by Randy Grim
Over the millennia, we’ve managed to cull many of the physical characteristics of wolves from dogs—put a pug in front of a wolf and he’d probably eat it—but we’ve never bred out the pack mentality. It’s instinctive. It’s a need. And for a dog whose pack consists of humans, it’s a matter of survival. Dumping a pet dog in the park is like expelling a wolf from the pack; unless she finds a new pack, she will probably die a lonely death in a relatively short period of time, and will do anything, submit to anything, to belong once again.
In Phoebe’s case, as with any dog abandoned—or in their minds “expelled”—from the pack, the experience is so frightening that even if they find the safety of a new family, they suffer a sort of post-traumatic stress. Dogs like this are so afraid of rejection that they often hyper-attach to their new pack members. As a result, every time they’re left alone, they experience abandonment all over again. Terror grips them. Hoping they’re only temporarily lost, they howl so the pack can find them again. When that doesn’t work, they claw at doors to get out, so they can go and find the pack themselves. When that doesn’t work, they become so afraid that they lose control of their bowels and tear blindly at anything holding the pack’s scent, including pillows, shoes, and blankets.
Whatever you do, DON’T PUNISH THE DOG when you get home. Her behavior isn’t so much destructive as it is desperate, because she feared you abandoned her. Remember always that a dog has about as much chance of surviving all alone as a four-year-old kid. In his book, The Ecology of Stray Dogs, Alan Beck noted that the average life span of a family dog is 10.5 years, while the average life span of a stray dog is 2.3 years. I’ve not kept records, but in all of the years I’ve spent tracking feral dogs (those born wild on the streets), I’ve never seen one with arthritis. So when you walk in the door and find your shoes with teeth marks, your coffee table books ripped to shreds, and the legs of your sofa splintered like fireplace kindling, DON’T PUNISH THE DOG. I can’t stress this enough. DO NOT PUNISH THE DOG.
Since the cause of separation anxiety is fear, the cure is security. The problem is that you can’t just lavish your dog with love, hugs, and diamond-studded designer water bowls, hoping she’ll equate this with security. She won’t. She’s addicted to you and will always need more.
Now, I’m no fan of anything that doesn’t bring instant gratification—if a meal doesn’t meet my three-step rule in which step one reads “peel back lid and place in microwave,” and step three says “enjoy,” I don’t buy it—so let’s make this easy on ourselves and think of the cure for separation anxiety as a simple one-step process, which is: FOLLOW DIRECTIONS THAT FOLLOW.
(This exercise may seem a little silly at first, but remember—you can’t convince your dog verbally that you’ll be back. You must communicate with her through actions she can understand and interpret.)
Start by putting on your coat in front of the dog (even if it’s hot) and grabbing your keys. She’ll probably show all kinds of distress like whining, barking in your direction, and circling around you. Ignore her, say nothing to her, and then sit down at a table or any place where she can’t jump up on you. Sit there until she calms down. Then stand up, take off your coat and put the keys away, still ignoring her. Repeat this chicanery several times until she stops acting crazy.
Now, put on your coat, grab your keys, walk to the door, and open it. Again, she’ll probably get all upset, and when she does, sit back down and wait for her to chill. Repeat until it doesn’t bother her anymore.
Next, put on your coat, grab your keys, open the door, and step outside. Leave the door open so she can see you, and immediately step back inside and sit down. Repeat as necessary.
This time, put on your coat, grab your keys, open the door, step outside, and wait a few seconds. Then come back in, sit down, and ignore her. The idea here is to get her used to not seeing you for a few seconds at a time with the full expectation that you will return. Lengthen the time you stay outside from seconds to minutes, and always ignore her when you come back in.
Once she understands that you always come back from the other side of the door, it’s time to teach her the verbal cue. Now, each time you put on your coat, grab your keys, open the door, and step outside, you say, “Long live the king.” You could also say, “I’ll be back” or something, but I always say, “Long live the king,” because I’m extremely superstitious about my health. Whatever the cue is, always use the same one. Do this several times, always returning within a few minutes and sitting down.
