Bonding over bananas

My daughter Julie has been home for the past six weeks, and in that time has singlehandedly turned what had been Allie's mere love for bananas into a full-blown obsession. If Julie decides to sleep in, Allie sits in front of her bedroom door, paws at that door--and at times, even starts to whine. When Julie finally gets up, Allie pastes herself to her side. Then, as Julie slices up a banana to put in Allie's dish, Allie stares at Julie intently--and drools a rather sizable puddle onto the floor that Julie's occasionally had the misfortune to step in.

Until recently, Julie had been a little ambivalent as to what Allie's love for bananas meant with respect to her relationship with Julie. "I don't want Allie to love me just because I give her bananas," she'd say. "I want her to love me for me. I want to know she loves me."

I'm no ethologist, so anything I say about the nature of canine feeling is at least somewhat speculative. But it seems to me that it's a mistake for Julie to say that Allie loves her just because of the bananas. If one individual gives another individual -- regardless of species -- something that's desired by or pleases the recipient, the recipient is likely to regard the giver more favorably than before. And if what the giver bestows to the recipient is really important to the recipient, the recipient's regard for the giver will become even more favorable. So, just imagine how the recipient will regard the giver if that cherished item is given not once, not twice, but almost every day.

The fact that Allie loves those bananas, and that Julie gives them to her, is enough to grow the bond between them. To Allie, bananas clearly are a big deal -- so the person who gives them to her becomes a big deal, too.

In her book Bones Would Rain From the Sky, trainer Suzanne Clothier writes about a dog named Chance, whose relationship with his person, Wendy, was badly damaged as a result of misguided training. Clothier suggested that Wendy start rebuilding her relationship with Chance by tossing him a treat whenever he looked her way. Such a tactic sounds incredibly simple--even simplistic--but as Clothier tells the story, Chance decided on his own to work once more with Wendy after she tossed him several treats.

I love that story. I think of it whenever I see how Julie is building her relationship with Allie just by giving her some fruit in the morning. Because good relationships are more likely to form when we associate another individual with being a giver of good stuff. Those gifts can be time, an email, a smile, a kiss or so many, many other things.

Including bananas.

(Pictured above: Ginger the Golden Retriever, eating her favorite fruit. See the video here.)

Happy Thanksgiving

Letting go

The past few days have been, shall we say, tumultuous. Despite taking what I had every eason to believe were appropriate and sufficient precautions, my PC has been beset with 4 viruses over less than two months, each of which forced me to expend some cash to pay a pro to clean them up. Finally, last Wednesday, the boot file/sector got corrupted, leaving my computer and data dead in the water.

Enough already.

I decided to bag PC's and Windows forevermore and get a Mac -- specifically, an iMac. And I love it.

Unfortunately, in making the transition from PC to Mac, I lost some data, including years worth of emails and my virtual address book. At first, this seemed like a huge loss. Those emails included exchanges between Allie's breeder and me, enabling me to relive the whole history of how she came into my life eight years ago. There were plenty of other emails too: notes from my husband and daughter, email interviews, all kinds of history. I didn't refer to that history often, but I liked knowing it was there.

But now it's gone. There's no way of getting it back. I have to let it go.

I'm going to be doing a lot of letting go in the next few months: leaving my home of 20-plus years, watching my daughter graduate from college and make a life of her own, for starters. Further on down the line (I hope), I'll have to let go of Allie, too. What had been light-blonde patches on her face now are starting to look white. Thankfully, she still acts like a puppy while we go on walks; who'd have thought that I'd actually welcome her tendency to use her leash as a tug toy?

I guess life is a series of letting-go events. I've reconciled myself to some of those. I'm actually liking the look and feel of an email in-box that doesn't take forever to load up. I feel proud that I've raised a splendid daughter. I'm stoked about starting a new life chapter in a new place. But even those changes evoke bittersweet feelings. As for the Allie-related eventuality -- well, there's nothing sweet in contemplating that. When it comes to my golden girl, the sweetness is all in the present.

Like dogs? Like movies?

