subject: nothing much

I’ve been curiously unSnarlied lately, maybe because in general I’m just kind of lying low, a bit tired of worrying about dogs. At the same time, I’ve been especially grateful for both dogs now that I semester is ending and I’m looking at more days at home (yay!) and then again more days at home (sometimes a little disorienting and lonely). Last night Pearl and Kosmo were in particularly good moods, Kosmo determined to play and Pearl frequently on her back kicking her legs around as she hasn’t done in ages. They were relaxed and happy and thus so was I.

With her D.A.P collar and her latest homeopathic remedy, Pearl has had long moments of very peaceful sleep during which she gives off an energy that is bordering on the Lucy-like. This is entirely new and enormously heartening. It’s weak and fleeting, but it’s there. And since Kosmo’s recent blood tests revealed healthy liver enzymes, he’s cleared for regular Rimadyl, with the result that he’s spry and lively. (I know that Rimadyl is not without its detractors, but for now, I’m blocking up my ears to the criticism on the grounds that I can’t argue with his renewed energy, ability to rise from his feet without a struggle, and improved appetite for food and play.)

Meanwhile, I’m reading Temple Grandin’s Animals in Translation, avoiding anything to do with slaughter houses, but finding lots of interesting observations on animals and on autism, both of which interest me inordinately. Tidbits that ring true: fearful animals are also the most curious, a claim that makes sense out of what have always seemed conflicting behaviors: if Pearl is so spooked—and she is—why does go right up to something that clearly unnerves her? Dogs are predators. You can’t tell me this enough; I have real trouble keeping it in my head. But somehow Grandin is getting it in there, where it’s rattling around with other observations—for instance, Pearl’s chase reflex, which is instantaneous and really seems to have a life of its own. And I love thinking about our lives with these predators who agree to live among us not only peacefully, but with deep, loving bonds.

kerfuffle

Bones are making them loco. Those great frozen raw bones that have given me many a peaceful moment, dogs happily gnawing away, have suddenly become the source of much snarling and snarking. Last night, a full-scale fight broke out, with neither dog backing down and both of them barking and snapping their teeth. Because of all the noise they were making, I couldn’t really tell what was going on, and probably the whole thing sounded a lot worse than it was, especially after Patrick and I joined the fun by shouting so loudly that my throat hurt for the rest of the night. But when Kosmo kept coming back at Pearl, who kept coming back at him, I did what you aren’t ever supposed to do, that is, get yourself in the middle of it because you might get bitten. Having never heeded such advice before to no bad end, I stuck my hand between them and.. . . got bitten. I had two small, shallow punctures and bruised bone that got swollen and hurt quite a lot under the circumstances, but not much in the scheme of things. Still.

Kosmo has never had a flap with anybody. Sometimes he irritates other dogs by trying to climb on them and sometimes he barks agitatedly at another dog, but his only “fight” occurred when the former neighbor’s dog rushed out and knocked him to the ground, her jaws at his throat. Lucy flew into the middle of things, knocked the other dog away, then backed her out of our yard and onto her own porch, where she remained staring at Lucy until Lucy took a small , purposeful step forward and frightened the dog into the house. Lucy, among her innumerable gifts, was a big, brave dog who knew so thoroughly how to handle herself that she never got into a single fight because she didn’t have to. And that last bit was a shameless digression into the virtues of Lucy, the scope and nature of which I never tire of detailing. And as you can see, Kosmo’s fight wasn’t really a fight at all because he immediately panicked and gave way. It was, if anything, an excuse for me to talk about Lucy.

For a long time, Pearl feared Kosmo. If he snipped at her for some infraction, she’d flee, then creep back and lick his face until he seemed molified. But right around the same time that the rest of the problems escalated—and if you believe in the notion, possibly when she reached “social maturity—she began to snip back. Encounters once barely perceptible to the human eye grew larger and louder, though never as large or loud as the this time, when, perhaps because she’d been stealing everything of Kosmo’s all day long (Pearl subscribes completely to the statement, “Everything here is MINE”) he finally snapped, literally. She reached in to take his bone and the kerfuffling began. Though I realize that blaming Pearl for the episode looks dangerously like canine profiling, Kosmo’s 10+ years of living peacefully does speak loudly for his general character. Unlike Pearl, he was not looking for trouble. On the other hand, he didn't walk away from it.

