Anyone who loves both will recognize the laments in this New York Times piece.

Plus, some tips on how to restrain and retrain your dogs’ garden behavior.

We love dogs here at Dogblog, but we’re pretty fond of other critters, too. So every now and then we give the dogs a day off and let some other animal(s) take center stage.

Today, it’s cats — and specifically, houses for cats. I don’t just mean the feline version of a doghouse, or a human residence with a scratching post here and there. In Japan, where cats are very popular, people actually have their homes designed and built with felines in mind.

The photo up top gives you a hint. There are more photos and details at this blog.

Jimmy Stewart, on the Johnny Carson show, reads a poem about his dog Beau.

Of course we knew that, but here’s more scientific proof!

Researchers have found that office productivity increases when dogs are underfoot.

Really. You can show this to your boss (after researching it on your own time, of course). Maybe this’ll start a trend of more canine-friendly workplaces.

Dogs are getting smarter all the time, it seems. The latest evidence of their cognitive abilities comes from the University of Vienna in Austria. Researchers found, using photographs of dogs and landscapes, that dogs could form an abstract concept and transfer it from one situation to another.

Science Daily has the details. I’m particularly interested by the fact that the dogs were tested using touch-screen computers, thereby eliminating any possible influence/interference from their owners. (How much the dogs might have picked up from the researchers themselves isn’t addressed.)

“Unlike in America, dogs go almost everywhere with their people.”

Enjoy the story and gallery of photographs here.

Happy Saturday, everyone! Here are some bits and pieces of doggy news for you.

A London-based business gives dogs their own ice cream:

A New York dog might be the world’s oldest:

Scientists have found a fossil that may be the oldest known evidence of domesticated dogs;

And the dog really did eat the, erm, homework.

What plans do you and your furry friends have for the weekend?

Big variations from small changes

You’d think a Great Dane and a dachshund wouldn’t have that much in common, genetically speaking. But it turns out they’re far more similar than one might suspect.

Scientists have recently completed the most complete analysis yet of domestic dogs’ DNA. They found that unlike humans, most physical differences between dogs are due to very small segments of DNA.

“We’ve found that only six or seven locations in the dog genome are necessary to explain about 80 percent of the differences in height and weight among dog breeds,” said Carlos Bustamante, Stanford professor of genetics. “In humans these are controlled by hundreds if not thousands of variants.”

The researchers hope that having a detailed genetic map of canines will eventually give greater insight into human genetics and diseases.