No, this is not a post waxing nostalgic about Lassie, Old Yeller, or other classic movies of the boy-loves-dog genre. Instead, I'm veering in a somewhat less reverent direction. Specifically, I invite you to check out the Empire Online Dogs Movie Poster Mash-up. It's totally irreverent, occasionally tasteless, and completely hilarious. My personal favorite is poster #5, which I wish I could post on the Northern Virginia Dog Blog. It certainly sends the right message.

(Pictured above: the movie that poster #5 refers to)

What if they COULDN'T swim?

Like probably a gazillion other animal-loving WaPo readers, I enjoyed reading about the swimming test that the National Zoo gave to four lion cubs that were born in August. The photos of the cubs in both this morning's article and the website photo gallery were suitably aw-inducing.

At least initially, the explanations by zoo officials for the test made some sense: they needed to see if the cubs would be able to swim if those cubs fell into the moat that surrounds the lions' home there. And the test was needed now, before the cubs get too big and dangerous for trainers to handle safely. Lions, like other animals, are born with the ability to swim--but that doesn't mean that some animals don't use that ability better than others. (Among those other animals, by the way, are dogs: some swim just fine, while others tend to flail about. Hence, the need for dogs to wear life jackets when boating.)

But then I started wondering: what if one or more of the cubs hadn't been able to swim? During the test itself, the zoo's trainers would have fished the water-averse cub out of the moat, but what about after that? Would they:

-- Give the cub swimming lessons? This hardly seems likely. If the cubs are almost too big to even test, they undoubtedly soon will also be too big to be taught how to keep themselves from drowning.

-- Outfit the cub with a life jacket? Somehow, I think not. First, the cubs are growing too fast to be outfitted with appropriately-sized life jackets for each stage of growth. Second, if the cubs will soon be too dangerous to be given swim tests or swimming lessons, they certainly will soon be too dangerous to put into life jackets, even if such garments were available for lions.

-- Fence the moat? Then, what about those sea-worthy lions who might want to use it?

-- House the non-swimming cubs somewhere else? Where, pray tell?

-- Hope that they won't fall in the moat until they're fully grown? That won't matter. WaPo says the moat is nine feet deep at its deepest point. That means an adult lion could drown, too.

Soooooo ... since apparently there are no options for dealing with a lion cub who can't swim, what on earth was the point of this test -- other than to perhaps provide a photo op?

Field trip

Between today's absolutely gorgeous weather and the inspiration offered by today's Washington Post travel section on hitting the road with Fido, Stan and I decided to take Allie on a little field trip. We didn't go nearly as far afield as the WaPo travel crew ventured with their four-legged friends; instead, we headed over to dog-friendly Old Town Alexandria.

First stop on our itinerary was Founder's Park, located at 351 Union Street. This lovely waterfront oasis abounded with people and pooches--no wonder, with temperatures hitting the low 70's. We headed up to the northern end of the park, where we knew we'd find a doggie exercise area. There we tossed Allie a tennis ball several times, got acquainted with a Doberman mix named Joseph and his person, and then headed to our next stop in a roundabout way.

The roundabout way took us on a path along the Potomac, where we stopped occasionally to watch the boats skimming the water. An open gazebo made for especially nice viewing, not to mention a photo op or two. After awhile, though, our appetites got the better of us, and we headed to our next destination.

That next stop was Pat Troy's Ireland's Own, which Stan and I have visited many times, but where Allie was a guest for the very first time. We were welcomed enthusiastically by the hostess, led out to the doggie patio, and ate a tasty lunch while a harpist played some Celtic music. We think Allie appreciated the music, because she wagged her tail enthusiastically whenever the harpist played. Then we meandered back to Founder's Park, where we let Allie run around a little before we headed back home.

I'll be honest: between Allie's car issues and her sometimes over-the-top enthusiasm in greeting strangers, we haven't taken her out and about much lately. Now I regret that. Exploring new places not only deepens the bond between person and dog, but also provides the dog with much- needed physical exercise and mental stimulation. Until today, I hadn't really given Allie much of a chance to show how far she's come. But today she did great in the car, she was polite and mannerly throughout the excursion, and (bonus!) is plenty mellow this evening. I suspect a lot more field trips will be in her future -- which will nice for us all.

