Organic Food and Moving Your Dog to Spain - NFS Forum
by Ben Curtis
We recently started ordering big boxes of beautiful organic vegetables about once a week. Not only does this hopefully guarentee a better quality of produce, but it also saves a few bag-laden trips back from the supermarket! Marina writes about the different companies we have tried in the forum, see this thread, 3 posts down from the top: Ordering Organic Food in Spain
Dave Hall (Pepino) has great advice for anyone thinking about bringing a dog to Spain, 4 posts down in this thread: Moving a dog to Spain. My favourite part of his advice is:
2. Traffic. I see loads of people walking dogs in the street off their leads, and it’s truly amazing how the dogs seem to instinctively know the pavement from the road (better trained than most UK children!!) My dog is well-behaved for the most part and wouldn’t run away from me, but has no actual road sense and would happily bumble stupidly into the road if something catches his eye. He wouldn’t have lasted 5 minutes in Barcelona
This constantly amazes me too, they can’t all be that well trained? It must have got into the Spanish canine genetics!
Remember, for just about any question you have about Spain or learning Spanish, or just a good chat about anything under the sun, register and join in the conversation in our forum!
Posted: July 1st, 2008 under Living in Spain.
Comments: 14
Comments
Comment from Jon Hundt
Time: July 2, 2008, 6:58 pm
you just gotta feel sorry for that little dog in a cow suit (with hooves!)
I myself would love to walk around one day dressed in a cow suit as nice as that one… but I am a human being capable of making reasoned decisions.
That poor little sucker in the picture never had a chance.
Comment from Ray
Time: July 3, 2008, 3:01 am
I used to feel sorry for the dogs living in tiny apartments in Spain, with no room to roam, no space of their own…
But, then I got used to it. The sounds of the neighbors’ pets no longer wake me up.
I am also getting better at enthusiastically giving directions, especially when I have no idea if they’re correct.
-Big smile at the pleasure that someone chose me to ask for directions;
-lots of positive energy; assure the person that it’s really no problem finding the place…
-secretly hope that they find someone who actually knows the area.
Pets in Spain, just as children and more frail adults, must learn the rules of the road, or face extinction. 
I believe that pure Darwinian natural selection has led to a better breed of street-smart, microscopically tiny, and very quick dogs, at least from what I saw in Madrid.
Comment from ValenciaSon
Time: July 3, 2008, 2:36 pm
I wish humans would stop breeding out survival traits in animals in exchange for more pet-like behavior. And they call themselves animal lovers!
Comment from bill
Time: July 3, 2008, 4:07 pm
@ValenciaSon - at the risk of seeming pedantic, you can’t breed out survival traits in animals. If they lose their survival traits then they become extinct.
The survival traits may change, e.g. the survival trait of appearing cute and cuddly to a species that will feed and protect you may replace the survival trait of being able to fend for yourself in the wild. However it is still a survival trait.
Comment from gary
Time: July 4, 2008, 11:08 am
@ Jon Its tricky to reconcile….
“I myself would love to walk around one day dressed in a cow suit ”
with
” being capable of making reasoned decisions”
Hope your good lady has read this - it’ll make Christmas interesting ;-);-)
Comment from ValenciaSon
Time: July 4, 2008, 5:35 pm
@Bill, doyou mean to tell me that poodles evolved to their current state in the wild?
Comment from Bill
Time: July 4, 2008, 8:01 pm
@ValenciaSon - I mean to say that poodles evolved to their current state in a domestic environment. I agree that humans have bred out many traits that helped dogs survive in the wild, which is what I think you mean. However I’m just saying that that is not the same as breeding out the surival traits of dogs altogether. Instead those surival traits have been replaced by different survival traits that are more applicable to the domestic environment dogs tend to find themselves in these days.
The same rules of natural selection apply, regardless of whether a species is evolving in a domestic enironment or in the wild.
Comment from ValenciaSon
Time: July 5, 2008, 3:18 am
@ Bill, I think you’re arguing semantics (all survival traits vs. enough) however,I think the present day poodle might struggle a bit in the wild due to our influence and that was the point of my post.
Comment from Bill
Time: July 6, 2008, 1:00 am
@ValenciaSon -…and a wolf will struggle to survive in a domestic environment Of course I knew what you were getting at, I just wanted to point out that it’s not a question of having more, less or enough survival traits - it’s a question of having the most appropriate survival traits. Poodles need to survive as much as any other animal, they just do it in a different way.
Comment from ValenciaSon
Time: July 6, 2008, 2:35 am
But poodles descend from a lineage that evolved to hunt to survive. Poodles don’t have 13,000 times more olfactory cranial nerves than humans just so that they know when their owner is opening up a can of Alpo.
Comment from Edith
Time: July 6, 2008, 1:50 pm
I feel sorry for the little dog in his cow suit, too. This is a toy, not a pet. Why not buy a Tamagochi instead! :-((
Comment from Edith
Time: July 6, 2008, 1:58 pm
… or a cow.
Comment from Bill
Time: July 6, 2008, 2:25 pm
Of course poodles don’t need such a good sense of smell to know when it’s time for din-dins. It is a trait they inherited from their ancestors. As you say, their ancestors needed to hunt to survive, but poodles don’t. So for poodles, a good sense of smell is not a survival trait.
Poodles require other survival traits, such as behaving and appearing in a way that is appealing to a human, so that the human will give them their din-dins, so they don’t need to hunt for it.
Other survival traits for poodles include being able to live in a small flat, and not requiring excessive exercise. Wolves for example don’t have these survival traits, so they don’t survive in domestic environments.
You seem to be assuming that traits that help dogs survive in a domestic environment don’t count, while traits that help dogs survive in the wild do. I think that maybe where we disagree.
Comment from Maria S.
Time: July 6, 2008, 10:00 pm
Just a couple of days I finished reading the book “Under the Skin” by Michel Faber.
It is a story about callousness and lack of empathy with other beings. In other words - reversed roles of people and animals. Reading this book gave me a much better sense of how much people really impose on animals.
Has anyone else read it?
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