Are you the kind of pet parent who leaves Animal Planet on when you’re away from home? I have a lot of pet parent friends who do this. It makes sense. Animal Planet…animals are featured…pets should like this. Right?
But what if it scares them?
A little while back I watched Bailey, a neighbor’s dog, for a day. It wasn’t an overnight thing; all I had to do was stop over for a couple of pee-break visits and such. So she wouldn’t get too lonely in the interim, her mom left Animal Planet on for her. During my last visit I walked in during an episode of The Crocodile Hunter.
It was a classic episode with Steve Irwin in the crocodile enclosure, facing the croc, talking in his animated manner and making big eyes when whatever he did provoked the croc into snapping its huge mouth.
Bailey wasn’t really paying any attention. She was too excited to have me there to show off for. But it got me to wondering how she processes such a show.
Does she comprehend how large that croc is, or that she’d be lunch for it if the two met out in the wild? Does it give her nightmares? Could it? Or is the TV just noise and the images nothing more than moving color?
I think I got to wondering what she might be thinking about a show like The Crocodile Hunter because of our first dog, Budly. I remember how he reacted when we first rented Jurassic Park.
You know the scene where the two jeeps are next to the Tyrannosaurus Rex enclosure in the dark with the rain pouring down? It’s right at the beginning, when they realize the power’s been knocked out and the Jurassic critters might be loose. And sure enough here comes the Tyrannosaurus Rex. Knocks the one jeep over the cliff and then runs after the other one speeding away.
Budly about jumped out of his fur. He never reacted to any movie before that. I don’t know if he sensed our excited tension during that scene or if he honestly was following the plot, but he cuddled up next to me and quivered until it was over. (Just that scene. He was fine through all the rest.)
Again, I don’t know what he was reacting to. He’d never seemed phased by anything on TV before, and he never did it again.
And Bailey is a perfectly normal, well adjusted pup, as are all the other dogs and cats I know who benefit from Animal Planet’s company when their parents are away. But as my fellow Pets Blogger Aimee Amodio asked in one of her recent blogs, what do pets know that we don’t? And how much do they comprehend that we don’t give them credit for?