Words and Their Stories: Dog Talk

Source:http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/Words-and-Their-Stories-Dog-Talk-129522603.html
Now, the VOA Special English program WORDS AND THEIR STORIES.

Americans use many expressions with the word dog. People in the United States love their dogs and treat them well. They take their dogs for walks, let them play outside and give them good food and medical care. However, dogs without owners to care for them lead a different kind of life. The expression, to lead a dog's life, describes a person who has an unhappy existence.

Some people say we live in a dog-eat-dog world. That means many people are competing for the same things, like good jobs. They say that to be successful, a person has to work like a dog. This means they have to work very, very hard. Such hard work can make people dog-tired. And, the situation would be even worse if they became sick as a dog.

Still, people say every dog has its day. This means that every person enjoys a successful period during his or her life. To be successful, people often have to learn new skills. Yet, some people say that you can never teach an old dog new tricks. They believe that older people do not like to learn new things and will not change the way they do things.

Some people are compared to dogs in bad ways. People who are unkind or uncaring can be described as meaner than a junkyard dog. Junkyard dogs live in places where people throw away things they do not want. Mean dogs are often used to guard this property. They bark or attack people who try to enter the property. However, sometimes a person who appears to be mean and threatening is really not so bad. We say his bark is worse than his bite.

A junkyard is not a fun place for a dog. Many dogs in the United States sleep in safe little houses near their owners' home. These doghouses provide shelter. Yet they can be cold and lonely in the winter.

Husbands and wives use this doghouse term when they are angry at each other. For example, a woman might get angry at her husband for coming home late or forgetting their wedding anniversary. She might tell him that he is in the doghouse. She may not treat him nicely until he apologizes. However, the husband may decide that it is best to leave things alone and not create more problems. He might decide to let sleeping dogs lie.

Dog expressions also are used to describe the weather. The dog days of summer are the hottest days of the year. A rainstorm may cool the weather. But we do not want it to rain too hard. We do not want it to rain cats and dogs.

(MUSIC)

This VOA Special English program, WORDS AND THEIR STORIES, was written by Jill Moss. I'm Faith Lapidus. 

The Dog Masters

The Dog Masters

Source: www.speakup.com.br

English level INTERMEDIATE

Speaker: Justin Ratcliffe

Standard: British accent

In 1989 Sylvia Wilson was working for RSPCA (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to animal) in Australia and was become number of dogs that were being brought in to be destroyed because of behavioural problems such s barking, biting and tearing things up. She went on to develop a system that had almost immediate results in dealing with problem dogs, so she set up Bark Busters. Today Bark Busters is a worldwide organization dedicated to bridging the gap between dogs and their owners by using “dog psychology.” Carol O’Herlihy runs Bark Busters I the UK and explains that a dog psychologist is not the same as a dog trainer:

Carol O’Herlihy

(Australian accent):

A dog psychologist is somebody, I think, who bridges the gap between the two different species. It teaches…we teach people how to see what their dog is saying. Dogs never stop talking to you, their body language never stops, they never stop at it, unless they’re asleep. Happy dogs sleep most of the day, but dogs that are boisterous and overactive, they’re trying desperately to tell you something and we show owners how to interpret that properly.

LEADER OF THE PACK

As can be the case with humans, many problems for dogs are the result of the change of status and way of life. Dogs are used to living in packs, where there is a natural hierarchy. This is very different from their new life as part of a human family and it can lead to a lot of confusion between animal and owner:

Carol O’Herlihy:

What happens is, people read a dog’s body language as a human, and dogs read a human body language as dog, and the two are completely different, so you get this miscommunication between the owner and the dog and neither one of them knows what the other one’s doing. So, for instance, when a dog is jumping up and licking at owner’s mouth whenever they come back, the owner thinks, “He loves me so much he’s kissing me hello,” but the dog is thinking, “Vomit, vomit, you’ve been or a hunt, what you’ve caught on the hunt, I’m hungry!”

THERAPY

When we humans need to see the “head doctor,” we take ourselves to a clinic where we can talk about our problems, but for a dog psychologist there’s no such thing as the “psychologist’s couch.” Problematic dogs are best observed at home:

Carol O’Herlihy:

Well, we ask a few questions on the phone, not a great deal, but (they) most important thing is we go out and we visit the dog in its home because a dog’s very comfortable in its home and it’ll be displaying a lot of body language that tells us how the dog sees itself in a pack situation, where it sees itself, whether it’s the top or the middle or the bottom, and sometimes dogs that are at the top of the pack find it (a) very lonely place and it’s quite scary for them and they actually need to be down further, down in the pack and with the owners over the dog. So it’s all to do with pack hierarchy because that’s…the only way a dog thinks. A dog that’s shown aggression stands a higher change of being put to sleep, destroyed, killed, murdered…whatever you like. All animals will bite, but it’s only the dog who takes the big punishment for it.

Who You Gonna Call? Bark Busters!

Bark Busters, the organisation founded by Sylvia Wilson, now has branches in Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, Tawian, the UK and the USA. It is reckoned that over 300.000 dogs have been trained by Bark Busters since the organization was set up in 1989. Sylvia Wilson has written several books, including: Bark Busters: Solving Your Dog’s Behavioural Problems, The Bark Busters’ Guide to Puppy Rearing and Training, Train Your Dog The Easy Way and Bite Buster: How to Deal with Dog Attacks: For more on Bark Busters, visit www.barkbusters.co.uk  .