Barks and backhoes

I have three very sleepy dogs today.

Last night they ran themselves silly at a bonfire with us and their best friends, Sergeant (a husky) and Shasta (a weimaraner mix) . I've always said, "A tired dog is a good dog." There is quite a lot of truth to that. Ollie, Marshall, and Gus have been wonderfully well-behaved all afternoon. They've listened. But it's a different type of listening.

Normally around 5 or 6 in the evening, there is a lot of barking in our neighborhood. Eight of the eleven houses in my neighborhood have one or more dogs. One family dog sits for their adult children. Another family has fosters in regularly from a small breed rescue. People are coming home and their dogs are excitedly announcing the arrival of their owners. The rest of the dogs join in. The weekends are usually quieter.

One particular arrival that always gets my dogs overly excited is the daily return of the backhoe to salvage yard that abuts our north fence (thankfully behind our tree line). The dogs seem very offended by its return, and very content with its leaving. When it leaves in the morning, there is hardly a woof to be heard, but the whole group runs to defend our property against the evil backhoe seven days a week.

Today, when they began to jump up to run outside, it barely took a quiet 'nuh-uh' from me to get all three dogs to lay back down and leave the backhoe to it's own business. This is a good thing.

The not good thing is that the play with Sergeant and Shasta was largely unsupervised by the rest of us at the bonfire. We left the dogs to be dogs with limited rules. There has been a lot of unsupervised play lately and I've noticed mild behavioral changes with Ollie. He is getting more forceful in our play, using his body more, jumping up when he never has before. I thought it might have just been too much unstructured play, but then as I examined the behavior, I realized it was a result of play itself.

This article from www.paws4u.com explains some of the differences between physical exercise and mental stimulation and striking a balance between the two, especially for active breeds like Ollie.

an excerpt:

"With our dogs, we frequently engage in high stress activities with extended periods of rushing around, and the stress period is unnaturally prolonged. Conversely, we infrequently create rest periods or give the dogs a chance to calm themselves down. Accordingly, with unnaturally long stress periods and no cooling off periods, some dogs go on “stress overload.” They can’t process all the stress, and their bodies physiologically signal that a Fight or Flight response is warranted. Add that to a dog that may not handle relatively low grade stressors very well, and you are much more likely to have a dog that reacts to that physiologic build-up and does what his body demands; that is, the dog chooses to fight or flee.

Even if the dog doesn’t progress to the point of taking “fight or flight” action, the dog may shut down or give other external indicia of stress. For animals that don’t handle stress well, those stress chemicals and physiological changes can stay in the body and brain for up to two weeks. If you continually train activities such as fetch, the dog never (or rarely) returns to a baseline stress level and the stress keeps building on itself.

It’s not the running or fetching itself which is overly stressful. Running, fetching, flyball or agility can be great. But, as with so many things, we tend to overdo it. It is the prolonged rushing about with little or no cooling down or relaxation period where we are artificially creating the drive that can cause difficulty."

Walking Meditation II

Note: This is a revised post, originally posted 7.19.2009

It is another partly cloudy day. The last one I expect to see this week. I could base my prediction on the local weatherman's forecast of lower than normal temperatures and thunderstorms. Instead, I look at the trees for conformation. The breeze grows stronger throughout the day and the silver undersides of the leaves are exposed. The silver maple sparkles for a moment. This is how I know tomorrow will bring rain.

We are walking, Marshall and I. He is a good walker. His toenails tap the pavement as he bounces next to me. I call his happy walk "tip-tip-tip". His head is up, his whippy tail reminds me of the Wacky-Waving-Inflatable-Flailing-Arm-Tube-Man outside the local Chevy dealership.

Marshall is a happy puppy. I'm realizing as I write this that he only has a few short months until he is no longer a puppy. He will be two in November. People always think he is much younger and mistake him for a sixteen-week old Rottweiler. The truth is we don't know what he is, a Heinz 57 mutt that most closely resembles a German Pinscher, the dogs that are the ancestors of Doberman Pinschers, Schnauzers, and Affenpinschers.

His prance has been passed down from three hundred years of working dogs. Marshall walks with pride. He has a job and he does it well. I am currently working with him to be a service dog. My service dog.

