Dead Monkey

What is that glorious feeling? I'm feeling light and happy and worry free. The kids are arguing but it's really not annoying me very much...

Oh, I know what it is!

THE SCIENCE PROJECT IS DONE!

putting the finishing touches on the piece of  hell called, "Dancing Dogs"

Do you remember my rant last year? 

This year, Kat and I both came up with the idea and so there was no argument like there was last year.

She wanted to play different types of music for the dogs to see if they reacted differently. The idea came from the volunteering we have been doing at PACC. Sometimes they play classical music for the dogs.

Every time I walk into the cat room, there is a bad recording of lullaby music. I say it's a bad recording because every once in awhile, there is a second or two of some really bad static. There is a such a huge difference between the dog rooms and the cat room. It's like night and day. I find the static rather annoying but maybe it's there to keep people from drifting off to sleep.

Anyway, no one could find the one piece of classical music we owned,  Tchaikovsky. So, we used The Beatles instead. Sgt. Peppers I believe.

Then we picked an old Techno cd, The Shamen and finally some Reggae by Bob Marley.

Katrina thought the dogs would be the calmest during reggae.

We set it up and played two minutes of each type of music for each dog separately. This was before we had Shannon, our fourth dog, but it seemed like it still took forever.

All the dogs started at 4 points. Points were deducted for leaving the room, hiding behind the couch (seriously, they would do this), etc. Points were added for sitting calmly, sitting for a treat, etc.

We did it for three days and discovered that the music did nothing. Each dog is so stubborn that their normal, everyday personalities overshadowed any affect the music had.

Zoe ignored us and left the room looking for Erik.

Manny paced back and forth because he knew he'd have to sit for a treat and knew we had it somewhere.

Gigi just sat there. She is so mellow and she didn't care what was going on even though Manny was jumping on the window wanting to come in for his treat.

This is how they always act. This was nothing new.

After the 3 days, I had to deal with the "Shannon issues" and so we never had time to go back and do more experiments.

This is the bad part. I fibbed on the testing. We made it look like we had tested for a week, not three days. I knew nothing was going to change with the dogs so I added 4 more days of testing and now I feel slightly guilty for it which is probably why I'm confessing here.

But, at least the science project is done. The monkey is dead and has fallen off my back. It won't be back for another 364 days.