The rest of the Post's "have pet, will travel" section is here and here.

(Pictured above: Allie and me at the aforementioned gazebo, overlooking the Potomac. We're both feeling pretty happy. )

Kiss and make up

I was pretty pissed at Allie earlier today. We'd taken a nice long walk over a couple of briskly covered miles, and were on the last block before reaching home when she got one of her infamous Attacks of the Zoomies. Those aren't a big deal anymore: I either wait her out, keeping the leash limp, or I get her to focus on some cookies and settle her down that way. Today I opted for the latter approach, which she responded to well ...

... until she suddenly hauled me out into the middle of the street.

From what I could tell, she saw an acorn -- a thumbnail-sized acorn, for cryin' out loud -- rolling in the street, and she darted out to investigate it, hauling a caught-off-guard me behind her. Thank God a car wasn't coming. I may espouse positive reinforcement in human-canine interactions, but I most assuredly was not feeling very positive at that moment.

Fortunately, we reached home without further incident. I filled Allie's water dish, and went off to do my thing. Later I fed her dinner, gave her a chewie, and performed the rest of the evening routine, not really paying much attention to my Golden girl beyond what was necessary.

But a little while ago, Allie quietly came into my office. For some reason, instead of calling her over to me, I went and sat down on the floor next to her. I asked her to lie down, which she did, and then she did something most uncharacteristic for her: she put her head in my lap. I stroked her for awhile, then paused, at which point she put her paw atop my hand and gently held it down on my lap. We must have stayed that way for 10 or 15 minutes. I could feel my butt going to sleep, but I didn't want to move.

Finally, Allie lifted her head and sat up. Then, very deliberately, she leaned in and gave me two licks on the cheek.

All is forgiven.

Lend me your ears

I'm very careful about Allie's ears. They get infected easily--mainly due to allergies, to which Golden Retrievers are notoriously prone. That's why I feed her raw food from this company, and take care that she consume no grain whatsoever. But I've also learned how important it is to keep her ears clean, so I do the job twice a week, without fail.

I didn't realize until yesterday, though, that I must have been saying the same thing to Allie immediately prior to every cleaning: "Allie, time to clean your ears." Yesterday, however, that realization became very clear, because when I uttered those six words, my Golden girl stopped dead in her tracks, looked right at me, then turned around and began trotting away from me.

I never cease to be amazed at how closely our dogs study us and how much of our language they really do understand. While the apparent vocabulary of one dog, Rico the Border Collie, is truly remarkable, I suspect that many of us would be astounded if we took the time to make a list of the words and phrases our dogs know. Allie's list would include such words and phrases as "breakfast", "dinner," "chewie," "brush" and "cocktail" (don't ask).

As for Allie's antipathy to ear cleanings, I'm hoping that this task will be more palatable if I literally appeal to my puppy-girl's palate. So when I say those not-so-magic (to Allie, anyway) words in the future, I'll have a couple of pieces of venison jerky at the ready. Hopefully, those treats will encourage her compliance beforehand, and will certainly reward her for stoicism afterward.

A confession

(This post also appears on my K9Cuisine.com blog, "The Positively Well-Behaved Dog." I've never before used identical posts for two blogs, but this one's very personal--and also reflects the spirit of the Never Shock a Puppy blog campaign I'm participating in.)

For this week’s post, and in the spirit of the Never Shock a Puppy blogging campaign, I’m going to make a confession. Specifically, if there was ever a day that I might have been tempted to use a choke collar, prong collar, e-collar or otherwise take aversive action with my Golden Retriever, Allie, that day was yesterday.

We were taking a long walk when my normally politely walking Golden girl got an attack of the zoomies. Such “attacks” generally result in her running crazily back and forth, picking up the biggest available stick, inadvertently whacking me on the backs of my legs with that stick and/or attempting to use the leash as a tug toy. I understand why she engages in such behavior: she’s working off excess energy (she hadn’t been for a run for a couple of days) and is also trying to get me to play with her. Most of the time, I can deal with such behavior with total equanimity. She’s seven years old, so I’ve had plenty of time to learn how.

Yesterday, however, was different. I’d had a crown put in at the dentist earlier that morning and by the time Allie and I set out on our walk, the anesthetic had warn off and my jaw was aching. The very thought of needing to deal with Allie’s acrobatics was, shall we say, unwelcome. And I’m only human: just as parents sometimes talk about giving their misbehaving kids a good swift kick (without ever seriously considering following through), at that moment, I was tempted to give Allie a good swift jerk of the leash. Fortunately, I knew I didn’t have to.

I knew that all I had to do was to just stand still—which is exactly what I did.

Just as experts suggest that a person stand still if a dog tries to pull ahead and make like a sled dog on a walk, so is the same non-move a good way to deal with a Golden Retriever’s zoomies. Sure enough, after a minute or two, Allie stopped acting like a crazy girl and settled down. At that point, I quietly asked her to “walk nice.” We then continued on our way, and after a few sedate paces, I gave her a treat. A few more equally sedate paces earned her another treat. We made it home without further incident, and she was dozing next to me under my desk as I typed this post.

I’m glad I didn’t have the equipment that would have allowed me to give in to those aversive impulses. I’m human enough to admit I might have gotten a moment’s satisfaction from ‘teaching her a lesson.’ But I’ve learned enough to realize that in such instances, the best—and certainly most humane—way to respond to a dog’s misbehavior is to not respond at all. Put another way, in order to have a positively well-behaved dog, one has to commit to being a positively well-behaved owner.

A girl and her dog

When I was a kid, I would get annoyed at what felt to me like a proliferation of stories on print and screen about boys and their dogs, but none about girls. I still do. I've always wondered where there are distaff equivalents of TV shows like Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, not to mention books like Jim Kjeergaard's Red series, Eric Knight's Lassie Come-Home, or even Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Shiloh series.

Because, make no mistake about it, the bond between girls and their dogs are as powerful as those between those dogs and their brothers. I was crazy about the dogs I grew up with. As an adult, that adoration hasn't diminished. When I went off to college, I worried most not about homesickness, whether I'd get good grades or whether I'd make friends (especially the male kind). I worried most about whether our Dachshund, Casey, would remember me when I came home for Thanksgiving. And on many levels, I missed him more than I missed the human members of my family.

Apparently, I've passed that dog craziness to my daughter. Julie and Allie have always been great friends, but the intensity of that bond has grown exponentially since Julie started college three years ago. Julie's heading back to school for her senior year on Sunday--and she's said more than once how she'll miss Allie most of all.

I don't take offense at that. Unlike me, Allie can't respond to Julie's text messages or emails, and she certainly won't be coming with me when I got to visit Julie in Chicago next month. As close as Julie and I are, the mother-daughter relationship still carries a weight of history that is blessedly absent between a girl and her dog. With Allie, everything can be simple. I get that. It was the same for me--and, in fact, still is.

(Pictured above: Julie and Allie)

Not so shocking news

As should be abundantly clear by now, I'm all about training using positive reinforcement. That means I favor giving dogs rewards for when they something right over using aversives to stop dogs from doing something wrong.

Not everyone--including people I admire and respect--agrees with me, though. Many people believe that correcting a dog through the use of aversive devices should be part of a trainer's and/or dog owner's tool box. That's why I've joined a number of other dog bloggers on an 8-week campaign called "Never Shock a Puppy." This campaign aims to raise public awareness of humane alternatives to one such device: the electronic collar.

The electronic collar aims to correct unwanted behavior by delivering a shock that can range in intensity from a mild vibration to a truly painful jolt. The idea, of course, is that the dog will associate the behavior being corrected with getting the shock, and thus refrain from repeating that behavior. Over the next few weeks, my fellow bloggers and I will discuss other, more dog-friendly ways to deal with such behaviors. We'll also keep you posted on social media promotions and a boatload of great prizes associated with the campaign.

In the process, we hope to raise $2,500 for the Humane Society of Boulder Colorado's No-Choke Challenge, which will include lots of media outreach and other events in which the gorup will give away humane training tools to people in the Boulder area who relinquich their electronic, choke or prong collars. The donations will enable the organization to buy about 165 of those humane training tools.

