Duke and Todd in Monte Vista farm fields.
BODY TALK (12)
Back when we plucked Duke from the shelter, he was what I’d describe as untethered more than fearful or anxious, discombobulated like an engine running unevenly, definitely not purring, under a car hood. When he was alert, his erect body was solid, like an iron doorstop. He seemed not to know where his form ended and yours began; he would confidently, and stubbornly, try to sit in limited space we already occupied, then refuse to yield. No, he was not a yielder. Personal space was not a concept he entertained.
Several dog lovers suggested we try an anti-anxiety shirt, wrapping him snugly in fabric to demonstrate where his body ended. Most home remedies we tried were small or unwieldy. Instead, as noted earlier, we got used to him snuggling in tightly between us, with or without Raven, in our nesting area on the living room floor.
From an early age, I was acutely aware of how power imbalances assigned to age and experience leave unlucky youngsters exposed to the potential for harm, without the means to affect their own good. Therefore I remain sensitive to the plight of other species as well, open to the philosophies of animal whisperers and those who transcend human-supremacist thinking for an openness to more ecosphere-centered values.
In his first weeks with us, I slowly, almost methodically, approach Duke quietly and touch him with reverence. Silently seeking his permission, I place my outstretched hand firmly on the big dog’s chest as he sits, erect, facing me, and hold it there to affirm my respect for his body and soul. He smiles, as Labs do, and leans forward to lick our hands and faces. My instinct seems to resonate with his own. He gets it. We are a pack. He has found his family and, in part, his new identity.
Like Duke, Curly Willow, 20 to 30 pounds lighter but built like an athlete, has needed outdoor time as surely as she needs air to breathe. When we first brought Duke home, I was working long days as a hospital chaplaincy resident, including regular on-call shifts; my husband was busy contracting fences, and Duke spent many long and lonely days resting on our bed, waiting for us to come home. It hadn’t occurred to us yet to have him ride around in the truck with Todd, and I don’t know whether he would have enjoyed it as much as Willow has. As with Willow, whenever we were out and around with Duke, people couldn’t help admire his unique features, those jowls hanging low in ancient folds, his imposing size, glowing black fur and glad-happy friendliness. For a long time, I boasted to these admirers that Duke enjoyed life as an Only Dog. But one day all of that changed.
After work, I came in through the front door and did not hear the familiar sound of him jumping down from the bed to greet me enthusiastically. The silence in the house was loud. I walked to the master bedroom and there he was, up on the red bed spread, staring me down without moving. Wondering what was wrong, I stroked his head and neck and peered into his eyes. They were blank but resolute. It was not like Duke to not care about energy moving about, especially when there was the potential to go outdoors. He was either sick, depressed or simply bored sick—probably, instinct told me, the latter.
I thought of my mother’s words to me on the day she died: “Peggy, I’m bored!” Her kids were grown and gone; much of a main purpose in life perhaps fulfilled; and she had been fantasizing about travel (a little wildly of late, including her deceased brother in her plans). This new lack of limits was not something we associated with the woman who was almost always home waiting, watching TV but present to us at the end of the school day (unless she had taken the bus downtown, which was close enough not to worry about). Late in her illness, she had resisted adult professional caregivers, and we were trying to involve a neighborhood teen-ager in her care, even if it meant just baking cookies.
Boredom is the devil for me as well; I’d rather be overrun with challenge than deadly bored. It struck me in this odd encounter with Duke, when I was preoccupied at the close of the work day with end-of-life issues, that my gregarious dog was bored, too, but not resigned. He’d plumb had it with the way things were going. So when Raven came to spend a week, it turned into a life change for all of us. She was young and had boundless energy. For a long time, she helped keep Duke young too.
