No Dog Left Behind
NYT's Sandy Huffaker and Amy Gunderson in "What's the Thread Count on My Dog's Bed?" forecast the next school-and-socialization frontier after universal preschool:
The W San Diego started pet-friendly cocktail hours in the fall and the Hotel Helix in Washington is starting one this summer. The Ritz-Carlton Golf Resort in Naples starts obedience classes this summer including a socialization class for puppies 10 weeks to 5 months old.
And the Loews Coronado Bay Resort in San Diego offers dog surfing classes. Yes, surfing. The hotel rolled out a $300 package this spring that includes one night's accommodation, a surfing lesson for the dog (but not the owner), a meal for the pet, and board shorts (seriously) for smaller dogs.
"We have sold close to 40 of those packages," said Anne Stephany, the public relations manager for the Loews Coronado Bay. . .

Pups and Cubs Learn From Play
not canine curriculum prepared by commercial contract with puppy mills and sold to some Dog-Eat-Dog Congress as profitable education.
Some kids are that lucky still, to have engaged parents who let them learn from authentic play, rather than schooling them for sheer survival using obstacle course training.
By the time they reach an age to think about what they'd like to do, most kids have been thoroughly misled about the idea of loving one's work. School has trained them to regard work as an unpleasant duty. . .
Surfing classes for spotted hounds, never mind status-signaling doggy dress or kitty strollers seem to be going in in a new but nevertheless ominous direction, not toward developing the next generation in any productive way, or even letting them all play until they grow into their public lives, but instead toward some demeaning dog-as-plaything indulgence of classless and extravagantly stupid human masters.
OTOH - it's a delightful image all by itself; my children adore it and don't see any spectre of education politics in it, thank goodness! Never having suffered the loss of self-directed play, everything is fun for them, and they cheerfully bounce along like dogs out for an unleashed stroll (not in a cat stroller!) and are almost never hang-dog (cynical or defeatist) even in the face of disaster.
I do believe this comes from a life of well-protected play and preserved curiosity about the world, and maybe it IS a form of behavioral conditioning - the kind that creates happy do-it-yourself confidence, rather than some counterproductive, passive-aggressive fear response to all trainers, teachers and bosses.
I'd put a high premium on self-reliant yet socially responsible technology, schedules, lifestyles, networking, world views and income generation. The kinds of learning based on intrinsic motivation, privacy and sustainability, learning that doesn't require or prepare people to live and work in assigned dorms and barracks under constant public supervision and scrutiny.
. . .I think our kids need to learn differently and do differently, SO much better than we did and so far past school. Someday soon they'll replace us as thinkers, caregivers, problem-solvers, diplomats, designers, and story-tellers. (If they survive!)
If we really expect public education to help save every dog and a happy world for us all to share, then public support of private exploration and play in every pup's home environment would come much closer to creating the reality, than ridiculous resort surfing lessons for the elite, while the nation's puppy mill overruns are left to scrounge kibble off the floor of society's dog-pound schools. . .
How about "No Dog Dragged Outta Bed for Abuse" before we get to "No Dog Left Without a Surfboard?"
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Lessons for Us Animals
Amy Sutherland is the author of "Kicked, Bitten and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers" (Viking, June 2006).
Her take on behavior modification as everything we need to know about domestic human lessons is Skinnerian for sure, but at least it beats the horsewhip training mentality in the Pearl "To Train Up a Child" books!
Besides the author's NYT column on home education of husbands as exotic animals, see an excerpted chapter at author's NPR interview link and see if you can tell the human student training from their animal training, here's a teaser: