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Ode to Moe

March 30th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (1 Comments)

I glanced in the fishtank the other day
And was shocked to see Moe belly up
At the top of the tank,
Dead.
How could it be?
Moe was the anchor of the tank,
One of the first four fish,
The mother of many of the others.
She was so big and belly-full;
She took no guff;
Her female essence
Caused two of her female cohorts
To turn into males.
The earth mother of our fish,
The easiest to spot,
The one the kids called out on finding.
If she was gone,
I feared others would follow,
That somehow the water in the tank had poisoned her
And would poison the others too.

I fished her out
And buried her in the back yard,
As my daughter insisted I do,
Horrified at the thought
That I might flush her down the toilet.

The next day, the other fish were still alive.
They seemed healthy, frisky even,
Darting diagonally across the tank
As they chased prospective mates or rivals.

A couple of days after that, I noticed two things:
First, Mini, who had once been the smallest fish in the tank,
Who had begun to flourish when Eenie and Meenie turned from
Girls into boys,
Had become a new Moe, gleaming and plump,
A stately doggish presence around the lesser fish
Graciously accepting the attentions of the flashy boys.
She has so taken over Moe’s position
That my daughter insists I not call her “new Moe.”
She is just Moe now, Mini no more.

Second, there is a new baby linia in the tank—just one.
Did Moe die in childbirth?
I think she did.
Her legacy resides in our tank,
Including this one last baby that emerged from her body,
To carry on in a dynamic society in our dining room,
Experiencing birth and death at the same moment sometimes,
The way it happens all over our world.

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What Happened to Cholula?

March 25th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (0 Comments)

I know more about Cholula’s past than is typical for a shelter dog. First, there are these scars on her back right leg. Are they from a dog attack that led to Cholula’s problems with other dogs? I don’t know, but she carries on her body this evidence of trauma, which must have hurt a lot and frightened her terribly. One of her front leg tendons also is injured, although this injury doesn’t have scars or affect her in any obvious way. Sometimes I stroke her scars. She doesn’t seem to mind.

The other reason I know more about Cholula’s past than is typical with a shelter dog is that I talked to her previous owner. I’m going to call her Anna. At the shelter, the staff told me that Anna had come in with Cholula (then called Mia), sobbing. She had told them that she could no longer care for the dog because she was ill, but she had provided them a history of Cholula on a flier she’d put up when she’d been trying to find Cholula a new home on her own, and she had given them her phone number and told the shelter staff to pass it own to the dog’s new owner, that she would be happy to talk to them.

The shelter staff had lost the flier by the time I met Cholula. If they hadn’t, I probably would never have picked that dog, because although the shelter staff had posted on Cholula’s cage that she was good with kids, cats, and dogs, the flier (which Anna sent me later, after I talked to her) provided a full description of her problems with other dogs and even cautioned that bringing her to a home with another dog might not work.

In any case, I left the shelter with Cholula, without the wisdom on the flier, and didn’t call Anna until my husband and I realized that Cholula had some problems. Specifically, as I’ve written earlier, leash aggression—she would unpredictably become unhingedly aggressive towards other dogs when out on a walk.

When I called Anna she told me that she had rescued Cholula from the same shelter (via a friend who had fostered her) about two years earlier, when Cholula must have been about a year and a half old. Anna said that Cholula had been brought to the shelter skin and bones, 45 pounds instead of the slim 70 she is now, and that she had the scars and injuries. That’s all she knew about Cholula’s life before her first shelter visit.

At Anna’s house, Cholula lived with two cats, and she always let them eat from her bowl before she would eat. In fact, Anna said, sometimes it was annoying the way Cholu would not eat until the cats had finished, because Anna would be trying to shoo the cats away so Cholula could eat and Cholula wouldn’t eat and the whole thing could take some time. Anna several times said that Cholula was more like a cat than a dog. Sometimes I tell Pundit he needs to teach Cholula how to be a dog.

Anna loved Cholula, but due to a chronic illness and a difficult treatment for it, she didn’t have any energy for the dog, so after trying unsuccessfully to find a new owner for her, she’d taken her back to the shelter. She told me that the treatment was going to go on for two years, and she kept thinking that two years for her was 14 years for Cholula, and she didn’t want Cholula to spend the next 14 years of her life in a situation where she wasn’t getting the life she deserved. Also, she said that Cholula was so sensitive to Anna’s health and emotions that when Anna was sick, Cholula got depressed.