After the fur stopped flying, I felt bruised in more ways than one, and it seemed to me that Pearl needed to spend the night in the pokey, sleeping things off. Kosmo needed a long time-out and a chance to think about what he’d done. I also decided that all bones must go promptly in the trash can, along, alas, with the peace of mind they brought.

ten things to like about Pearl

1. When it comes to sports, she’s a team player. She never quarrels about what position she has to play. If Patrick and I are tossing the ball to each other and then to Pearl, she happily catches it and gives it back to the right person in the rotation. If we’re hitting a tennis ball with a wiffle bat (which is fun for about 4 minutes), she cheerfully scrambles to catch the hit ball, then brings it back to the pitcher.

2. She plays fair. When Patrick and I are both throwing her a ball or frisbee, she returns the object to each of us in turn.

3. She does all of the above even though she’s obsessed with balls and frisbees. She doesn’t like being left off the team, however, but that’s a matter for the other list.

4. No matter how excited she is, you can say, “Put the ball in my hand,” and she’ll put it right in your hand. If you drop it, she’ll get it and put it back in your hand. If you don’t want the ball and someone else does, you can say, “Give the ball to X,” and she will.

5. From a purely subjective point of view (that is, as far as I’m aware, no one else considers this a virtue), Pearl makes odd little noises in her throat when she takes food from my hand, little snorfling sounds that never cease to amuse me.

6. Because she knows the names of her toys, she can bring you a big rubber chicken with all the triumph of having done a job exceptionally well, which indeed she has; all you had to say was, “Pearl, go find your chicken.” For most of us, looking triumphant with a foolish yellow chicken in our mouths would be impossible.

7. No matter what hour of the night, if I wake and she sees me, she makes one of those little scuffy noises in her throat and licks my face.

8. Pearl is a world-class dreamer: she runs, she barks, she kicks, she furrows her brow—often and energetically, which is no wonder, I suppose, for a dog whose mind and body are as active as hers.

9. She will do anything for food. Which is also true of me.

10.She is always around, a good half of which aroundness belongs on the other list, but a good part of it belongs here, too, where it means that right now, she is sleeping on the bed next to where I’m sitting. If I get up and go somewhere, she’ll come along. Not everybody likes a dog who follows them around, but I have dogs (and cats, too) for just this reason-- for the sound of soft breathing just a few feet to my right, for the look of fur ruffling slightly in the breeze coming through the window.

on rereading Vicki Hearne

Vicki Hearne, whose death I have mourned extravagantly, does not like behaviorists, or clickers. She also declares war on any theorist who would scrupulously strip from observations of animals all “anthropomorphic” language—as though such a thing as an unanthropomorphized language were actually possible, come to think of it. But to Hearne, an animal trainer, the language that trainers use—a dog might be, for example, “courageous” or “shy”—forms a structure far more descriptive than the stripped language of the behaviorists, whose observations are saturated with assumptions but masquerade as neutral observance (I just editorialized, but probably not much). Hearne, in Adam’s Task, must counter a claim, for example, that an animal can’t hide—no kidding, the prevailing wisdom actually maintained such a notion on the grounds that hiding implies a sense of self that animals don’t have—with an unassailable reminder that prey animals wouldn’t last long if they didn’t know how to hide, an assertion so sensible that you’d think it woud hardly need stating.

Since the time Hearne wrote, behaviorists have changed enough that I can read Cultural Clash, the work of a behaviorist, and Adam’s Task without heaving one or the other against a wall or imagining that the authors might do the same to each other.. And after the overheated discourses that preceded behaviorism as a way to think about my relationship with Pearl, Culture Clash felt clean and head-clearing. To recap the previous training:

Overheated Discourse #1: Be the dominant pack leader. Correct your dog as decisively as necessary (prong collars, for instance) in order to show the dog who is in charge. A difficult dog is merely the result of a weak leader, all dogs being, presumably, inherently malleable. The problem with this form of training is that when you have a dog who by temperament requires not just a strong leader, but a trainer with exceptional professional skills, you are never permitted to imagine that the dog is even a part of the problem you’re having—you with your very much unexceptional, amateur abilities, the nature of which you have never concealed from anyone, least of all yourself..