Finally, you’re ready to increase the time you remain on the other side of the door, so put on your coat, grab your keys, grab an adult beverage, open the door, step outside, saying, “Long live the king,” and stay outside for longer and longer periods of time. Each time, return and sit down.
Now here’s the part I didn’t want to tell you about earlier: You must repeat this whole process every time you leave for at least a week. It’s a headache, I know, but it will eventually work. Think of it as house-training a puppy: It’s time-consuming in the beginning, but well worth the effort in the end. Try to make it fun for yourself; have a friend outside to talk to, enjoy an adult beverage, buy a Game Boy or an MP3 player, and just enjoy being outside. Don’t worry about the fact that your neighbors are watching you walk in and out of the house with your winter coat on in the summer; wave like they are the crazy ones. (It’s also great for dealing with human kids who don’t want to go to daycare.)
Once your dog understands that you aren’t abandoning her every time you leave, reinforce her sense of security by leaving her an article of your clothing to smell and the TV or radio on. Better yet, buy a Kong toy at the pet store and leave it with her. This is a hard, plastic toy you stuff with treats, which by design are tough to get out and keep your dog’s mind off the fact that you aren’t around. Hannah enjoys a Kong stuffed with peanut butter (that I froze overnight, like a Popsicle) and now runs to her crate when I grab my keys.
While this training works with 90 percent of all dogs, there are some who have such severe histories of abuse and abandonment that nothing works but drugs. I’m a big believer in better living through chemicals. I myself use ... well, a lot of medication prescribed by Dr. Gupta, who, exasperated with my lack of progress on the couch, said a bunch of heady stuff about the lack of serotonin in my brain and neurotransmitters doing this and that, but ended with what I consider a plausible excuse: “If it works, why not?”
Currently the only two medications for dogs I know of are clomipramine and fluoxetine, which both work well. According to one of my veterinarians, they produce feelings we humans might associate with eating chocolate or falling in love, which tempts me at times to try them myself. Talk to your vet if you want to go this route.
As for poor Phoebe, who suffered abandonment twice, we placed her with a foster family that patiently worked through her problems with her. They tell me that she shows no more signs of anxiety, and that she’ll live with them forever.
(Note to Self: Consider writing a book about family relationships, including crating some family members during the holidays with a gingerbread-stuffed Kong.)
CHAPTER FOUR
Shuuut Up!
Dear Sir,
I adopted a dog from you about two years ago. Max is a great dog and I love him dearly, but his barking is starting to wear on me. He barks if someone knocks on the door. He barks at the mailman. He barks if he sees another dog walking past the house. He also barks when he wants to go outside and come back in. Like I don’t know he needs to go out? And it’s not so much that his barking is incessant. It’s the sound of his “woof.” It has a high pitch and I’m afraid he’s going to cause me to have a seizure because the tone really hurts my ears.
I will need to bring him back today. Please let me know what time I can drop him off.
Best,
Duh
Dear Duh,
Did you originally think dogs meowed?
Dogs, for the record, bark. Most of them bark a l
ot, and if they’re anything like one of my dogs, Stinky, they bark at absolutely nothing.
Best,
Randy Grim
Stinky, a stumpy little yellow pit bull, barks at rain, new art on the wall, his empty food bowl, piles of laundry, and birds. Sometimes he sits in the middle of the backyard and barks at air. One night, while loading the dishwasher after a dinner party, I dropped a fork on the floor and Stinky went nuts. When one of the guests asked with panic in his voice what the dog was barking at, all I could do was shrug and say, “A fork.”
Stinky is only one member of the pack that inhabits my house, and his barking usually sets the others off en masse. If I’m on the phone and, say, a large mosquito flies past the front window, I can’t even hear myself yell “I HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK” into the receiver, which is especially embarrassing if you’re being interviewed on a live radio talk show. One time I listened to a tape of one of these radio interviews, after it aired—but all that could be heard was a lot of barking and me screaming, “SHUT UP!”
