Thursday, June 22, 2006

Pavlov's dog

When my human has a shower, I go in and sit on the bath mat, and I try to engage him in a conversation about the day's events or issues I've picked up from information sources, such as the news on the radio or the internet.

Unfortunately, his perception is a little different. He seems to think that I associate his having a shower with me being given a snack afterwards.

Today, he even had the audacity of accusing me of being like Pavlov's dog. Hello? Not just any dog, but Pavlov's dog? What is wrong with this picture? Didn't Pavlov have any cats? Do I have conditional reflexes to external stimuli?

Ivan Pavlov was a Russian physiologist, psychologist, and physician. In the 1890s he was about to study the gastric function of dogs, in particular of their salivary gland. He decided that the stimuli producing the saliva was more interesting than the chemistry of the saliva.

He produced a stimuli before the presentation of food and found that due to "conditional reflex" his dogs would salivate in anticipation (or rather expectation) of the food.

The behaviour became rather predictable, but Pavlov was able to get the dogs to "unlearn" the reflex as well.

How this notion of Pavlov's dog relates to me getting a snack after my human has a shower is absolutely ludicrous.

I tell my human I am hungry when I sit at my feeding spot. It just so happens that after my human has a shower, I choose to sit there or on the kitchen floor but this is purely coincidental. I know that he also eats some food after a shower (usually breakfast).

Pavlov's dog indeed. How rude!


Pavlov's dogs were so famous, even one got stuffed!

*As always, please check out Cooper and Camilla who always have interesting things to say.

.........ooooooooOOOOOOOOoooooooo..........

My human left at the usual time today but returned home early. He had a medical appointment and decided it was best to sleep off the symptoms of the flu for the next few days.

We had a lovely afternoon nap together on the couch.

This evening, Jack's (the dog) human Malgosia, Nina's (the Russian Blue) human Deborah and Cressida (a newbie to me) dropped over after they finished work. I got to sit on Malgosia and Deborah's laps. Cressida got rather defensive with her preference for dogs. How could anybody not like me? I was mortified.

keisercat@wildmail.com

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home