Dog Swim

Time to put those white shoes away until fall, breath a sigh of relief that Gustav wasn't the same pack of punch that Katrina was, dust off your water wings and find out if you have a local public pool Doggie Swim! Local public pool Thornton in Shaker Heights is having their annual Doggie Swim this Saturday, 10-12. The mob of dogs, some who swim, some who just run around having doggie fun, and the dozens and dozens of people of all ages and sizes convene to close out the pool season and head back to school and fall schedules. If you haven't been, it's a scream, if you have, you know what I'm talking about. This socialization experience is a once a year Big Fun Time!

Kitten Karma

It was 12 years ago this summer I first took on a proactive animal rescue role. My brother and his then wife had just moved back to Cleveland a year after I had and the day the moving van rolled up to unload, my ex sister in law found a cardboard box on the lawn of their new suburban manse that she didn't recognize. Upon closer inspection she found inside a wriggling mass of kittens. Terribly allergic, her first instinct was to call the local animal control officer who promptly came and took in the litter of 6. When I learned of this a few hours later, I was aghast and went to the depressing shelter and paid $10 per kitten to release them to my custody. I encased them on my porch and socialized them while seeking permanent homes. We ended up keeping two of them -- an all black one we called Willow and a white one with black ears we called Leaf. All the others were adopted.

Leaf and Willow were nice enough cats although I began to notice that Willow started spending more significant periods of time away from home. Eventually I followed his trail when he left home one day and learned he was time sharing at the house directly behind my back fence. Living there was a couple with a young daughter and an array of animals as well. I went over and introduced myself. Mom was Deb, a vivacious, upbeat, lovely woman. She introduced me to her black cat named Blackie who had appeared one day. I looked closely and I said, "No, that's my Willow." After discussing our philosophies about cats -- they don't so much allow ownership as they allow you to care for them until they might choose another option if given the choice, I told Deb she could keep him if he seemed to prefer her home to mine, or she could stop feeding him and I was sure he'd return.

Willow remained there and became Blackie full time. Deb and I became better neighbors, friends and eventually colleages as she began a dog grooming business to supplement the income of the family. I referred dozens of clients to her and her business was very popular. I even sent my springer, Bean, to her capable hands, and he always came back well groomed and smelled fabulous.
When our shared and beloved vet tragically died nearly 3 years ago, we mourned his loss. When Deb's dog Jake, a husky mix, invariably escaped and took a trip around the hood, I'd see Deb and her daughter Hannah cheerfully walking up and down the block calling him.

Last week, exactly a week from the minute I'm writing these words, I agreed to and accepted an abandoned litter of 3 kittens to my house because I was having a garage sale and I would have them there to meet people and possibly be adopted. I was adamant to the woman who brought them they couldn't stay. She agreed. When the trio arrived, they were covered in feces and urine and vomit from the traumatic ride over. They seemed very feral and I was aghast thinking they would never be adoptable.

They smelled so bad even after being washed off with kitten wipes that I gave all 3 a bath. Each of my 3 daughters was given one to dry off in the sun. My middle daughter took the black one and promptly named her Burn. My youngest took the tabby seen in the pic above and named her Flipper. I vetoed it and called her Kitty Fay. The shyest was given to my eldest daughter to dry and was named Shady (I called her Lila). Once they were clean and handled and played with they warmed up and were actually really nice kittens. When the garage sale ended and the woman who brought them returned to get them, I asked her what her plans were. When she said she would take them to the APL, I said, "No, I'll keep them here. I'll find them homes." My girls were thrilled but I said under NO circumstances can they come in the house. NO NO NO.

Late that same night my eldest daughter came down with a look of sadness and shock. She told me one of her oldest and closest friends had called to tell her of a tragedy -- that another friend's father, neighbor on the same block as Deb, had been out on a long bike ride on that sunny Saturday morning and at the same time as the kittens came into my backyard, scared and smelly, he had been hit by a car and died later that afternoon from his injuries. A popular college professor and all around good guy, he was dead, just like that. My heart went out to his wife and children -- how do you deal with such a sudden tragic loss?

Last fall I took Bean to Deb's for a grooming. Sometimes I threw him over the shared fence in our backyards, sometimes I'd walk around the block to drop him off. She shared with me at the time that she had finally been to the doctor about a months long persistent cough thinking it was bronchitis, only to learn it was a spot on her lung indicating Stage 4 Cancer, secondary to the original never found ovarian cancer. Deb's attitude was, I'll beat this thing. She endured a surgery, chemo and radiation, and took time off from her grooming business. Shared clients contacted me for updates and a phone tree began. By early spring Deb felt better, her hair was growing back, and she resumed grooming with smaller dogs or very very well behaved larger dogs as she gained strength.

