My control-group dogs had mixed reactions to DogTV that bordered on randomness:

¶Mitzy, a Border collie mix in Westerly, R.I., was certainly stimulated by the “Stimulation” video: she was stimulated to get up and leave the room.

¶Dakota, a Dalmatian in Westford, Vt., “quickly realized the dogs in the video were not going to try to take her spot and went right back to sleep,” her owner reported. Her companion, Otto, a German shorthaired pointer, “watched for about a minute and a half, then tried to lick the iPad.”

¶Maxie, a bichon frisé in Hawley, Pa., who is said to prefer Yo-Yo Ma delivered by radio to any sort of television, looked everywhere but the screen for most of all three videos, the exception being a brief glance when a dog owner in “Exposure” aimed the command “Sit” at her dog after a doorbell rang.

¶Walter, an Airedale in New York, ignored the screen for the first two videos and walked out on the third. His housemate, Fadilah, a Lakeland terrier, was also uninterested except during that controversial doorbell scene. “Her head did the telltale sign of paying attention (slightly cocked to the right) as the dog sat for his/her owner’s ‘sit,’ ” Fadilah’s owner reported, adding, “Then the image shifted to the people walking across the street, and she was done.”

So much for the dog verdict on DogTV. The first out-of-species test subject was an 18-inch garter snake I apprehended in May. About one snake a year makes the mistake of coming into my yard, in which I enforce a strict no-snakes policy, and I have become quite adept at nabbing them.

I decided to show this one “Relaxation,” since it seemed annoyed, possibly because I had imprisoned it in a Tupperware container for transport to someone else’s yard. Surprisingly, the video noticeably calmed down the snake. “Stimulation” and “Exposure,” however, seemed to have no effect at all, even though “Stimulation” includes images of an animated mouse, a favorite food of snakes.