My life with my dogs is the 21st century girl equivalent of Steinbeck’s “Travels With Charley”, except my story is still unfolding.
Over the span of time that defines my career, I have seen and heard many things, witnessed the rise and fall of many fads and ‘trends’, and been on the forefront of some of the most innovative, and alarming developments in the realm of dogs, their behavior and their ownership.
I do not fall into the category of ‘pet parent’, ‘furmommy’ or even more infantilizing, ‘pawrent’. I own my dogs. They are my property. They enjoy a life precious few will ever experience. I travel with them almost daily. All of them. Not just one or two, but the whole damn crew.
I bought a vehicle that can accommodate all of my animals and their accoutrements. They travel securely in crates. They get frequent outings on long trips and see parts of the world that very few dogs get to enjoy.
How?
Training mostly, but primarily because including dogs in my life was a decision I made when I was very young, and willingly worked to include in my life. I wanted my dogs to be more than an accessory. They aren’t ornaments, they are an extension of me, my personality, even in some ways, my physical attributes.
Pearl is the dog most like me in behavior and temperament. Lately, we also seem to share the same ‘Rubenesque’ physique as women of a certain age, with a lot more frost on the rooftop than it’s economical to color. We are au naturale’. We both pretend to be emotionally indifferent, but the internal flame of absolute passion absolutely still blazes. She has learned to watch and wait, something that took years for both of us to acquire. As she ages, she grows less tolerant to some things, more tolerant in others. Same same.
Rooster is me when I was younger. Balls-to-the-wall recklessness that has never really abandoned me, but tempered with age. His joyous enthusiasm for everylivingbreathingmoment leaves me smiling just watching him still. Now over five, he is still the same hard-charging, calamitous renegade that earned him the name ‘Rooster’. I hope he never grows up. I didn’t want to, but dammit, here I am.
Spider. Handsome, elegant, smarter than he should be, and endowed with an independent streak more than a mile wide. He demands negotiations for every little thing. His whole cynical existence is transactional. I can be like that. We both need to see the benefit of things. He recently learned that humans have value and if he is observant and cooperative, they enable him to pursue every working dog’s dream – to enjoy his genetic programming with meaningful work, untarnished enthusiasm, and single minded purpose.
Eris, my youngest. Who she is, is yet to be determined. She has a world class pedigree, it’s too bad that her sire and dam don’t belong to the same breed. She is hopefully the best of both sides. Her dam was a quiet, nimble creature. Built like a Thoroughbred. Her sire was a sturdy lad, more like a Quarter Horse. I wish I had gotten a chance to meet him in person, but from what I saw, I was impressed by. He wasn’t frantically acting like he wanted to kill us, but he regarded us with quiet curiosity. He showed his willingness to stand his ground, without the empty bravado many dogs behind fences demonstrate.
She’ll get there. She is mentally tough but she is smart. She is too young to have any vices, and I am careful not to allow her to develop any. She has been anointed Pearl’s successor, taking her place in a long line of world-class animals who have joined with me as companions, helpers, confidants and friends. Her future is ahead of her, and hopefully my years of experience will make her transition from insolent, drivey puppy into an emotionally stable, controllable adult.
I read a lot. It was an escape from confusion and loneliness when I was a kid. I was able to insert myself into the pages of whatever I read in ways that insulated me from the turbulence of the present. Nobody has a perfect childhood, and for me, when those moments became intolerable, I had books.
Dog books. All the classics. “Big Red“, “Old Yeller”, “Where the Red Fern Grows”, a hundred others. If it had dogs on the cover, I read it. If I heard it had dogs scribed into the pages, I read it. Even if they were just casual characters.
Reading created a passion for book collecting, which requires, on occasion, I have to let some go in order to make room for others. I haven’t done that in a while. I have been slow to embrace technology and e-readers, although I am starting to embrace it now. Still, culling almost 60 years worth of book collecting is a hard task.
All this to say, I have a fairly concentrated focus on things ‘dog’ and everything adjacent; health, nutrition, fitness, training, psychology, law and ownership. Do I know it all? Of course not, but I don’t let that stop me from trying to or wanting to.
