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. )