Patricia McConnell
Patricia McConnell
Patricia Bean McConnell is an Adjunct Professor of Zoology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and expert in animal behavior. She has written several books, including The Other End of the Leash and For the Love of a Dog, and produced a number of pet training DVDs. In both her academic and popular writing she has focused on issues of interspecies communication. She also runs her own publishing company, McConnell Publishing...
dog looks perhaps taught
Perhaps you've taught your dog to sit, and you want to show this off to your friends, ... You say, 'Sit,' but he just looks at you." ()
biggest control dogs drops emotional family handle houses learn problems react
One of the biggest problems I see are dogs who don't have a lot of emotional control and frustration tolerance. If dogs are going to live in our houses as family members, they need to learn how to physiologically handle spiraling emotions, not react like a 2-year-old who drops an ice-cream cone." ()
against animals beds bias domestic eat otherwise plates science sleep studying
Science has always been uncomfortable with emotions, so there's a real bias against studying domestic animals. Especially canines that may sleep in our beds and eat off our plates and otherwise get spoiled.
couple writing years
The only thing I remember writing in prison is a couple of poems for an inmate magazine they did once a year.
jail age fifteen
I'm actually a lowlife. On the street at fifteen and also in jail for the first time at that age, and off and on the street until my mid-twenties.
white facts assuming
The fact that educated white women automatically assume that we have similar backgrounds annoys me. We don't. I feel like I'm in a certain kind of drag.
weed drug criminals
Although I was simply what today would be called a "mule" - the bottom of the food chain in the drug biz - the federal system treated me from beginning to end like a major criminal, and I still don't know why, other than that in those days, 6.5 ounces of heroin was a big load. Ludicrous by today's standards, when coke, heroin, and weed are shipped across the border by the ton.
historical peers prison
My friends in prison were mostly women more like myself: not historical figures who I did not relate to as peers, but hookers and addicts.
husband dirty past
My husband regarded my prison past as a dirty secret and never asked me one single question about it. But what I had experienced and witnessed was eating at me and I needed to "tell somebody."
mean pay-the-price choices
One of the principle things life has taught me is that we always have a choice. When we say we "can't," we usually mean we're just not willing to pay the price.
thinking self amphetamines
I was addicted to amphetamines at the time I got busted, but I tend to think I was on a determined, self-destruct course that had little to do with the effect of Benzedrine.
loss life-is worst
The loss of a sexual life is one of the worst things about getting really old. The worst thing.
lust clubs getting-laid
At eighty-one, health club-lusting is as close as I'll ever come to getting laid again.
fate blow might
I felt compelled to blow the whistle on the penal system, under the delusion that doing so might result in some change, or at least save a few women from the same fate. Eternally naïve, that's me.