When I came home from work the other night, I had two dog treats in my pocket which I emptied out onto my nightstand along with my wallet and keys. At some point in the past, I might have thrown two dog biscuits into the garbage, but I left them there for future use. I figured I didn’t know when I was going to need to give a dog a treat next. And since it was something I was likely to do and enjoyed doing, then I ought to keep the object which would trigger that event handy.

At least, that’s more or less how my brain works now. Things have been boiled down into much simpler equations. I’ve got equations for every occasion, you could say.

I use dog treats at work every day between 3:30pm and 3:50pm, when our green schedule taped to the wall says “Climbing Games & Agility.” This is one of our many group-lead activities which we do throughout the day (at 4:00pm, I take out my harmonica for “Parade”) and usually it doesn’t go too well without treats. Because the dogs just don’t care that much about running up a bunch of stairs or jumping through a hoop otherwise. I mean, some of them do it all regardless of treats, but those also happen to be the most high-energy difficult to contain (and not to mention loving) dogs that you’ll encounter.

For the advancement of the rest of the pack though, I will step out into the office area adjoining the green room and make small talk with my boss to distract her while I grab two handfuls of dog treats (one for my co-worker and one for myself). She herself occasionally bursts in spontaneously, blasting handfuls of treats willy-nilly and upsetting our carefully-balanced regime. But on the other hand, she’ll lecture us constantly about not over-feeding them.

My system of treat-delivery at work usually goes like this: I break down every treat into about five or six bits. Based on the bone-shape of the biscuit, it usually has natural breakpoints, and that is how many it typically breaks into. I then let the dogs know I have treats by whistling and calling and holding my fingers up on each hand in the “OK” hand signal, so that it looks like I’m holding something between index finger and thumb. Dogs are completely attuned to body language, so you have to make things obvious for them if your schemes are to achieve any success.

Then I’ll go over to a small plastic children’s playground kind of castle thing we have in the room and give away bits of treats to any dog who climbs up or does something amazing. And we’ll walk over to other spots in the room and do the same things: climbing up, over, under, walking around and in general testing and developing dog ingenuity.

Until the treats run out. You can usually keep leading them on for about 2-4 minutes just by making the hand gestures and acting as though you still have treats. One of my favorite gimmicks is to keep putting these invisible non-existant treats into dog’s mouths who are closest to you, so that it looks to dogs farther away that nothing has changed and you haven’t run out of treats. I think this is the same thing that is happening right now in the economy with the Bear Stearns thing, not that I have been following it that closely above and beyond keyword clusters I download occasionally from NPR. I also think it might be similar somehow to when Jesus fed the multitudes and made it seem like a few loaves and fishes would be enough to feed a humongous crowd. So you can use simple circus and crowd tricks in all kinds of ways, in all different directions and to push forward any kind of agenda. It’s simple and all it takes is practice.

Looking a night or two later at my nightstand, I saw the familiar shape of the dog treats juxtaposed against the wedding photo of my grandparents on my mother’s side. My grandfather has on his WWII army uniform. He became a deacon later in life. I carry his “Elder Affairs” ID card in my pocket when I go out. My mother’s mother looks like a cross between her and all her sisters. Go figure. The dog treats, I realize, are currency. One dog treat equals I can get about five or six very small “tricks” or “favors” from “other dogs”. It’s extremely practical and experience based. And then you have credit, which is kind of like the scam I pull with the dogs when I run out of treats: where I act like I have more treats, but keep feeding them invisible “money.” They eventually catch on though, and start running more wild and peeing everywhere (they do both anyway, though).

As the dollar plummets, as people become less and less willing to do “tricks” in exchange for worthless inedible (or worse, invisible) “treats” what other kinds of things are we going to revert to as basic elemental objects of trade and behavioral motivation? I met a girl at a party once, who had half of a dog treat in her pocket. I knew that she was okay because of it, and let her wear my hat for a while. She tried to make me eat the half biscuit she had in her pocket. But I didn’t, cause I knew what that would mean.