As regular readers know, I feed Cassie the Corgi real food: a carefully calibrated combination of starch, vegetables, and cooked meat plus canine vitamins. Easy to fix and unlikely to be contaminated with adulterants such as melamine.
It being summer, we’re both developing cabin fever: when it’s 105-degrees plus, the pavement is too hot for her feet after dawn and before sunset. In her doggy boredom, she’s been working on creating a fine lick granuloma on one leg. Because she doesn’t pull off bandaids (what kind of a dog is she, anyway?), it’s pretty easy to block her from chewing the incipient wound she’s already built, but all that means is she finds another spot to lick.
No one really knows what leads a dog to lick itself raw, but some veterinarians speculate that one cause is boredom. So I decided she needs something to keep her busy with chewing: let her chew an object instead of her foot.
I never feed my dogs bones, mostly because they’re messy indoors and attract ants and other insects outdoors. Smaller bones, as we all know, are very dangerous to domestic dogs: the risk for intestinal impaction and perforation is high. Some people, however, think you can get away with large knuckle bones, those round heavy things that are pretty hard for a dog to break apart. And many folks figure a dog, being a direct descendant of the wolf and genetically barely discernible from the wolf, should have at any raw bones you care to give it.
A dog, however, is not a wolf. Over tens of thousands of years, Canis lupus familiaris has adapted to live with humans, and it’s a rare domestic pooch that brings down dinner on the range. I did a little research and found this interesting e-mail discussion between a small-animal veterinarian and biologists and caretakers who manage captive wolves. The wolf experts point out that wild canids eat more than just a bone: when they ingest bones, they’re also eating skin and fur. The fur, in particular, tends to wrap itself around hard objects in the digestive tract, padding sharp bones and protecting the intestine.
Huh. Well, I don’t think I’ll be inviting Bugs Bunny to Cassie’s tea-time while she’s chewing some cow’s knuckles. So…hold the raw bones, waiter.
So what can I do to amuse this animal?
One reasonably safe strategy is to take a Kong-style toy and fill it with peanut butter or dog treats, so that the pooch has to fiddle with it for quite some time to extract the yummy stuff. Peanut butter, while probably harmless unless the dog is allergic to it, is fattening. You can substitute any number of fillers, including raw vegetables if your dog will eat them. Yogurt and cottage cheese can also be used. Ordinary dog treats work well. When using gooey or runny fillings, you can minimize leakage by freezing the filled Kong before giving it to the dog.
The other thing I’ll be trying is adding some omega-3 fatty acids to her food, lest she have a deficiency that’s giving her itchy skin. Easiest way to accomplish this is to include salmon in the diet. She likes salmon, but lately I’ve fallen into the habit of feeding hamburger most of the time. Dogs need a variety of protein sources. In addition to adding fish a couple times a week, I’ll dig some chicken out of the freezer for her, and also pick up some ground lamb the next time I see it on sale at Sprouts.
And finally, even though Cassie is pretty laid-back (she got over her apparent separation anxiety within a few weeks of taking over my house), to forestall any further neurotic behavior I’m going to have to get off my duff at 5:30 in the morning and take her for a walk, instead of plopping in front of the computer and spending an hour or two blogging. She already polices the neighborhood every evening; in the mornings it will be safe for us to invade the park (we don’t go there after dark). So that should give her (and me) a little more exercise.
So, as to the answer to the question of whether you should feed bones to your dog: in a word, nope.
As Cassie and I were walking home from an early evening stroll last night, a neighbor stopped me to report that a stray pit bull has been running loose in the neighborhood for the past week or so, and that he had just seen it go into my yard. The animal was gone by the time he and I talked, but it was a mildly disturbing exchange.