On July 4th this came from her:
Hi Friends and Family,
I began to feel very sick this past week and after a few days in the hospital I have a small recurrence which has caused fluid build up in my left lung and so this Monday I'm having the same surgery that I had on my right lung which is doing well. I'll be going back on chemo but have chosen a treatment course that won't cause me to be as sick as the last one. Our attitudes are good here and I adore my oncologist so continue to be well cared for. The hope is that I will take a few months off from work and once again return to my life. Ovarian cancer is a chronic condition so one has to just be positive and peaceful. I will send updates and know that with so many wonderful people pulling for me and sending prayers and positive energy that I'll be back on my feet in no time at all. May this find you all well and enjoying summer.

Love, Deb

Then 3 weeks ago I got another email that things had taken a turn for the worse and she had moved into a lakeside hospice that allowed Jake, her geriatric husky mix, to live with her. HOSPICE! We all know what the means.

On Thursday this week my daughter and I joined hundreds of others at the funeral of our neighbor. Thursday night, still reeling from that event, I learned Deb had died sometime the night before.

On Friday evening (gosh, that was just last night!) a woman who had contacted me several times about wanting to adopt Burn because she liked that the kitten was a dynamo, came over with a friend. They each adopted a kitten but Burn was passed by. Oh the stories I could tell you about people coming to adopt rescue animals!

I couldn't let Burn stay outside in the cage I had kept the trio in all week all alone! So I brought her and her food and water and litter box onto the porch. That wouldn't be in the house, just on the porch.

When I went up to bed, late and on a very sultry night, after letting the dogs out for their final constitutional, I was pretty sure I had gotten Burn wrangled onto the porch.

1/2 hour later as I was in bed enjoying the breeze generated by 3 different fans, suddenly a little black kitten jumped up into my bed and began purring and rubbing against me and being oh so very affectionate and loving. OMG, she was in the house. We all know what that means.

I hope to have further updates on little Burn and how I hope her antics will give hope and laughter during a week of sadness and loss.

Behavioral Mutations

Lily, Trip & Bean

Accept, as I do, that among the wonderful features of the creatures that they are, dogs are creatures of habit and habits can be formed in a variety of ways. Further, since they inhabit our homes and lives, it is our job and responsibility to shape them into what we want (using positive methods of course). It seems to me a wise thought that once shaped into your minimum standards, that you use powers of observation to note mutations as they might occur and decide if they are

a) beneficial or useful or desired in which case you randomly reward them;
b) neutral/don't matter and no one gets hurt and you can reward or ignore; or
c) behaviors that probably should be redirected/reformed because someone can be annoyed or worse -- it can be downright dangerous for either dog or others.

I realize because dogs are a major passion of mine, I spend extraordinary amounts of time, often even brief glances throughout my day, observing my own pack of three -- Lily (nearly 9), Trip the JRT (nearly 7) and Bean the ESS (just turned 5). If I had to give you a quick summary of their personalities, I'd say Lily is the protective and moody but ever so loyal and loving large mix; Trip is a clown and I still haven't ever seen him meet a dog he didn't like (whether that other dog liked him); and Bean is loyal, true, and not too smart but very well behaved dog. They are of course much more than that, but their essences are as above.

I noticed a few weeks ago a new habit that formed when feeding time came around. I can't say what started it, but now that it's there, I'm trying to pay attention to each meal (twice each day) to see how, why and what it mutates into (let me just preface it by saying that it definitely fits into "b" above).

Here's the scenario:

When it's feeding time, the dogs scoot to their "assigned" location: Lily by the fridge; Trip in a crate in the dining room/office; and Bean on the dining room/office floor by the doorway into the kitchen. Two bins of their food (Lily eats Flint River Ranch Senior Plus and the boys eat Flint River Ranch Fish'n'Chips) are stacked near where Lily eats and either my oldest daughter or I feed them. Trip gets 1/2 cup, then Bean gets his cup, and Lily gets her 1.5 cups. Trip dives into his food, and here's where it gets interesting -- Bean just lays there staring at his food even though he's given an "okay" cue which means he can eat and he used to do so, but the mutation started where he just lays there and stares at his bowl as Trip is chowing his portion; then Lily gets hers and starts digging in. Bean (you can say "okay" as perky as possible a dozen times to really assure him that it really really is okay to eat already you odd little dog) just stares. When Trip finishes his food, and he makes the slightest move to leave the crate (I have really carefully watched this from many angles without interfering), Bean makes one slight little growl and then dives in. It seems the real "okay" cue for him is the movement of the Jack Russell Terrier finishing up his meal (which takes very little time I might add...about 45 seconds).

