Confuse a Dog
This blog has a new Internet address. It continues to be hosted on WordPress.com and can still be reached via its old URL of http://cheeseblintz.wordpress.com, but from today it’s main URL is http://confuseadog.com.
There is, as with all things, a reason for this.
It has a lot to do with the arrival of a 6 month old mongrel puppy in our household. Tiggy, as we have named her, has much to learn, not least about walking on the lead. As is typical for young dog, she tends to try to run in all directions, move from side to side, run ahead and pull on the lead, get distracted by pedestrians and cars, etc.
We were given some advice by Claire, a colleague and friend of Naomi’s, who has long experience with dogs. She told us there is a trick to getting a dog to walk to heel and not pull on the lead. It is all about avoiding predictability. If you always follow the same circuit, the dog rapidly gets a sense of where it is headed and will tend to pull for home. If on the other hand you keep varying the route you take on your walks, keep changing direction, vary your speed without warning, cross the road at random, the dog will become confused about where it is and become much less likely to pull.
We have tended to refer to this concept, for short, as “confuse-a-dog”, partly in homage to Monty Python’s “Confuse a Cat” sketch. Instinctively we bolted on “dot com”, maybe because it has the right ring to it in the Internet age. Thus the notion of confuseadog.com was born. It never occurred to me that the domain confuseadog.com might actually be available. I tried it in the browser some days later out of curiosity, and found it was unknown to DNS servers anywhere.
So on impulse I registered it and decided to attach it to this blog, since this was the only website of mine still using a wordpress.com URL.
Confuseadog.com may not make a lot of sense as a name for a personal and travel blog, but please just humour me. At least it is no less logical than “cheese blintz”. Now, I haven’t checked to see whether bewilderbeest.com might still be available …
Well, it looks like both bewilderbeest.com and confuseacat.com are taken, although the first leads to a holding page with ads and the other redirects elsewhere.
Meantime, the confuse-a-dog routine is starting to work. A week ago, I would return from a 20 minute walk with Tiggy feeling like I’d just gone twelve rounds with Ali. Now she is far better on the lead. Still some considerable way from perfection but the improvement is phenomenal.