Dog fighting—which mostly involves “pit bull” type animals of indeterminate breed related to the Staffordshire terrier—has become a serious problem in Arizona. A common entertainment of toughs and hardened criminals, this lucrative gambling racket thrives on breeding aggressive dogs and abusing them to the point where they are truly dangerous. The problem is not so much in the dogs as in their sociopathic owners. Pit bulls have found favor among street gangs, who use them to protect their drug operations and intimidate citizens as well as in organized dog fighting. In fact, the pit bull has become emblematic of the Bloods, a widespread violent street gang. The interest in pit bulls among celebrity thugs like football star Michael Vick and rapper DMX does not help matters.
The dog shelter where I rescued Cassie was, like most shelters in Arizona, overrun with pit bull-type dogs. It is located in an area infested by gangs, and so the predominance of pit bulls there is not surprising. What is surprising is that I managed to retrieve her before she was “adopted” to be used as bait in training vicious fighting animals, a common practice among dog-fighting breeders and trainers.
The Centers for Disease Control caused quite a flap a few years ago when it released a report saying pit bulls are responsible for about a third of U.S. dog-bite deaths. Groups advocating bans on specific breeds succeeded in getting legislation passed in several states and cities. In fact, though, the CDC did not say the problem lies solely with pit-bull type dogs but that—given enough provocation—any breed will bite, and the study explicitly said the group does not support breed-specific controls. During the study’s period, Rottweilers were the most commonly reported breed in fatal dog attacks. Together, pit bulls and Rottweilers are responsible for more than half the fatalities from dog bites in the U.S.
The sociopaths who breed pit bulls for dog fights use savagely brutal “training” techniques, and they will shoot dogs that lose or back down during a fight. The result, of course, is a dangerously mean-tempered animal, and over time, a breed that has been selected for aggression and viciousness. Anyone who thinks such an animal is not potentially dangerous is fooling himself. Fighting dogs that are not killed are often simply abandoned after a lifetime of horrendous abuse that inclines them to attack anything that comes their way—there’s a chance that’s how our visitor got here.
So, I wasn’t pleased. A street pit bull, which will not back down when confronted by a human and is usually impervious to pepper spray and blows from a well-aimed kick or stick, poses far more risk to Cassie than do our urban coyotes, which are fairly easy for an adult human to scare off.
And more to the personal finance point: I wasn’t pleased because this is yet another indicator of the encroaching slums.
Though my immediate neighborhood and the district just to the south and east are nice enough, these centrally located enclaves are surrounded by blight. One of the reasons that for years I felt a nagging sense that I should move someplace else is that when I worked on the West campus, I had to drive home and into the neighborhood from the north. Coming in from the north and the west takes you through miles of working-class neighborhoods and downright slums, which get crummier and more menacing as you approach our neighborhood. The northern fringe of our neighborhood has been dragged down by the noise and crime from a seedy shopping center, now mostly vacant after its anchor, a Fry’s grocery store, finally closed. The departure of the Fry’s, however, did nothing to help improve that area, mostly because as the real estate market deflated there was no way for the home values to go up. Values in that section of the neighborhood were already depressed, and as they have fallen further, a worse element has moved in and the properties’ deterioration has accelerated.
Driving in from the south and the east, as I’ve been doing since I started working on the Tempe campus, carries me through the middle-class and high-income neighborhoods that line north Central Avenue. These are pleasant areas, and so one tends to forget that everything to the west and the north is a dangerous slum. Out of sight, out of mind.
You can’t keep it out of mind forever, though, when the denizens’ rejected pit bulls are wandering through your front yard and when your neighborhood is under siege from burglars and home invaders.
My problem with moving, besides the fact that my property values are as depressed as anyone else’s, is that I happen to like living in the city’s central core. I don’t want to move out to the suburbs. I dislike Tempe, Mesa, and Chandler and don’t want to live there, and I have exactly zero desire to move to the only affordable middle-class venue I can find, which is Sun City. Except for my specific six-square-block neighborhood, which because of its status as a buffer zone between the rich folks and the gang-ridden slums to the west has always been underpriced relative to similar houses a block or two to the east or south, there is no other desirable part of the central city where I can afford to live. A one-bedroom apartment closer to the center of the city costs more than my four-bedroom house on a quarter of an acre with a pool.