So I'm going to keep watching. And waiting for the mutation. If I remember, I'll update the blog to report on the action.

Dogs really are such odd little creatures!

Dogpile and my pal Arfie

Every year you read about certain words that creep into the lexicon and become official dictionary words. The latest version of one such book (see below) came out last September. I've already discussed in the past the way animal behavior fascinates me, but I have to confess, words fascinate me too. So...

You can find these new words in

Webster's New Millennium Dictionary of English, Preview Edition
Barbara Ann Kipfer
Editor

and learn all about these new words BUT follow along in my normal state of digression as I'm eventually going to be getting to the point of this post!

So google made it in and it doesn't even matter WHAT search engine you use, we still say google. We don't say yahoo, no that means something completely different, although it saddens me that one of the definitions is not what you yell when your dog does something really really cool or you're zipping down a roller coaster or something....

But given my vocation as a dog trainer/behaviorist, eventually I was turned onto dogpile. The dictionary definition of dogpile is:

When many people post unfriendly responses in short order to a single posting, they are sometimes said to "dogpile" or "dogpile on" the person to whom they're responding. For example, when a religious missionary posts a simplistic appeal to alt.atheism, he can expect to be dogpiled.

Which I certainly hope doesn't happen to any of my blog posts!

For my purposes though, Dogpile.com is a very useful search engine (it's tagline is All The Best Search Engines piled into one) AND it has this really cute dog named Arfie to represent it as a widget or a gadget or whatever the heck they call him. Years ago you could buy computer software that would allow a dog or cat to zip around your desktop..now we have Arfie, a free downloadable widget/gadget dog that plays fetch (whether you want to play with him or not, my kind of dog!) on the desktop and is available at a moment's notice to google, oops, I mean search something on the internet for you and fetch you the info.

I downloaded Arfie yesterday and I move him around the desktop of my computer and when I'm on the phone or idling I watch him and play fetch. The best part about Arfie other than his obvious search and rescue skills in finding me useful info on the information highway is that I do not have to sweep up any stray fallen shedding hairs. You should try him. He might give your real canines a run for the money! He even has a share option in the corner of his little patch of green!

The Zen of Stay

The art of nothing. It's all around but everyone seems too busy to notice. Earlier this week I was listening to my local 9 am NPR show called The Sound of Ideas on the topic of The Age of Distraction about the concerns generated by multi tasking and being distracted. Guest Maggie Jackson, of course promoting her book, DISTRACTED, spoke to her audience about the land of distraction. We're so busy multitasking -- blogging (uh oh!), texting, face booking, zipping from here to here in micro meetings -- we're distracted and eroding our capacity of deep attention.

Her site says

"And yet we can recover our powers of focus through a renaissance of attention. Neuroscience is just now decoding the workings of attention, with its three pillars of focus, awareness and judgment, and revealing how these skills can be shaped and taught. This is exciting news for all of us living in an age of overload."

I myself with respect to teaching people about dogs talk about the 3 D's: Distraction, Distance & Duration, but okay, her three pillars work for me too. It was too funny for me that while I listened to the show, being slightly but only slightly distracted at the time, I marveled at how much it chimed in with the lecture (maybe it was a rant?) to my group puppy class the day before about the Zen of Nothing, the art of being happy, doing nothing,preferably but not necessarly a down stay, no matter what, and how hard that it for puppies!

When I'm walking around in a group environment giving students individual attention, I emphasize, repeatedly, to the other students and their dogs, how, when waiting for the next exercise, the important exercise is to just be there happy doing nothing no matter what. My goodness that's a very hard lesson to drum home.

So I decided to continue this invitation only class for another run in the early fall. We'll see how many drop out and how many embrace the next onslaught of training torture. No no, we really do have fun!

JASPER DOING NOTHING

Happy Birthday, Bean!

Bean the Spokesdog turned 5 earlier this month -- on the 9th. A wee bit more extra affection, some photos, (have I mentioned this dog absolutely LOVES to get his photo taken?)and because he lucked out and we had a stunningly gorgeous summer day here -- blue sky, sunshine, slight breeze, low humidity, green green green everywhere -- we ended it with a long late afternoon walk, a little extra dinner and a good thick chew for dessert.

When I look at my youngest dog, my boy who is now 5, I see a dog who is loyal, true, not so smart, almost annoyingly thoughty, yet almost wholly reliable in the house and out, on leash and off, representing me in public events and consistently accompanying me each early morning no matter the weather for our brief alone time of getting the newspaper while he waters the tree, the lawn, the expanding hastas, not necessarily but usually in that order. He always beats me back up the stairs, sometimes by just a hair!