For more info, check out the Never Shock A Puppy website. And, in the meantime, enjoy the above YouTube video of this year's Doritos Super Bowl commerical, which went a long way toward articulating the reasoning behind opposition to electronic collars.

Weather or not ...

... it's been a challenging summer for Allie.

In July alone, 22 of the month's 31 days had temperatures above 90 degrees, and August hasn't seemed any better. Those temperatures are too high for safe, much less comfortable, for our usual long walks, much less our customary fetch sessions up at the local middle school. We've been doing plenty of indoor playing, but still--indoor sessions of fetch, tug or hide-the-toy just aren't the same as chasing a ball in a wide open school field.

And even if the weather had been cooperative, my schedule hasn't been. Between writing two books, doing a goodly number of paid blog posts a week, the usual articles, and some traveling, there haven't been enough hours in the day to get through the items on my to-do list -- including those rousing play sessions. That same schedule has been making it tough for me to write here--going more than a week between posts here is embarrassing.

I'm not complaining for my own sake. I'm grateful to have the work (and will be even more grateful when I'm paid for it), and the heat hasn't bothered me nearly as much as it's bothered a lot of other people. But I feel for my Golden girl. Yes, she's getting older, so she doesn't need as many of those fetch sessions as she used to, and the sessions aren't as long as they once were. Nevertheless, I know that the next time we walk anywhere that approximate our route to the local field she'll try to pull me there--and no matter how legitimate the reason is, I'll still feel bad if I have to say no.

But this won't go on forever -- just another two weeks for the book work, and hopefully not much longer for those steamy days. Hold on, Allie. It won't be much longer.

(And for those who are wondering how I'll handle the heat with Allie when we move to Florida, I can tell you right now: I have no idea.)

A moving experience

We are going to be moving--not right away, but within the next year. This past weekend, Stan and I traveled to Lakewood Ranch, Florida, to put a deposit down on some land and begin building a house (the finished dwelling will look something like the one pictured above).

To say that we're excited is an understatement. Now that we've put down the deposit, the die is cast--and we're beginning to think about all we need to do to leave the house we've lived in for more than 20 years and begin a new phase of our lives. (And no, Julie probably won't be with us. She's finishing college next spring--how did that happen?--and beginning a new phase of her life.)

But while Stan is focused on crunching numbers, I am focusing on how to make the move dog-friendly--specifically, how to move Allie along with ourselves and our inanimate stuff. This will be no easy matter. Nevertheless, I am somewhat amused that even now I'm thinking about:

• where Allie's crate will be located in our new house. Not totally decided on that yet.
• how to keep Allie from freaking out when we leave the only place she can remember living in.
• how to find pet-friendly hotels/motels for two nights on the road when we drive from northern Virginia to southwestern Florida--and making sure that pet-friendliness extends to include a 70-pound Golden Retriever.
• where Allie will be when we do our final walk-through of the house.

That's just for starters. Am I a planner or what?

Poor Polly

Last night I watched the season premiere of AMC's Mad Men (thank God for DVR's)--and while there was much in that episode to sadden any viewer, dog lovers like me were most likely to focus on what's happened to the Drapers' Golden Retriever, Polly, since Betty divorced Don and married Henry Francis.

Apparently Henry doesn't like dogs, and Polly--who'd been very much a part of the family and had actually prompted Betty to shoot some pigeons in Season 1--has been banished to the basement. No protest from Betty, of course, but when Don brings the kids back from their weekend with their dad, he lets Polly out of solitary. The dog is lying at Don's feet when Betty and Henry arrive home. After Don leaves, Polly is returned to the basement once more, at Henry's insistence.

Seeing Polly exiled broke my heart, and not just because my Allie is a Golden Retriever, too. Forcing a social animal like a dog to endure prolonged solitary confinement is, quite simply, cruel. And yet, such practices were probably pretty common in the 1960's. I remember several families who kept their dogs in their garages. Other dogs were let out to roam the neighborhood all day, and when they didn't come back, the parents simply shrugged. One dog I remember especially well was driven to a field one day by the dad in his house, and dumped in a field--the guy actually congratulated himself because he was "setting Skipper free."