Last night I crawled the online real estate listings and found three short sales or foreclosures over in the “good” part of my area. One potentially attractive house that was completely gutted many months ago is still on the market—the bank is asking $175,000 and entertaining any offer. My guess is the fix-up job will require about $100,000. You’d still end up with a nice house for about $100,000 less than the (former) value of surrounding properties. But it’s not livable—no kitchen, no bathrooms, no flooring, no nothin’—and so you’d have to live somewhere else for the several months required to rebuild the place.
Another house, about as far north as mine but only a block from swanky Central Avenue, is on the market for $230,000. It’s a short sale. This, too, is priced well below the value of neighboring homes, but it’s on the upper end of my price range.
The backyard is nowhere near as nice as mine, and heaven only knows what’s inside.
Deep in the heart of North Central—must be just one or two houses in from the coveted tree-lined boulevard—is this little gem:
It appears to have a nice kitchen. Two fireplaces, one of them in the master bedroom. What look like real wood beams in the family room. They want $289,900 for this, as is. In that part of town, they’re practically giving it away.
But that’s still way more than I can afford. I’d be surprised if I could get $230,000 for my house today, and that’s before I fork over Realtor’s fees and closing costs. The truth is, I can’t sell my house for enough to get into any better area that is not on the far-flung fringes of the Valley or in Sun City.
Yesterday M’hijito and I went in search of a small but reasonably easy-to-use harness for Cassie the Corgi. Her collar is loose enough that she can easily slip it, and I realized that if our coyote friend had noticed her instead of being intent on some other prey, she might have wriggled loose during a confrontation and tried to run off. That would have been the end of her.
Well, we went into PetSmart, not one of my favorite emporiums, and there we tried on a nylon harness. The part that slips over the dog’s head and is supposed to encircle the chest and shoulders needed to be adjusted. In our efforts to do that, we ended up making it tighter around her neck. So tight, in fact, that I could barely fit my finger under it. Try as we might, we could not loosen it! I finally had to take my jackknife out of my purse (alarming my son, who thought we’d be arrested) (all right, all right, it does look a little fierce and you could think it’s a Mexican switchblade) (but it’s not!)and cut the dog out of the stupid thing. So that was $9.50 for nothing, and a customer lost permanently to PetSmart.
So, to the Internet. The harnesses that operate simply are training devices. Cassie doesn’t really need a training device. She just needs something that won’t slip off her head.
Greyhounds, I recalled belatedly, have bullet-shaped heads that moot the value of a regular buckle collar. To get around that, you use a martingale: a collar with two loops, one of which slides, so that when the dog exerts pressure on it, the collar tightens. Because the martingale is made of nylon or fabric ribbon, it doesn’t jerk or pinch the dog the way a chain collar does. It does, however, work effectively to keep a sighthound from dragging you down the street in chase of cats, birds, and flying plastic bags. Works on a German shepherd, too… And, BTW, if you have a clue how to train a dog, it’s far more humane than chains and pinch collars.
Duh! Sighthounds come in many sizes. Italian greyhounds are chihuahua-sized, and whippets are the size of Cassie: around 25 pounds. Somebody, somewhere, must be making martingales for smaller dogs.
Yea, verily! Google “martingale collar” and up comes a raft of sites, many of them by people who are hand-crafting the things. You can get them much cheaper at Petco (Petsmart doesn’t seem to carry them), but the ones in the chain brick-and-mortars are just plain, ugly nylon things. Greyhound lovers really get into crafts for their dogs, and some of them make gorgeous collars.This outfit, so far, is my favorite. Problem is, I can’t make up my mind! Check these out, if you will, and tell me which would be your preference.
Cassie the Corgi is not quite as large as a grown jackrabbit in a good foraging year. In the eyes of some, she is small, tender, fuzzy, and juicy-looking.