The second Tuesday of every month is the worst. That’s when the city tests its weather sirens, and the dogs stand at the front window and howl like a pack of wolves in the Grand Tetons during a full moon. The second Tuesday of every month is the only time my neighbors venture near my house because they want to make sure “everything is all right.”
Several years ago, a reporter from a national magazine asked if she could interview me “in my own environment.” She suggested my house. I suggested an abandoned parking lot on the far south side.
At first, I thought Stinky in particular barked to get attention. See, dogs evolved from wolves, and while adult wolves don’t bark, wolf pups do. It’s the equivalent of a human baby crying to get his mother’s attention, because he doesn’t yet know how to communicate in any other way. So the wolf pup barks until he learns how to communicate in adult-wolf ways.
But over the millennia, humans have selectively bred wolves into mere shadows of their former selves, and the result—dogs—are really just adult wolves physically, and wolf pups emotionally. In other words, dogs are big babies looking for attention.
Stinky, for instance, would sit in the middle of the backyard and start this woof-woof-woof thing while his head turned slowly from side to side like he was sending out warnings to anything that might be in the general vicinity. My first “command” through the window was always a wellreasoned, “There’s nothing there, Stinky—hush,” which usually worked until I stepped away from the window and he’d start again. Woof, woof, woof. We’d go back and forth that way ...
Me: Stinky, please be quiet.
Stinky: (silence)
Me (turning away from the window): Good boy.
Stinky: Woof, woof, woof.
Me (back at the window): I said, be quiet.
Stinky: (silence)
Me (turning away from the window again): Good boy.
Stinky: Woof, woof, woof.
... on and on, back and forth, until my inner hick lost control and was heard throughout the neighborhood bellowing, “FOR GOD’S SAKE, SHUUUT UP,” through the window. Usually in a bathrobe.
Here’s what was happening: Stinky barked to get my attention, and when I yelled at him, he just thought I was barking back. Mission accomplished. I was rewarding him for barking. The answer, then, was as simple as not rewarding him when he barked. I started inside the house. When he barked at anything that wasn’t a burglar, I pulled out a plastic water sprayer and gave him a little squirt. He hated it, and within several weeks, he managed to put two and two together.
If a person has one dog, the water sprayer works great. I, however, have an entire herd, and after a while I developed carpal tunnel from pulling the trigger so many times. That’s where a good, old-fashioned dog whistle comes in handy. If the crew starts barking, just blow the whistle, which hurts their ears and pulls their attention away from whatever they’re barking at. This is a good way to make them shut up when they’re outside too. The only problem with this method is that during dinner parties, with the dogs locked away in bedrooms, you sit at the table and blow continuously into a silent (to humans) whistle. If you don’t want your guests to see you blowing into a whistle, just place it in your napkin and pretend to wipe your mouth, blowing all the while. They will just think you are a messy eater with perfectly behaved dogs.
Many dogs—especially those like ours who were either feral or abused and thus tend to attach to only one person—bark when their person leaves the house. It’s the only way they know to call them back. There are a couple of easy solutions for this, though.
Quick Fix for Too Much Barking
Get another dog to keep the first one company;
Turn the TV or radio on, so they don’t feel so alone;
Use a bark collar; or
Ask your veterinarian about medications for separation anxiety.
The bark collar is probably the most practical solution, especially in multi-dog homes, because it works whether you’re home or not. I’m not talking about a shock collar here. Not only does it physically sting the dog, but if you have as many as I do, it knocks out whole sections of the national electricity grid when they go off in unison every time the dogs bark.
Instead, consider a citrus collar. Dogs hate the taste of citrus, and every time they bark, the collar ejects a spray of citronella onto their muzzles. I love this method for entertainment value alone, because you’ve got a pack of dogs at the window on the verge of warning you there’s a car driving by, and suddenly, at the very first woof, they go silent with puckered lips, their tongues darting in and out, giving each other quizzical looks as if to say, “Do you taste that too?” The citrus collar also saves you from buying air fresheners.