I am one of the thousands of people with an invisible disability. People with Epilepsy, Autism, Diabetes, Alzheimer's, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and other serious psychiatric disorders fall into this category. Marshall is being trained in medical alert and response, certain tasks to help me in my daily life, as well as all of his public access standards. I may have periods of recovery where I may not fit the definition of disabled and meet the requirements to bring Marshall with me. I actually hope for those times. We continue training regardless of what the future brings, trying to stay in "the now".

He is off-duty right now and enjoying the scents coming to him in the pre-rain breeze. We stand for a moment in the shade of an oak tree, close our eyes and smell. Someone is burning leaves and yard waste and from far away someone is grilling. The scent of sun-ripened blackberries down the path beckons me. I start to walk ahead, but Marshall is not moving. He has firmly planted himself next to the tree.

When I move closer, he nudges my knee. It is one of his gentle alerts. I take my pulse and realize I do, in fact, need to sit down and continue the deep breathing we were doing before. The tightness in my chest builds then subsides and I breathe through it. A few minutes later, I feel a tug on the leash. Marshall is standing on the path with his happy wagging tail. He tap-dances at me to tell me it's time to get going and I'm ok again. It is time to finish our walk, side-by-side.

I am reminded at this point of a quote by Thich Nhat Hanh's "Faith as a Living Thing".

Faith is nourished by understanding. The practice of looking deeply helps you understand better. As you understand better, your faith grows.

My faith has been fed today. And I think Marshall's has, too.

My Furry Four Paws: Marshall

Marshall T Wunderstrudel was brought home December 8th, 2007 from the Michigan Humane Society. He was about five weeks old at the time and still recovering from bordetella, commonly known as "kennel cough" and pretty comparable in both symptoms and severity to pertussis or pneumonia in people. He, along with three siblings, had been abandoned in a box outside the MHS vet center Thanksgiving week.

We aren't quite sure what breed he is other than a perfect mutt. He's a black and tan German-something-or-other with a Zorro mask a little bit taller than a beagle. He meets the breed standards, behaviors, and appearance of a German Pinscher, the dogs that Karl Dobermann began working with in the 1890s. I find it highly unlikely that someone would abandon a whole litter of purebred dogs, so the commonalities are probably coincidence.

Marshall was (and still is) a snuggle pup from the first day we brought him home. After a few days of introduction, our older dog Ollie accepted his 'little brother'. He needed special love and attention but has always been a people-pleaser, so training came easy. He was mostly potty-trained in about seven days, learned "sit", "come", and "wait" in ten days. In terms of basic obedience and puppy kindergarten, he might be the fastest-learning dog I've ever worked with.

He quickly showed promise at doing Therapy Dog work. He came with me twice to visit my grandmother in a pet-friendly nursing home as a puppy and loved each trip. One gentleman down the hall who'd had a stroke looked at him with wide eyes and a one-sided smile. I asked the man if he wanted to pet Marshall, and the man started to move a shaky hand. I sat in a chair next to him, put Marshall in my lap, and guided his hand to pet my puppy. An orderly walked by and went to get a nurse. I immediately was afraid I had done something wrong, but the nurse assured me I hadn't. They were just shocked. It had been six weeks since the man had the stroke and hadn't shown any signs of responding to conversation or interaction.

Marshall trotted in his prancing little way out to the car. He seemed proud and alert and I know I am in danger of anthropomorphizing his behavior. I'll just say that I'm not sure if he was content to interact with others or was picking up on how proud I was of him. He snuggled into his bed in the back seat and quickly fell asleep with little choo-choo train puppy sleeping breaths.

We began socialization trips to start the Therapy Dog training. He's learned how to walk on different types of floors, use escalators and elevators, walk calmly next to people in scooters and wheelchairs. He can do a three-minute down-stay, wait for me even when I am out of sight, and only accepts treats on my command. He knows his manners when it comes to greeting new people and dogs, sits politely for petting, and does a perfect heel on leash.

That doesn't mean to say we don't have a few behaviors we're working on at home, but it's pretty fair to say I'm exceptionally proud of Marshall and looking forward to his Therapy Dog testing.