This evening we had a close encounter with a pair of those eyes. We were ambling up the backside of our block, taking in the balmy evening air, when who should come flying across the perpendicular street but a fine, muscular young coyote!
What (from any point of view other than a rabbit’s) an amazing and fantastic animal! It moved like a shadow, soundless and illusory. To come up to that pace, a German shepherd would have to launch into a gallop, but this wild dog’s gait was a smooth, even trot.
Coyotes inhabit our neighborhood. Unknown to most urbanites, they dwell in most districts of the city, and these days they’ve moved into most parts of the United States. A couple of years ago, neighbors were up in arms because we had a denning pair with a litter of pups, making them marginally dangerous. Coyotes who are in the business of raising young do not like to be interfered with by, say, your dog, and so they will ghost over a six-foot fence (easily!) and come after even a large dog.
As for the likes of Cassie the Corgi: dinnertime! Given enough hungry cubs to feed, a coyote will try to grab Fifi right off the end of your leash. Some reports have claimed coyotes have actually tried to snatch little dogs out of the arms of their doting owners. They also, on occasion, will go after small children, but those occasions are extremely rare.
The coyote was so focused on whatever it was chasing (cat?) or whatever it was running from (human?) that I don’t think it noticed us. Nevertheless, I picked up the Corgi and carried her the half-block back to our house. Tomorrow: remember to bring the pit-bull shilelagh! Gotta quit leaving that thing at home.
Condo Blues responded with a little clarification of a post I linked to yesterday, in which she described some doggy treats she’s invented. Her discussion of doggy food allergies brought me back to one of my favorite hobby horses: dog food.
Commercial dog food, besides being equivalent in human terms to a steady diet of cheap hot dogs and processed dry cereal, is full of ingredients that are common dog allergens. Corn, for example, is one of the top offenders among canine allergens, and yet most commercial dog foods are full of it, because it’s very cheap. Fish is another common allergen for dogs, yet it’s touted as a main ingredient for some very fancy, very expensive premium dog foods.
Overall, though, the problem with dog food is that it isn’t food. It’s fake food, an even feebler imitation of food than the fast food and junk snacks that humans favor for themselves. While it will sustain most animals, it may not sustain them well.
This fact came to my attention during the late, great Chinese melamine dog food scare. While that was going on, you couldn’t tell what commercial dog foods, if any, were safe—every time you turned around, another brand was being yanked off the shelves. So, I decided to feed my German shepherd and my greyhound human food: real food purchased from the grocery store’s counters of human food. The result was amazing.
I did a fair amount of research to find out what dogs eat and don’t eat. Humans routinely consume a number of foodstuffs that are toxic to dogs, notably onions and chocolate. Condo Blues provides a useful link to a list of dog no-no food items. Interestingly, domestic dogs are unlike cats in that dogs are not “obligatory carnivores.” A cat is: it must have a diet high in animal protein. Dogs, however, having evolved with humans for many tens of thousands of years, thrive on a diet similar to an omnivorous human diet. Apparently they started down that road before they started hanging around with humans: wolves have been observed eating berries and other vegetable matter in the wild.
Understand, this does not mean that dogs are vegetarians (although some people feed pet dogs vegetarian diets without much obvious harm). A look at the teeth should clue you to this: a dog’s mouth is full of tools designed to rip meat, whereas a human has, in comparison, a limited number of teeth designed for tearing meat. Clearly, the animal needs meat as a large part of its diet.
I’m not going to try to track down the research I unearthed just this moment. If you’re interested, google topics such as canine diet and canine nutrition with edu as part of the search string. Adding “edu” will help bring up serious research papers and articles posted by leading veterinary schools. Use some common sense about what you believe: there is a LOT of woo-woo out there—as much woo-woo surrounds the subject of pet diets as you’ll find about human foods. But in addition to New-Agey silliness, you’ll also find ream after ream of propaganda emanating from the pet food industry, and you will discover that many veterinarians buy this propaganda, as many human doctors buy into what Big Pharma tells them. Pet food corporations conduct scientific research, too, and unsurprisingly that research tells them dogs should be eating nothing but dry kibble.
No.
Dogs should eat about what you eat, with a larger proportion of meat or (if the animal can digest it) cheese. Dogs, like humans, need starches, vegetables & fruits, and animal protein; a healthy ratio of these ingredients (for a dog, not for you) is about 1:1:1. That is, 1/3 starch, 1/3 veggies, and 1/3 animal protein. A little more meat and a little less of the others won’t do any harm.
Don’t even think about trying this on your cat! Cats are not dogs, and their metabolism is different from a dog’s. A cat’s nutritional needs are weird, and you will need expert advice to build a feline diet from scratch.
Corn is indigestible for many dogs, and it should be avoided because it often kicks up allergies. Onions and garlic are toxic. Avocadoes are said to be bad for dogs, too. Otherwise: almost anything goes. Like humans, dogs need a variety of veggies: mix green and yellow items, and don’t feel shy about giving the dog squash one day and spinach the next. I’ve been buying Costco’s frozen “Normandy Style Vegetable Blend.” This gives you a lifetime supply of dog and human veggies. It contains broccoli, cauliflower, and two kinds of carrots. For convenience, I microwave a plateful of the veggies and run them through the food processor, providing a week’s worth of finely chopped, easy-to-serve dog vegetables. Unground, they’re mighty good served up to humans, too.
Starches include rice, oatmeal, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and peas. In a pinch, I’ve substituted a little bread. Cook potatoes and sweet potatoes well—you can zap them in the microwave, because the dog can’t tell the difference between cooking methods. Rice and oatmeal are easy to cook on the stovetop. Be sure the stuff is cooled off before feeding.
Meat: some people like to feed their dogs raw meat. My own practice is never to feed my dog anything I wouldn’t eat myself, and I do not think raw meat is safe to eat. You have enough vet bills without deliberately exposing the animal to staph, C. difficile, and E. coli infections. So, I feed cooked meat. For the same reason, egg also should be cooked. When I cook a meal for myself, I cook up enough extra meat for the dog to last for several days. A barbecue grill is particularly handy for this purpose.
Hamburger is amazingly overpriced. Watch the meat sales. You can buy roasts marked down, and most butchers will grind it for you. Keep the bones for the purpose I’ll describe below. And taste the fresh-ground hamburger yourself—it’s much better than what you get off the counter. Last week Safeway was selling hamburger for over $2 a pound, but chuck roast was $1.47 a pound. I got enough ground chuck to feed me and the dog for a week. Rump roast is leaner and also sometimes comes on sale at a substantial mark-down. Chicken is often marked down, too—thighs are easiest to debone after cooking.
There’s no need for meat to be ground. You can cut it up into manageable chunks by way of discouraging the dog from setting it on the living-room carpet to chew it up—I use a pair of scissors to snip cooked meat into pieces for Cassie the Corgi. But if you want to grind it, a food processor will grind raw meat for you in a matter of seconds.
If you have a roast ground, ask the butcher to give you the bones. You can use these to make soup for yourself or, if that’s more work than it’s worth, simply drop a bone into the water you use to cook the dog’s rice. This flavors the rice to the dog’s taste, and it also cooks up the last few bits of meat, which you can shave off and add to the rice. Do not, do not, DO NOT let your dog chew on cooked bones! And never give your dog chicken or turkey bones! A dog’s jaws are strong enough to splinter bones, especially cooked bones; the splinters can lodge in the dog’s mouth or perforate its intestines.
And yes, I KNOW wolves and wild dogs eat bones. In the wild, wolves commonly die of perforated intestines.