Impressed with Raven’s playful bonding with this new and older man in her life, we welcomed her into our home. Now when Duke was home alone, he wasn’t—not really. Raven was there, ready to sleep or play with him. Clearly she adored him, cleaned around his eyes with her pink tongue, looked to him for protection—a need that, as a medium-sized dog, she clearly felt. She followed his lead in just about everything. For years we had been fighting a syndrome that had Duke constantly shaking his head and trying to itch his ears with his hind claws. We thoroughly deep-cleaned his ears, once while he was anesthetized. Afterward, he still shook his head and compulsively scratched. But before long, with Raven around, licking his eyes and ears and keeping him company, his old condition pretty much left town.
One of our memorable trips with them in Duke’s old age was to visit Monte Vista, Colorado, in March, the weekend after the annual festival marking the return of flocks of sandhill cranes to this sanctuary area. In the wee hours there, we left the warmth of our hotel room, then drove and walked out to the refuge area, in the golden light of sunrise, to witness and snap pictures of these majestic birds gracefully lifting off and landing from protected wetlands. While the dogs pulled on their leashes to smell the many unfamiliar farm and wildlife scents, we enjoyed their excitement at discovering a bone-dry terrain more like our camping grounds in Buena Vista.
We took a side trip to Alamosa and the Great Sand Dunes National Park & Preserve, where the memory of another dog’s relentless barking in the car on a road trip decades earlier reminded us of our first days in this incredible state. Our arrival this March was before official opening of the park, and the dogs got to shuffle through the sands and waters as if they were in the remote Sahara.
The capacity to explore is important, and we surmise that a dog who is fatigued from running, sniffing and digging in dirt is less likely to be bored, frustrated or tempted by aggressive impulses. Often I’ve wondered what our dogs would do all day if unrestricted and left to their own devices. It would depend on whether they were quartered inside, and what access they had to the wilds. My husband assures me they would probably spend most of their days sleeping, and, like their wilder cousins, do any spirit quests at night.
Animal science pioneers, including Jaak Panksepp and Temple Grandin (Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals, with Catherine Johnson, 2009), speak of the pleasure and necessity of seeking behavior. We like to encourage that in our dogs and ourselves. Vitality is a powerful antidote to depression, with movement and discovery generating renewed life force.
And really, believing as strongly as we do that most dogs crave freedom of movement, it’s amazing they aren’t down in the dumps more often. We do what we can to expand their limited acquaintance with nature, and let them stretch their limbs in the grass as we would in the gym. Everyday stints outdoors are critical, or so we believe. This attitude has helped keep us healthy ourselves.
Park makes room for soothing memories.
PROFILING (13)
Some dogs come to us as puppies (and cats as kittens), with a brief but fairly known history. We select the strongest, or maybe feel a personal affinity with the runt of the litter. Others don’t. They come to us at older ages with unknown histories, off the streets, perhaps, through a network of friends, from the local shelter, or from a rescue organization. Like even those people closest to us, we don’t really know all they’ve been through. If their ribs stick out, as Willow’s and Duke’s both did, we might surmise they’ve been hungry. If they have matted hair, with poor body posture, we may think they have suffered abuse or neglect and were not cared for properly. Somehow, as with hurt and broken people, we still manage to deny the full weight of what we’re seeing, lest it crush us. Humankind’s inhumanity or capacity for blind n
eglect can be just too much to contemplate.
Duke I first spotted in a long indoor run at the local shelter. His improbably large bloodhound head on his modestly large Lab form brought a smile to my face. I had never seen anything like him. His concerned but friendly countenance remained with me as a compelling visual for a week or more until my second visit. This was despite the fact that he didn’t meet the profile my husband sought—a young male black Lab with a big block head. Because Duke was half bloodhound, he lacked the requisite block head despite the fact that his head looked oversized. Since he was successfully caged with another large dog, we knew he could get along with others. He was still young, but because of his size, I worried he would be euthanized if not adopted soon.
