Milk carton catapult

The enduring sound of this recession in my memories will be the barking of small dogs. The enduring image will be the devices I composed in my mind to launch small, light projectiles at them.

Due to bad timing and bad precognition, I quit my last full-time job right at the beginning of the Great Recession of 2007. I quit my part-time job the week Lehman Brothers collapsed, or the beginning of the Great Panic of 2008. Then came the Great Encore Presentation of 2009, during which I was doing nothing, followed by the Great Hangover of 2010, when I was bumping around in some temp jobs, which led to the Great Rehydration and Swearing to Never Do It Again of 2011, when they said things were getting better, but it was hard to notice. And now we seem to be on to the Great Getting On With Your Life of 2012, or at least I am -- now I have two part-time jobs that add up to 40 hours a week and I am applying for apartments.

Lots of people had housing problems during this time. Some had their homes foreclosed on, some got evicted. I went to live with 12 dogs. How these dogs came to be is not important; for the purposes of this essay, they simply exist and bark. They bark a lot. They bark when you come home, they bark when they’re hungry, they bark when they’re bored.

As a human, you’d probably like them to stop, and you’re inclined to give them a correction. There are some basic rules of dogs that they use to thwart you in this effort.

1. The three-second rule. If you want to correct a dog for negative behavior, you have to do it within three seconds of the dog’s actual transgression. After that, it’s meaningless, and does not build an association. If you come home and your front room is shredded, do absolutely nothing to the dog -- he has no idea that it happened.

2. Yappy dogs love attention, and seeing a human get up and come over to them is attention. They are pretty bad at telling the difference between good attention and bad attention, sort of like how teenage girls can’t tell the difference between confidence and arrogance, much to the disappointment of many a well-behaved freshman boy. (Off-topic, sorry.) Yelling at a dog is attention even if you’re saying “Shut the %*@! up!” In your meanest tone possible. You’re just barking at the dog. The author of the delightful blog Hyperbole and a Half does an excellent job of showing what it sounds like to a dog to be yelled at:


3. Smacking the dog, while tempting, is both wrong and will only encourage the dog to bark more as it warns friends and asks for help regarding the Big Scary Human.

4. Dogs also understand the three-second rule to a fashion. Since the universe is only three seconds long, they will do nothing wrong while the human is close enough to correct them within three seconds.

Several methods of correction are available within these constraints -- must happen within three seconds, must not equal attention, and must not involve actually hurting the dog -- however they’re not easy to accomplish on a regular basis.

First is the super soaker method. These things have a range of 30 to 40 feet, so you can keep it on your desk and squirt the dog when it barks. This also indulges another fantasy of something to do with a gun. Another, my favorite, is the milk carton method. Empty plastic milk cartons are light, good at flying, and loud when they land. Do this enough times and they’ll learn to behave just because the milk carton is sitting on the counter. (As an aside, when I was four years old, we got a dog named Popcorn and trained her with a milk carton. When Hurricane Gloria came through northern Virginia, an Enemy Milk Carton flew across our backyard and Popcorn went berserk.)

A third is to cause a distraction to the dog that makes them think about something other than the public service they’re performing by breaking up the boredom by barking.

Yet another, less effective method, is to ignore the dog. In my experience, dogs can sustain an I’m-bored barking soliloquy longer than a primary election. A side effect is that if this dog has anxiety issues, this can cause the dog to go from Bored Dog Mode to Abandoned Dog Mode, at which point they will engage either the Worn-Fan-Belt Sound Effect or worse, the Car-Wreck-in-Progress Sound Effect.

Given those rules and possibilities for correction, here are the devices that I fantasize about building.

Device No. 1: Milk-carton catapult. A spring loaded device that would toss a milk carton in to the dog run, landing on or near the dog and upsetting him, briefly engaging Submissive Dog Mode and building a negative association with barking. This would be a remotely controlled catapult so that it be set up in the garage (where six of the dogs live) and launched by pushing a button in the house. No yelling, no human coming out, just the Plastic Thing of Doom crashing on you.


Device No. 2: Sound-triangulating and image-recognition self-aiming water gun. With multiple dogs, you need a device with two or three microphones that can cause your gun to aim at the guilty bored dog, not the well-behaved one next to it. You need it to pick the right dog, and then actually aim at the dog’s present immediate location (hence the image-recognition) and then squirt the dog with a small burst of water.

Device No. 3: Dog spatula. When the dog is barking, the dog spatula will get under the dog’s feet and turn it over on its side, thus distracting it and breaking the recursive barking loop.

Device No. 4: Unpleasant noise generator and fence shaker. This will be a speaker that broadcasts sounds of large objects being dropped while simultaneously shaking the fence of the dog run back and forth.

Device No. 5. Dropping milk carton. One dog likes to go to the door and dig and beg to be let in. This will be a milk carton tied to the top of the door frame with a string coming through a hole in the wall. While the dog digs, the human unties the string, bonking the dog on the head.

Device No. 6: Large gerbil wheel. Design a six-foot-tall wheel that is clear, has a solid floor and has room for the dog to walk around when the wheel is not moving. When the dog barks, the wheel turns a little, requiring the dog to walk, and distracting him from Bored Barking Mode.

Device No. 7. Guided milk carton. For outside when the dog has freedom of movement. A puff of compressed air will launch the milk carton, which will have wings that are radio-controlled, much like the radio-controlled gliders that can be used at beaches with steady wind. A camera attached to an image-recognition computer will tell the glider how to stay on target, so if the dog moves, it’ll still be hit by the milk carton.


Device No. 8: (Dependent on future discoveries). After going to Alaska and studying the barks of wolves, I will come back with a recording of the Secret Growl that a mother wolf uses to tell her pups, “Shut up, you’re attracting grizzlies.” I will play this recording whenever bored barking starts up.

You may be thinking something else more constructive: Why not train the dogs and engage them in Useful Dog Mode, which will make them happier and less annoying, and involves far less engineering than these launchers and spinners? All true, but this falls in to the category of Tasks I Don’t Want. And, there are 12 of them... and when training requires an hour a day, I think you understand the problem.

The short of all this: I’m glad to be working again. Maybe I’ll start learning Chinese so I have somewhere to go for the next recession.