Because no one really knows all a dog’s nutritional needs—remember, in the wild they’ll eat anything, including insects and some things you’d just as soon not know about—it’s a good idea to add a dog vitamin to one meal each day. Sometimes Trader Joe’s carries dog vitamins, relatively inexpensive compared to the same thing you get at the vet’s office or PetSmart.
Interestingly, as soon as I put the German shepherd and the greyhound on real food, their health changed. Visibly and drastically. The decrepit Ger-shep perked up. She began to move around with a great deal less discomfort, and where before she could only hobble after the beloved Toy, soon she was chasing it at a fast trot. The grey, a far more low-key character, also seemed healthier and happier. He was allergic to corn—a sensitivity that manifested itself as ear infections—and fixing his food myself meant I knew exactly what was and what was not in his dog dish.
It’s a lot of work to turn enough food out of your kitchen to feed a 90-pound dog (to say nothing of two of them…), especially if you’re not in the habit of cooking your own meals all the time. However, a smaller dog is very easy to feed this way. You can prepare several meals at once and store the food in the fridge.
I feed Cassie, who weighs 23 pounds, about 5 ounces of food twice a day, evenly divided between a vegetable, a starch, and meat, egg, or cottage cheese. I refrigerate the cooked ingredients in separate containers and then combine them at mealtime. Microwaving the food about 30 seconds at a medium setting to take the chill off seems to please the dog, though she will eat it cold. If you try this, be sure none of the food in the bowl is too hot, as microwaving heats unevenly.
If you change your dog over from kibble to real food abruptly, your pet likely will have diarrhea for a day or two. This is normal: dogs get enteritis when you change from one fake food to another, and the same effect occurs when you take them off fake food. Afterwards, though, you’ll find that once the animal is acclimated to eating real food, you can introduce a wide variety of foodstuffs without causing any stomach upset.
Real food may cost a little more than commercial pet food (although given the cost of some of the premium brands…maybe not!), but it’s way worth it in terms of the animal’s health and the savings in veterinary bills. Feeding your dog fake food is a classic case of penny-wise and pound-foolish.
Cassie is a two-year-old Pembroke Welsh Corgi. I found her at the Humane Society, among the woebegone cast-off, lost, and abused mutts. She looked like she’d been immaculately cared for — her long hair was clean and perfectly groomed. What an amazing little dog!
It’s hard to believe you could find a relatively rare, apparently pure-bred pooch in the Humane Society shelter, but lo! there she was. Her picture had been posted for nine hours when I found it online, and I was at the door the next morning when the place opened. Eight people had already inquired about her.
Here are the advantages of adopting an adult dog from a rescue organization:
You get around the various puppy stages that entail destroying the carpets with excreta, unearthing the flowerbeds, and shredding the furniture.
If you’re lucky, the dog is already obedience trained.
You can see what the dog will look like when it’s grown up.
For $50 (make that $25 if you’re over 65 years old!), the Humane Society gives you the dog, throws in a cheesy collar and leash, neuters the dog, updates all its vaccinations, and treats the animal for fleas and ticks. You also get a free veterinarian’s check-up and five weeks of free care for common ailments picked up in kennels.
And you do the planet a favor by taking in an unwanted dog that’s already here rather than bringing yet another puppy into our overpopulated world.
Financially, adopting a grown dog represents a large savings, because dogs cost you the most when they’re puppies and when they’re old codgers.
The reason her humans gave for getting rid of her was that she barked. Apparently they were in the habit of keeping her in the house all the time they were home and then when they left, locking her outside.
Well, you’d bark, too, if you were locked out of your home in 100-degree heat.
We’ll return to that issue in a moment. Meanwhile, what a difference between a 23-pound dog and an 85-pound dog!
She eats 1 1/3 cups of dog food a day, barely a mouthful for a Ger-shep. She’s a dainty little eater and drinker, never slopping food and water onto the floor. That means the water dish can be in the house instead of on the back porch, and she only needs one bowl of water. In the backyard, instead of mounds she deposits pellets. Like a rabbit!