There are also ultrasonic collars that, much like a dog whistle, emit a high-pitched sound people can’t hear, and collars that vibrate every time they bark.
If you want to avoid the expense of bark collars, it’s easy to improvise. Get a tin can, put twenty pennies in it, and shake it every time the dog barks. Likewise, put lemon juice in a spray bottle (rather than water) and squirt it at his mouth when he woofs, and you’ll not only have a quiet dog but a good laugh as well. (You can also use it on your fish for dinner.)
Whatever you do, don’t talk, pet, or try to soothe your dog with your hands when he’s barking. This only tells him you love him for driving you crazy. Only reward him when he doesn’t bark at something he normally would, which I know is difficult when, like Stinky, your dog barks at drying paint, growing grass, and forks. Try it anyway.
In the end, a person really can’t get too upset about barking. There are so many people out there, from politicians to spouses, whom you’d love to squirt with lemon juice or place inside a shock collar, that a little barking from the dog shouldn’t seem so annoying. I think it is because we spend all day listening to the rants of others, and by the time we get home, we feel we can finally scream SHUT UP and not worry about being arrested. In my house, I only reprimand nuisance barking. If the doorbell rings, I tell my crew, “Go on, let it out,” because I wish so much that I could.
Quick Fix-2
CHAPTER FIVE
The Turd Eaters
Dear Mr. Grim,
About three months ago, I adopted from your organization. She’s very loving, even though we’ve had to deal with her being very shy and unsure of most situations. She seems to be happy; however, she will not stop eating poop. She’s eating our other dog’s poo from the yard, and also doing her best to keep our litter boxes cleaned. It’s so disgusting; we just can’t deal with it. Last night we found a turd in our bed. For my husband, it was the last straw ...
Sincerely,
Doody Dumper
Dear Doody,
Obviously, she left the turd in your bed as a gift, because if she liked the taste of poop, she would have eaten it. I’m curious: Was it a cat turd or a dog turd?
Yours,
Randy Grim
I will confess to two thi
ngs at this point (and only because Dr. Gupta says that I should):
I’m not sympathetic enough with people who haven’t read as many self-help books as I have and thus can’t handle the eating of turds, and,
despite the number of self-help books I’ve read, the thought of eating turds makes me want to hurl.
I admit, it is pretty disgusting. I saw one of my own dogs, Ichiban, do it once—ran up to another dog pooping in the yard like he was the ice cream man offering free treats—and I couldn’t even look at him for an entire week.
At first, I did my usual: drank a little wine, went into denial, and pretended it never happened. Everything was fine for a while, but then early one morning, as I stood at the kitchen window sipping hot Brazilian Robusta, watching the dogs play in the backyard and, in general, feeling that all might indeed be right with the world, Ichiban did it again—he wolfed down poop as it came hot out of the other dog’s butt, and my rare moment of tranquility (along with a mouthful of Brazilian Robusta) splattered against the wall.
One of my biggest phobias (of which, admittedly, I have several) is of germs. It’s a generic kind of fear—germs in general scare me—and I avoid public bathrooms, escalator handrails, handshaking, and all-you-can-eat buffets. I flush my own toilet with my foot. During the course of my lifetime, I have visited the emergency room with symptoms of the plague, botulism, bird flu, tuberculosis, West Nile, malaria, and anthrax poisoning.
I nearly had a nervous breakdown once when some friends, playing a practical joke, left a message on my voice mail from the “Federal Department of Infectious Diseases and Emergency Sanitation,” saying they had “reason to believe” I’d come into contact with someone who carried streptocophal, an extremely rare and potentially lethal disease, and that a special “contamination vehicle” had already been dispatched to my residence to take me to a nearby air force base where I’d be “administered special tests” which included an anal probe. I fainted on the spot.