It's a matter of perspective...
I found this little anecdote in the book "The Rosetta Bone: The Key to Communication Between Humans and Canines" by Cheryl S. Smith (link). I laughed when I read it because I have been on both sides of this argument several times.
Living with a mix-bag of dog breeds, and learning how sensitive to detail a defensive guardian can be, I immediately connected to the sentiment of this anecdote and I thought some of you may appreciate it too...
Living with a mix-bag of dog breeds, and learning how sensitive to detail a defensive guardian can be, I immediately connected to the sentiment of this anecdote and I thought some of you may appreciate it too...
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Identity Crisis
A woman rushes into the veterinary clinic with a black cat. She had witnessed the cat being hit by a car on the road and brought it in to have the injuries assessed and see if an owner could be identified. Let's call her Mrs. G.
Mrs. G was a cat lover, was an existing client for her own kitties, and offered to pay for some initial diagnostics for this injured black cat.
Mrs. G went on her merry way and the cat, who was displaying labored breathing, was hustled to the back for oxygen support and radiographs. While the films were developing and the cat was being stabilized, we scanned him for a microchip since no other ID was present.
Jackpot! Black kitty had a chip! Microchip company was contacted and in a matter of seconds, owner of cat was identified. The operator said that the cat was registered to (are you all ready for this??)...MRS G.!!!!!
So, we phoned Mrs. G. back to inform her of the good news:
(a) Black kitty had a microchip and we found the owner
(b) Black kitty had a pneumothorax and a luxated hip but would do great with a chest tube and when stable enough, the hip could be reposited under general anesthesia. Not too bad for a HBC. The road rash was mild.
And the bad news:
Black kitty is YOUR cat, Shadowfax*. (*Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)
Incredulousness on the other end of the phone. She didn't know he was out of the house. In her paradigm, he wasn't out of the house so he couldn't possibly by on the road hit by a car! She didn't recognize her own cat when he was all dishelved from a recent trauma.
Happy ending all around though...of course she paid for complete therapy and Shadowfax did marvelously after a few days in the hospital.
(This is also one of my favorite microchip stories!)
Yanno it's always been an underlining fear of mine that I wouldn't be able to recognize my animals.
My friend had caught the wrong dog. The right dog was found waiting in front of the house.
It reminds me of a joke I once heard about a mathematician and an engineer. A mathematician and an engineer were presented with a problem. They were placed in a room with a bucket of water on one end and a fire on the other. They were asked to put the fire out. The engineer went first, walked to the bucket, picked it up, walked to the fire and put it out. Then the mathematician did the same, picking up the bucket and putting the fire out. Next, the fire was re-lit and the bucket was replaced only this time it was empty. The engineer went first again, picking up the empty bucket, carrying it to the spigot, filling it, then putting out the fire. Then it was the mathematician's turn. He picked up the empty bucket, filled it with water, then return it to other side of the room and proclaimed he was finished. Confused, the person posing the problem asked the mathematician why he thought he was finished. The mathematician simply responded, "I already solved the problem with the full bucket, so I reduced this new problem back to that one."
Perhaps you don't find that as amusing as I do if you aren't all that familiar with mathematicians and how their brains work, but it does illustrate the point that our brains can make us do strange things when we aren't expecting something out of the ordinary. :-)
I have never really thought about not being able to identify my own dogs... I would like to think that I know them so completely that even if they were covered in white paint, I would recognize them in a heartbeat... However, as both Brad and Dave have pointed out, the mind limits the problem...