These days, many people consider dogs to be members of their families--and the growth of the pet industry reflects that status. That said, pockets of old-school laissez-faire attitudes about our best friends still persist. Still, I'd like to think that the dogs of today are more likely to be understood as the social animals they are than was the case a half-century ago.

(And yes, I know Polly's not the only dog who hasn't fared well on Mad Men. )

Four-legged meds, no side effects

Most of us who have the privilege of living with a companion animal know that doing so is just that: a privilege. But in this past weekend's edition of USA Weekend, my good friend and colleague Steve Dale has a terrific article on exactly why having a pet is good for the person who cares for that pet.

I am not going to muck this up by adding my two cents. The article says it all. Read and enjoy.

Who knew?

Apparently I write like Cory Doctorow -- at least according to this website. That said, I would never name a child Poesy, much less add Nautilus as a middle name.

Many thanks to The Poodle (and Dog) Blog for sharing this.

Ta-da!

Coming to a bookstore near you on August 30 (or around that date, anyway)!!!

And baby makes four

I've become a great fan of Bethenny Getting Married, the Bravo TV show that chronicles the life and times of Bravo-lebrity/chef/author/entrepreneur Bethenny Frankel. The woman is flat-out funny, not to mention fearless. I mean, how many women would allow TV cameras to capture her peeing into a bucket on her wedding day? Not many, I would imagine. Certainly not I.

And yet, as much as Frankel's adventures seem way beyond any I would ever/have ever experienced, there's one area in which I can identify: her joy in becoming a mother in her late 30's. That happened with me, too -- and like Frankel, I worried about everything. One of Frankel's worries was how her 10-year-old dog, Cookie, would cope with having baby Bryn join the household, and she tweeted as much not long after Bryn was born.

As a new mother, I had a similar worry: how my 10-year-old mixed poodle, Molly, would handle having a new baby (that would be my now 21-year-old daughter) in the house. More specifically, I wondered how Molly would cope with having to share me with the baby, given that just a couple of years earlier I'd made our twosome a trio when I married Stan.

Unlike Frankel, I didn't get a boatload of responses to a tweet, but I did have one of the earliest editions of What to Expect When You're Expecting. That book contained some great suggestions for baby-prepping a dog: sending home a T-shirt with the baby's scent home from the hospital, greeting the dog separately when returning from the hospital, carefully introducing baby and dog. I followed all those suggestions to the letter, and Molly did fine. In fact, she seemed to consider herself Julie's protector, especially when the latter began walking.

Although Frankel's baby only about eight weeks old right now--and thus a long way from walking--People magazine reports that Cookie has taken on a role with Bryn that's similar to Molly's with Julie, and the new family is doing great. That warms my heart the same way that Molly did when she made it clear that she was cool with any new additions to our little pack. As long as I was happy, she was happy.

That said, if Frankel runs into any problems in the future managing Bryn and Cookie, I can recommend a terrific book: Colleen Pelar's wonderful Living with Kids and Dogs ... Without Losing Your Mind. Pelar's not only a terrific dog trainer; she's also the mother of three sons and the caregiver to two dogs. She's written a pragmatic, compassionate guide that, in my opinion, no dog-owning family should be without.

Apropos of absolutely nothing

Exercising restraint

Allie adores bananas, and usually we're very generous about sharing the ones we eat with her. But this morning Julie (who's the most generous of us all) left a banana out on the kitchen counter, in preparation for packing it for a snack to take to work.

Of course, Allie saw the banana. While Julie was in her room and I was in the kitchen, our golden girl spied the coveted fruit, looked at me expectantly, and offered a very polite sit. "No can do, girl," I told her. "Go to Julie."

"I'm taking it to work," called Julie, who had overheard me. "She can't have it this time."

Allie continued to sit and continued to gaze at the banana. I got diverted by something else and went into the dining room.

When I came back, Allie had broken her sit but was still looking at the banana. But amazingly, this dog--who generally will countersurf to retrieve plastic containers and knives from the kitchen sink, much less anything edible--made absolutely no attempt to reach up to the counter to grab the fruit that had literally prompted her to drool.

Wow. What a good girl.