She doesn’t go on the furniture — won’t even go on a seat in the car. She did want to get into the bed with me last night, but finally settled for a nest on the soft rug next to the bed. She’s not interested in the pool and apparently doesn’t much like to get wet.
So we went for a doggy-walk this morning, down to the park. This exercise revealed a number of amazements.
Item: We don’t try to bring down vehicles by their oil pans. Anna’s atavistic psyche regarded cars and trucks as buffalo and mastodons, and she craved to chase them down and grab them.
Item: We’re not interested in yanking the Park Service’s lawn sprinklers out of the ground.
Item: We don’t even want to plunge into the flying (untreated!) irrigation water and frolic around in it. We will cross the street to avoid getting the stuff on our elegant fur.
Item: We like dogs. We do not trick them into a false sense of confidence by grinning and wagging at them before going for their jugulars.
Item: The human needs to find its old Sierra cup so we can have a drink of water en route.
Item: We can slip our collar. Yipe!
Item: But if we do, we don’t go very far.
Now about the barking issue:
The pound was a madhouse. Reports that people are abandoning their dogs as they’re evicted from their foreclosed homes are not exaggerated. The shelter was overflowing with dogs, most of them barking, yelping, and screaming nonstop, and it was jammed with prospective dog owners. But Cassie was absolutely silent.
When she was taken out of the dog run, she remained quiet and very calm.
“That dog doesn’t appear to be a barker,” I said to the volunteer.
“Sometimes people lie about the reason for turning in a dog,” she said.
Hm. Why do I doubt it?
Here’s why: Cassie is a Velcro dog. She wants to be with the human at all times. She doesn’t want the human out of her sight.
Cute, endearing . . . and not a good sign! Velcroing is never a good sign in dogs. It means the dog is uncomfortable in one way or another, either physically or psychologically. In the case of dogs that bark nonstop or rip up the furniture when the humans leave, it reflects canine separation anxiety.
It’s a sign of bad habits on the part of the dog’s humans: doting on the dog, carrying on with lots of cooing and petting when you leave, carrying on with lots of excited fawning when you come back in the house, failing to persuade the dog that it has to do something for you to obtain what it wants. I’m not suggesting you abuse or be cold to a dog; merely that you have to behave as though you’re the head of the pack and you expect the rest of the pack to believe you’ll be back when you leave. And not to act like ninnies who will bring predators to the den by yipping and whining while you’re out bringing down a mastodon.
I tried walking out the front door last night, and indeed, Cassie started yipping about 30 seconds after I shut the door. Stupidly, I’d left the side gate locked, and so I couldn’t walk around the house and come in another door. Walking back in the same door after she had begun to vocalize meant, of course, that I rewarded the vocalizing. Argh!
But this morning I took the opportunity to close the door behind me on the way into the garage, walk away from the door, and then walk back and open it before she could start to make any noises. And I locked her out of the bathroom when I went to the john without creating a fuss.
Then I started some sit-down-stay training, a crucial skill for the process of helping the dog get past this sort of behavior. It looks like someone trained her to sit, but the trick is remembered fuzzily. She will go down, but she’s so submissive she wants to roll over when you try to coax her into the “down” position. And “stay”? Surely you jest!
So, there’s some hope here. If a dog can be gently relieved of separation anxiety, it takes about two months of steady, consistent training. This could be a challenge, because I have to go to work.
However, because my house is on a third of an acre, she can bark herself stupid inside the house and not disturb the neighbors. I will alert my closest neighbor Sally, though, and tell her to let me know if the dog makes her crazy. If push comes to shove, I can take Cassie with me to the office (ah, the joys of working at a university in an office where your dean can’t see you!) until I can take some vacation time to focus on this matter.
So, we join the Queen of England and the House of Windsor in our admiration for these funny little dogs. Just call me Betty! Or “Your Majesty” will suffice.
Thanks to everyone who commented on yesterday’s post!