Raven, possibly a cattle-dog/whippet mix, came through a relative whom she was transferred to outside the shelter. Basically, someone turned over a dog outside the shelter to a stranger who had just come to look, without encountering the shelter’s filter system. Max came from another daughter who was expecting a child and was impressed by his hand-holding behavior around us. Mac, a neighbor’s dog who frequents the dog park with us, came to Susan when his owner went to jail. Since the dogs can’t tell us the details of their pasts, we are left to fill in the blanks, often by noticing behavioral quirks.
About all we heard about Willow, coming in, was that her owners might have been experiencing bad times while they had her. Her reactions could suggest some invective had been directed at her, like a child told “Just wait until Dad comes home” so much that he dreads his father’s arrival. But, no one knows with any certainty why she is how she is. Because she nibbles gently on the edges of pillows and blankets when feeling happy, Todd suspects she may have been removed from her mother too soon.
Now she goes to work with him in his truck, and languishes in the grass waiting for him to finish fence projects. Although he has had little problem with her temperament, when they return home she beats a hasty retreat out the dog door before she can adjust her expectation of anger and punishment to one of affection and missing. For Willow, at first this process of trusting her heart could take an hour or more. To head off her old dread, we started giving her full-body hugs upfront and offering treats when she sits and shakes. This proud act of hers we did not teach her, so someone else has cared something for her somewhere along the way.
Before Duke, a similarly oversized dog named Vincent was the canine love-of-my-life. He crossed country with me in a van when I moved quickly from New York to Colorado. Probably he would have been jealous of Willow’s time in the truck, so we hope and pray he cannot see this betrayal from dog heaven, which many dog-lovers refer to as the “Rainbow Bridge.” This legendary dog, a shepherd/Pyrenees mix, also resembled the thick-coated Leonburger breed, with its quirky history. Vincent loved nothing better than riding in a car or truck; if he weren’t actually a trucker reincarnated, he could have been a great over-the-road companion for any driver who could break him of his barking habit. Vincent loved riding so much, he couldn’t contain his excited self-expression. Wherever he sat, he would loom forward, waiting for the turn of the ignition key; this alone would send him into a state of ecstatic expectation.
Raven could feel shut out.
STUCK IN DRIVE (14)
So much did Vincent love the experience of being on wheels, he would bark nonstop inside the car or out the open window, casting spittle every which way against a vehicle’s windshield and side windows. A pillowcase over his head did not calm him in the car, nor did all kinds of varied-distance experiments or conventional training wisdoms.
Upon coming to Colorado, we’ll never forget entering the serenity of the Great Sand Dunes preserve with his insane barking shattering the peace of this sacred space. We tracked down a veterinarian nearby to prescribe an anti-anxiety drug—for him, not for us, although these lines admittedly had blurred.
Stoned for the next 100 miles of the trip, Vince then settled down to chew on his bone in the back of the suburban … until he defecated on a sleeping bag spread out for his comfort. When we ground to a halt and threw open the back doors of the van to let him finish, this water-loving dog scooted down the steep embankment into a river next to the road and was swept by the racing current down the highway to the next stop. In our years together, there was scantly a dull moment with Vincent. I don’t think our hearts ever stopped racing. Big dogs are challenging, but worth the effort.
The doctoral student I was living with in upstate New York, when I picked Vincent from a litter, whined about keeping the new puppy in the kitchen until potty training sank in. In a flash I knew my relationship with Vincent would outlast our own. When we moved to Colorado, and I fell in love with Manitou Springs, my prospective landlord was not interested in housing any dog, let alone one Vincent’s size. His building was a century old, and for my part, I couldn’t see us in anything else after touring that elegant, elongated, second-story apartment.
Luckily, I talked him into a trial period. And miraculously, neither barking nor bathroom breaks became an issue of contention. How “the barking wonder” survived this trial I will never know. Somehow he knew he had to; this was high stakes, for we could have been separated. Like Duke, Vincent also survived my extended shifts, and for that I remain grateful. He was about the only one I really knew in my new universe, and I often wondered about our afterlives when I felt the depth of my love for him. Later, when I was married and we were living in our first house in town, whenever my new husband noted that it was time to go to bed, ever vigilant Vincent would jump to his feet, scurry upstairs and block the bedroom door, all with a low, good-humored (or so I presumed) growl.