I think back to how he entered my life and some of the milestones along the way -- I met Bean sight unseen at a restaurant parking lot off I-77 with his breeders -- they were heading west from NJ to Missouri; I drove south from Cleveland to intersect with them and meet him for the first time. Oh, I had queried his breeder several times and seen video so by the time I did meet him, I felt like I already knew him -- he was exactly as I had imagined. That first day I actually counted how many people met him between pick up and bringing him the house for the first time -- it was a mind boggling 27!








There certainly are a lot of memories from our five years together, but one entered into my active memory recently, probably because it was a crispy hot day. Early on, when Bean was about 5 months old, I took him on a walk along with my brother, his wife and their 3 dogs in the woods and fields about a 15 minute drive from my home. It was a bleak late fall day and as we walked in the crisp, cold of it all, gray skies above and a layer of snow crunching under our boots, the four dogs off leash, we began ambling by what looked like the foundation of a previous building. Peering over the crumbling low remaining walls, you could see into the pit that was formed -- there were lots of dead leaves, snow, branches and other debris littering the ground. I remember mentioning aloud how I wondered how you would get out if you fell in and as the words were leaving my lips, I watched in absolute frozen horror as Bean sailed through the air, over the wall and fell into the pit. He missed being impaled by a jagged branch by inches and safely landed on a large pile of snow covered leaves. Completely unhurt. I remember screaming out, "call 911, get a helicopter to air lift him out." My brother looked at me as if I were insane and Marina, his wife, calmly noted there was an attached ladder down into the pit. Without hesitation she clambered down, picked up Bean and handed him up. The other dogs watched, I have to think they were mildly amused.


Rescue from the pit!

Summer is a month along but it feels like it's zooming by. I have a ton of new puppy clients -- lots of people getting pups during the school summer break to have the time, good weather and opportunity to train before heading back to more structured routines come fall. But inbetween the training classes and private sessions, car pool to camp, endless vacuuming, I try to stop and watch the dogs and thank them, yet again, for being so well behaved, and give myself a small pat on the back for shaping them into such steady pals for my life at this point.

Week In Review

As I get older my vices become less risky and more sinful in my eyes only. I used to hitchhike and mountain bike on real mountain crags and rock climb and para sail and other stuff but then I wanted to survive and become a mother and not just give birth to them but one who could watch her daughters grow up and develop independent living skills. People who think they know me are surprised that I'm an admitted reader of PEOPLE magazine. I argue it's a way to keep my finger on the pulse of America. I also not so secretly fantasize being featured in an article in that magazine as the pinnacle of success, preferably in the do gooder section having something to do with increasing the human animal bond in positive ways. I am contemplating letting my subscription lapse, but as the deadline nears and the renewal notices start to increase, I'm feeling that I will probably succumb to pressure and renew --- maybe for 3 years!

One of my favorite habits is to get up early on Sunday mornings before anyone else and do my obligatory trudge out to the driveway -- in any weather -- with my trusty dog Bean who does his morning constitutional pee mail on the front tree lawn and drag in my Sunday New York Times. I make a pot of coffee and crawl back into bed. The first section I usually read is the STYLES one, sort of the PEOPLE magazine section of the hallowed NY Times; today what caught my eye was an article in the WEEK IN REVIEW called Sit. Stay. Love. by Erica Goode (who writes about human behavior for the NY Times) about the use of pets as a substitute by some people in lieu of human relationships.

What really struck me, though, were paragraphs 20 and 21 and I'll quote:

-=-=-=-=-=-
"Dr. Gavriele-Gold [a NYC psychoanalyst in private practice in Manhattan and the author of WHEN PETS COME BETWEEN PARTNERS] described one patient as a 'total control freak' who became a dog trainer.

'It worked out really well for him,' he said. 'He was able to marry a woman who was totally laid-back, and he had no desire to control her because he was able to do it with the dogs."
-=-=-=-=-=-=

I'm concerned about those control issues. Does becoming a dog trainer, albeit as a positive non force based one, make me a control freak? I think I'll have to read the book before I pass judgment but I can tell you this--
-- for me from the ages of 21-32 a diminutive English Springer Spaniel, Teisha, was the most significant relationship I had and outlasted friends, partners, jobs, apartments, cars, cities, and so much more. Her fall from grace as the primary happened with the birth of my first daughter. Now the balance is complete -- the kids, family, close friends, dogs and cats are definitely in that order the most important to me and I'm going to let go of control and not sweep anymore today! I do however, plan to have dogs about me even when the kids leave the nest!