Anna took good care of Cholula. She trained Cholula at an obedience school. She had talked to several trainers about Cholula’s problems with other dogs, and one trainer had recommended that she squirt Cholula with water when she got aggressive to other dogs, and that was the one thing that had worked, had worked to the point that Cholula was even able to befriend a couple of dogs in the neighborhood she’d been aggressive to before. Although I bought a water bottle to try this, I couldn’t figure out where to keep it so I’d have it ready right when I needed it (what with Pundit and sometimes a stroller taking up my hands on our walks) and so I actually never managed to even try it. In any case, my dog trainer Kevin Behan recommends against that, as (I believe I’m stating this as he would) while it may be effective in inhibiting any aggression, it’s actually counterproductive to natural dog training in that it’s teaching the dog ever more entrenchedly NOT to let its energy out, rather than helping the dog figure out how to handle the energy rush it experiences from other dogs.

Anna also warned me that the one other thing that could unhinge Cholula was skateboarders. As there aren’t that many skateboarders in my neighborhood, I hadn’t experienced that yet when I talked to her, but eventually I did, and it was quite dramatic, and I was glad to have heard from her before hand so I knew what was going on. Anna took good care of Cholula, and then, via a week or two back in the shelter, Anna passed her on to me.

And so all of this, the good and the bad, Cholula somehow carries inside her. I would love, one day, to see her with some cats.

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Cholula and I

March 22nd, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days - (0 Comments)

My neice took this photo of me and Cholula back at Christmas time.

I remember when she was a chubby baby I liked to rock to sleep in a rocking chair, long before I had kids of my own.  I remember when she was two and on one of my periodic visits, she looked at my shoes and said, of an event that had happened months earlier, “You walk in the rain and your shoes get muddy.”  I remember when she would run and shout, “I run!”  I remember when on a summer trip to Maine she became enamoured of a walk we took in the dark and every night would say, “I want to take a walk in the middle of the night.”   And now here she is, a high school student with a camera, taking photos of and my dog.

First Warm Day

March 18th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (1 Comments)

I didn’t have much time outside on this first warm day of spring
but
I biked to work without a jacket, and was glad to feel the mellow breeze through my thin shirt on the long ride down hill;

I walked outside at lunch time–
past people lunching behind plate glass windows–

I biked home from work along the reservoir,
fast up the long hill.
I walked 5 kids in flip flops to the park, which was swarming with children
at 7:00 at night, and chased them.
I walked the dogs around the block, wary with a spring-energized Cholula,
and then, Cholula safely indoors, brought the kids out front to see the extra large almost-full moon.
We walked out front after dinner to check on the moon again.
It had risen higher in the sky and was shining through a haze
like a minor sun.
We had dessert on the front porch.

The struggles of the day exist
side by side with these moments.
The struggles took more of my hours
and resolved nothing–
and promise to go on and on.
But these lovely moments, almost perfect,
exist too. It is up to me to give them the weight they deserve.

Ubi in the Flowers

March 17th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days - (0 Comments)

Ubi. My perfect dog, who died about two years ago, when she was 18. Look at the confidence with which she has plopped herself down in the midst of the flowers. She had such self confidence, such heart. She was never aggressive to other dogs and other dogs were almost never aggressive to her–she somehow could deflect all negative energy before it reached her. The one time she was attacked by a dog, it ran into us at a corner, neither us nor it having seen each other until the moment we met, and so Ubi had had no chance to work her magic. Whenever my husband and I fought, she would shiver until we stopped. And so we would stop.

Ubi in the flowers.

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Bark the Fear Out

March 4th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (4 Comments)

In his new book, Your Dog Is Your Mirror, Kevin Behan states that a dog’s issues mirror its owner’s issues, as “the most powerful emotional battery in any dog’s life is its owner’s deep inner stress.” I also remember reading on his website, although I can’t find it now, him positing (I’m paraphrasing) that this even applies to a dog a person picks out of a shelter. According to Kevin Behan, when a person picks out a dog at the shelter, that person chooses the dog whose energy—as seen in those first moments—does the dog cringe at the back of the cage? Come forward and bark? Etc—reflects something the person subconsciously needs to work on in their own life, some unresolved emotional issue.

Do I believe this? I don’t know. I don’t think I’m the reason Cholula sometimes attacks other dogs; I know from talking to her previous owner that Cholula has had this problem since she was adopted by that owner two years ago, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it got worse from her being back in the shelter before I brought her home. Also, my other, most beloved, dogs, Pundit and Ubi, never had this problem. However, I wonder if there isn’t something to his claim.

When I called Kevin to request that he provide me with a training program for Cholula after she attacked a little dog in front of our house, the primary training project he gave me was to teach her to bark on command. He said that when she could bark on command, I would be able to get her to release her fear/excitement/energy when we encountered a dog on the sidewalk before this fear/energy caused her to attack the other dog, and that this would be the key to solving her dog aggression.

Problem #1: Cholula is not a barky dog. She barks at only two things: when someone she doesn’t know knocks at the door (and this only lasts until she sees that I or my husband are calm about the entering person) and when she goes into a lunging frenzy on the sidewalk at another dog or (the one other thing that sets her off) someone whizzing by on a skateboard. Kevin told me I needed to accept that she might not bark right away but to keep working on the exercises. The exercises he gave me were simple. He recommended doing them twice a day for her whole bowl of food.