We used to hike in the foothills near Pikes Peak before work. Adamant thunder would trigger resistance in Vincent’s hiking, but during a final trek, when he was older and slowing down, I had to go on without him and send family members back later, when I was at work, to fetch him and take him home. To all appearances, his back legs were giving out. Todd brought a turkey leg with him and continuously lured him forward onto a blanket, then dragged it down the mountainside, stretch by stretch, with Vince on it. When he got to the truck, however, this stubborn elder lurched forward and jumped up into the truck bed, where he promptly pooped!
That little Victorian house in the cliffs was built on stilts, with more than a dozen steps cut like railroad ties into the red dirt of the hill and a similar set rising to the front porch. Once again, it wasn’t easy to respond when Vince needed a patch of dirt and grass quickly. The splendor of dog park visits was unknown to us yet, so I mainly walked him, and eventually his Afghan companion, through the town’s beaten dirt paths on a leash. Occasionally we visited the waterfall down the way so they could run across the rocks and drink from the cool creek.
Vincent’s health worsened gradually and he died during one long, barren winter night. The next morning, our dog’s body was so heavy we had to slide him down the long wooden staircase outside to the ground using a sled on a rope. We covered him in dark plastic, with flowers atop it, and loaded him into the trunk of the car until we could bury him. We were all too well aware of what this could have looked like from the windows of the police station nearby, and so it wasn’t long. Like Duke, Vincent remained close by us.
Near the end of his life, I worried about impatient reactions to Vincent’s bowel issues while I was at work and couldn’t advocate for him. Sometimes family members doubted his bowel issues, questioning whether he was losing control or was really just lazy and stubborn. It is interesting how central their bathroom duties are to dogs like Vincent, Duke and Curly Willow. And here again, involuntary elimination, sadly, plays an outsized role in care matters for both humans and other critters, especially in their final days. As confusing as it may be, it’s important to compassionately consider some subtle distinctions around stubbornness, volition, biological or medical challenge, and the involuntary slide into dementia.
Mom, when she was dying, I
observed more than once spitting ice cream from her mouth into a soft tissue, then tossing it onto the clean carpet for Dad to pick up. If you asked why, she would disclaim sabotage, and yet, watching this dysfunctional dance, it was quite natural to speculate about motive. Being confronted with your own fragility cannot be fun, especially when it is nothing new. Mom was never a person to claim her power directly, and as a housewife of the 1950s, she learned to be resourceful in many behind-the-scenes ways.
How do reasonable people comprehend some of these seemingly stubborn behaviors that cause exasperation in caregivers? I continue to suspect animals may be more like us than we realize, with personalities not immune to joy and sorrow, anxiety, insecurity and depression, and a complex awareness of love, anger, power dynamics, life and death. In both Colorado and Alaska, where we have homes, we have come to know some of the local wildlife, including a herd of deer around the neighborhood, and I feel much the same way about them.
That is to say, I am curious about their daily routines, needs and strivings, associations, fears and phobias, petty frustrations and true desperations. And while agreeing that wildness befits wildlife, I also surmise, especially in locations where shrinking habitat takes the worst toll, that their lives can be very hard. Might not a mule deer savant be forgiven for harboring occasional curiosity about a few of the creature comforts humans take for granted? Even just a fresh water source in the backyard can save many a tedious trek to the nearest creek, hardest for those with unhealed injuries to their limbs. In the bitter harshness of deep winter, I cringe to see creatures cold and hungry when there is so little to claim as theirs day after day. I worry that the young deer with the bum leg won’t make it, especially when the elders in the herd kick it or otherwise block it from food sources until they have had their fill. (To be fair, they may do the same to other vulnerable members of the group). Nature, so impressive in a macro sense, is not always sweet or romantic close up.
Hound Dog Blues Page 5