Because I care about my subject. More than I care about a lot of things. I care about it almost pathologically, but if you were my son, or my husband, maybe my mom or dad; you might think it was pathological in nature. It may be, but in my defense, I DO have other interests. I like cars, gardening, photography, history, archaeology, my family of course, and other things. Since I was usually too poor to pay for a car repair, I frequently had to do it myself. I discovered I liked the challenge of figuring out what was wrong and learning how to make it right. For the most part, I stayed true to my self sufficiency and figured that shit out on my own.
All of this to say I put the time in. A lot of it. Every waking moment and most of the dreaming ones thinking about dogs, their impact on my life, my impact on theirs, and how to continue improving. I don’t remember when I became so OCD about dogs, but somewhere along the line, I did. I understand that very few people possess the same singular obsession, but there it is. I did it because I wanted to. It was an escape and an adventure. Dogs gave me things people simply could not.
Not to say that occasionally I’m surprised, by either the dog’s behavioral presentation or a human’s response to it, but these days, those events are few and far between. The human brain is a magnificent tool. It stores every memory we create. The magic is in the recall. If we could all just hold on to that…
What fascinates me most about our closest companion is how similar we really are. We’re supposed to be genetically related to the Great Apes, but in all honesty, I think we are more closely aligned with dogs. We don’t get to pick our relatives, but we absolutely do get to pick our friends and allies. There has been some exceptional new studies on our relationship with dogs that require more attention. We have been together for tens of thousands of years. Folks may say history was written on the back of a horse. I say that may be, but we were led by a dog.
I think we are the same animal. We just wear different skins.
If dogs are hungry, they will follow a pre-programmed genetic roadmap to acquiring food. It will look largely different externally between the wild dog and its domestic counterpart, but only externally. The exact same mechanisms are in place from the moment that hunger pang triggers behavior until the organism is satiated.
If you’re standing in a kitchen, your dog is probably somewhere nearby, not only because he’s pretty confident that something will miraculously fly into his mouth, but his genetics have told him for millions of years to ‘get it while the getting is good’. We have reinforced that because enough things have flown into his mouth, he has wagered on it happening again in the future. So the gambler waits. He just needs to be patient. In the wild, a meal is not assured. On top of that, acquisition is an uneven affair, laden with risks and overwhelming energy expenditures that do not guarantee success.
He sought game (he heard you in the kitchen), he located game (you, at the counter, making a ham sandwich), he stalked game (waiting and watching intently for the right moment to STRIKE!), he attacks (the bread crust you trimmed away casually falling to the floor), kills and consumes (gobbling the goldmine before another bigger, meaner predator takes it away from him). He has just enacted the millennia old predatory behavioral chain of events.
And humans looking on are thinking that whole event was either cute or annoying.
Somewhere along the line, we lost our common sense. We wrap dogs up in little suits and endow them with human qualities instead of embracing our own animal natures. I watch my dogs every day and consider their uniqueness. Every one of them enriches my life for having known them, all for the price of a regular meal, shelter and some attention.
Humans have to complicate things. Personally, I don’t think too many academics have owned dogs, or if they have, it’s been a single-dog experience. It is easy to live in books and recite theories. It’s far more difficult to peel off the rose-colored glasses and observe the true-ness of dog behavior; how they interact with each other, and how they interact with us.
Back in the Victorian era, writers called it ‘sagacity’ – (səˈɡæsɪtɪ ) noun. foresight, discernment, or keen perception; ability to make good judgments.
Are dogs capable of these things? I think so, but being mindful of what drives dogs to behave in certain ways, I am more inclined to think along the lines of ‘survival instinct and self-preservation’ than any form of cognitive analytics. Dogs do plan for a future, if seeking their next meal is a form of future. Planning a vendetta against the owner that left them alone for too long, or missed a planned meal isn’t even in their lexicon, regardless of how much you argue.
Dogs don’t do regret.
Dogs don’t do vengeance.
Dogs don’t do spite.
They are everything people should be, except for maybe licking their privates in public and sniffing asses… those things humans have found work-arounds for, at least.
People seem to measure intelligence with the use of tools. As a colleague of mine from years back once stated, “Dogs are the original tool-users. And WE are the original tools!”
Yes. Absolutely.
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