1) Tie her to a tree on a flat collar.
2) Stand in front of her with food held at my heart, and shiver my energy while telling her to “speak”
3) As soon as she broke concentration, especially by opening her mouth at all—i.e. licking her lips, sneezing, burping, give her the food and praise.
4) Repeat until she’d had her whole meal in this fashion.
5) (Optional) Try to trigger the bark by having my husband hide in the yard or on the street with a funny hat to disguise himself and jump out, startling her into a bark before she realized who he was, which I could immediately respond to with food and praise.

So it’s three months later, and Cholula has still never barked on command. My husband and father think it’s hopeless. Incidentally, Pundit, who is naturally exhibitionist where Cholula is inhibited and will bark at any excuse, got very excited about this new training protocol and learned, at 12 years of age, to bark on command after a couple of weeks of intermittently poking his nose into Cholula’s training. He was barking with such frenzied misery in the house when I took Cholula out to train her that for a while I tied him to a bush at the same time Cholula was on the tree and took turns instructing them. In this way, I managed to teach my old dog a new trick, while my new dog still gazes at me in anxious silence.

(Important admission: In the beginning, I made Kevin’s suggested training schedule a priority. However, there is no way for me to get out alone with her in the evenings until after the kids have gone to bed, and in the dark I was getting nowhere with her, energywise, so I dropped the evening training. Recently, mornings have been crazy too, so I am now working with her on this about 4 days a week).

Here’s the thing: once I really started trying to get her to bark on command, I saw how hard it was for her. Even for Pundit, a naturally uninhibited, barky, healthily assertive dog (sometimes annoyingly so), to bark when I told him to was initially mind-blowing. I could see that he knew what I wanted him to do but he couldn’t figure out how to let his energy out in a bark consciously, because I told him too, instead of as an instinctive response to whatever minor stimuli had excited him in the moment. Pundit learned when a friend came down our walk one morning as I was training the dogs, and although Pundit knows this friend well, in the excitement of the moment, he barked when I could immediately, as Kevin had told me to, tell him “speak”, praise and feed him, and the lesson clicked.

I think that Cholula knows what I want her to do when I tell her to speak. But she can’t—she lacks the courage, the energy, the will to let loose a bark into my face. She can not figure out how to do it. And the more I understand how hard it is for her, the more I believe what Kevin told me, that if I could get her to release that bark on command, I would hold the key to resolving her aggression problems.

Which brings me to Kevin’s assertion that we pick the dog that reflects something in ourselves. I used to write a lot. And then I stopped. And I wonder if there is something to Kevin’s assertion that I was drawn to Cholula in the shelter not just because of the big sign on her cage saying she was good with kids but because the inhibition I glimpsed in her resonated with an inhibition in myself that I was desperate to cast off, but didn’t know how. And so as I work to get her bark out, I also started the blog, and made a New Year’s resolution to write in it at least weekly.

So I haven’t gotten her bark out yet, and I haven’t solved her aggression problems yet, either. This is what happens on our training these days (the photos are from a morning I took her and her breakfast to the woods to train in a lovelier setting for a change).

1) I tie her to a tree and jiggle food in front of her, encouraging her to speak.
2) I’ve found that with her I have to focus just on keeping her energy up, not letting her droop into avoidance, where she walks away from me behind the tree or looks away, and the easiest way I’ve found to do this is to crouch in front of her and give her lots and lots of praise the whole time I’m telling her to speak. Kevin suggested working farther back or standing up tall, but until she’s excited, when she’ll jump on me, I haven’t been able to keep her energy flowing well from either of those positions.
3) Cholula wrinkles her forehead. I praise and give food, and tell her to speak.
4) Cholula paws the ground. I praise and give food, and tell her to speak.
5) Cholula burps. I praise and give food, and tell her to speak.
6) Cholula paws the ground more fervently.
7) Repeat until the food is gone.

Although this doesn’t sound like much, and I’m not trying to suggest its very impressive for three months work, the thing it has done is tremendously improve the passion of her pushing (Kevin’s central training technique; you can read about it on his blog (www.naturaldogtraining.com) or Neil Sattin’s blog (www.naturaldogblog.com). When I let her off the tree these days, she races up and down our back walkway leaping into me for the food with a pure energy that is tremendously exhilarating for me as well as her, especially after the tentative pushes she used to give. She flies into me now, she leaps off the ground, and I have to brace myself to keep from falling, which I know (because it happened once before, when I first had her home and tripped while walking backwards) would cause her to so cut back on her energy out of fear that it would take me weeks to bring it back up.

That’s where we are. We’re not there yet. But she is pushing and trying to speak, and I am blogging. And I hope that both of our energy is flowing in the right direction.