Every situation is a test. Who goes out the door first? It had better be you. The dog is stealing food? It obviously doesn’t respect you. If you’re like me and incline to self-doubt and hand-wringing, this method is more fun than sitting in front of nuns at children’s mass and not lurching to your knees quickly enough. A side benefit of this plan is that for a spooked dog like Pearl, dominating can feel a lot like scaring the beejeesis out of, which was part of what happened to Pearl and made her worse.

So the behaviorist comes along and says the dog is stealing food because it wants the food and can get it. It flies out the door in front of you because it’s excited about going outside. You can see, I think, how liberating such a notion might be.

Overheated Discourse #2: This method reacts strongly to the other and with any luck at all will get you a long speech on how we would never think to put leashes on dolphins and yank them around. I have respect for the people who occupy these positions because they want, above all, to do no harm and because they appear to be prepared to do any action upwards of a hundred times if that’s what it takes; it’s a method strongly based on repetition. Unfortunately the very sweet trainer we hired began immediately to talk to Pearl in a high-pitched voice, making Pearl’s name into two shrill syllabus thusly: Perr raaaall. It was not, I thought at once, the way to talk to Pearl, who needs no cranking up whatsoever and who, I am inclined to think, is capable of seeing such behavior as foolish and irritating, as, not surprisingly, did I. After the speech about leashes and dolphins, we embarked on a number of well-meaning projects that involved my walking back and forth past strangers as many times as would stop short of getting us arrested, all the while stuffing treats into Pearl’s mouth in an effort to associate strangers with treats. If a 20 minute walk involved incidents, take ten 2-minute walks instead (one day I made it all the way to 5), not a bad idea except that it really did involve giving up a day job and, I was convinced, confused Pearl mightily, though she bore it with good humor. No doubt inevitably, the whole experience ended badly when the trainer, trilling Perr raaaall and trying to get Pearl to learn how to bow (don’t ask) finally incurred Pearl’s ire (I sat on the sofa holding my breath, absolutely certain that the trainer was going about things the wrong way), and Pearl chased her into a chair and wrapped her mouth gently but decisively around the trainer’s ankle.

I did not, however, see the trainer’s chairing as evidence that the method itself was wrong, just that the trainer wasn’t quite up to the task. But then again, neither was I, being perversely unwilling to spend hours doing the same things over and over again with minimal effect. Nor did treats make walking any easier: Pearl would walk beautifully next to me (she was always a champion heeler in class)as long as I gave her a treat; the moment I stopped, she pulled just as badly as she always had. So you can imagine what a relief it was to hear Nancy say, “Of COURSE you don’t want to take ten small walks every day. WHO WOULD?” or “OF COURSE Pearl pulls when she isn’t getting a treat. Why wouldn’t she?”

But getting back to Vicki Hearne, who is, I hasten to say, a very tough cookie in her own right, I find myself utterly absorbed in the world she creates, the determination she brings to understanding dogs and horses, to learning to talk about them in a way that is deeply humane and acknowledges both their interdependence and their autonomy. I haven’t said that Hearne is also a philosopher, a point of no small note, but perhaps a story for another day. For now, I return to Adam’s Task having no idea what Hearne would do with Pearl, currently downstairs barking insistently about something, but I’m absolutely certain it wouldn’t involve yanking or warbling.

some days are better than others

Pearl has always had good days and bad, with the bad days in the past being very bad indeed. What has always made some days difficult is the level of her pitch and the corresponding lack of connection: she’s revved up, insistent, rarely interested in doing what I ask. Since the new training, her bad days are not nearly as bad or as numerous as they once were. But yesterday was a doozy.

It began right away, with Pearl’s clearly needing to burn off some energy first thing in the morning. Though the Tug-a-Jug slows eating breakfast way down and makes her work for it, she was nevertheless on high speed while we tried to eat our own breakfast, pacing around and barking at the door. She didn’t have to go outside, we had already determined; she just wanted to. So eventually, but only after she settled down, (in case you're listening, Nancy), I stopped reading the newspaper and took her out in the yard to chase balls and frisbees. We played for quite a long a time, the first of many such outings throughout the day.

For the rest of the time, she bullied Kosmo, barked and clawed at the window when someone walked by (and before I could get into the room to stop her [hi Nancy!]), barked every time another dog in the neighborhood barked, and managed to behave so badly on a walk that we turned around and came right back after Pearl spent the first half block pulling and lunging at dogs and people. To cap things off, she met my hand with her teeth when I didn’t give her something she wanted, which is different from trying to bite me only if you think small calibrations matter. In short, she was obnoxious from morning til evening in just about every way she knows how to be. Bear in mind that she’s taking calming Chinese herbs, without which she is markedly worse, and wearing a D.A.P collar. And still.

Sadly, when Pearl has a bad day, I do, too. I slump around wondering just how much time and energy I can continue to put into making her reasonable. I get exhausted at the thought of working with her. I consider giving up—and to tell you the truth, I haven’t yet shaken that notion. But I wonder what “giving up” actually means, or can mean. I’ve already let go of any idea I had that Pearl would be a dog I could take on vacation or other outings, walk off leash, take along for company in the car—in short, do all of the things I’ve done with every other dog I’ve ever had. I’m working with her so that perhaps she can eventually be around people without trying to bite somebody and so that she doesn’t make our lives miserable by doing every day all the things she did yesterday.

Maybe I can give up on making her more sociable. She can continue to stay away from people who come into the house as she’s doing now: if you don’t get to be around people, you can’t bite anybody. And we can continue to monitor her so that she never again gets used to barking out windows or through fences.

It’s very hard not to read a bad day as evidence that no matter how much progress we make, real change hasn’t happened and won’t happen. Perhaps instead, I tend to think, everything is just precariously held in check, balancing temporarily on a thin line between the barely acceptable and the completely unacceptable. Some days, the slightest tip lands her back in the bad old days, rocketing around as if she’d never left. And there I am, right there with her, my own emotions tumbling with equal unpredictability into completely familiar territory.

reading, a bit of ranting, a wolf story, and a little snarly

If I get nothing else out of Natalie Angier’s NYT article, “Even in Animals: Leaders, Followers, Schmoozers,” I will always have this sentence: “Recent research suggests that highly sensitive, arty-type humans have a lot in common with squealing pigs and twitchy mice. . . .” I’m pulling that right out of context and flinging it into the wind. Do with it what you will.

Looking further into the article will cause a less felicitous reaction because, if you’re like me, you’ll be grinding your teeth at the headline and picture of birds lined up and saluting a strutting, fascistic leader bird. What, you will wonder, does this article have to do with the headline? I’ll tell you what: as the distinctions between humans and animals continues to blur, as the research in the article (and many elsewheres) suggests, we are finding fewer and fewer categories that make "human" a special instance. And if indeed, (don’t look now!) we are all animals of one kind or another, certain humans must scramble to find something in the research that helps to undergird that greatest of all sustaining hierarchies, the "natural" difference between us and them, fill in the us and them of your choice. I follow, you lead. I lead, you follow. By god, even the birds do it! So quit your complaining about the boss. I’ve skipped a few steps here, but you see where this is going.

The problem with articles like Angier’s, which is amusing and dimly informative, is that they necessarily oversimply what is incredibly subtle and complicated. Even if we get ourselves mesmerized by the leader/follower thing, we want to be very, very careful about what significance we give it. So, for instance, in studying geese, this result, “The only reliable predictor of goose leadership was boldness—the willingness to approach a new item like a scrap of carpet. " The bold bird is also, it turns out, the best at getting food. Other birds then follow this bird, the researchers claim, to get their own food. And pretty soon,the pictures claim, you have birds lined up saluting a natural leader. That is, they’ve formed a hierachy in which some people (or birds) matter more than others (because the cartoonish birds in the picture not only appear to be following, but also cowering , and they all look remarkably alike, undistinguished in all senses of the word).

That notion of the leader bird reminded me of endearingly wacky or wackily endearing Shaun Ellis (The Man Who Lives with Wolves) who writes about, yes, living with wolves. But not just living with, but living like, complete with eating what they eat (details that will stick with squeamish readers like myself) and trying in every way to experience life as wolves live it so that he can see them better, understand them more. He claims, among things, that when we think that the puppy who comes first out of its litter to greet us is the dominant dog, we are wrong; the dominant wolf, Ellis argues, would never be the one to encounter a new situation. The dominant wolf is always, first and foremost, protecting himself—and being protected by the pack—so that he/she is safe to procreate. Whether Ellis is right or not isn’t the point,. His rather large quibble with the standard interpretation reminds us that all interpretations are shaped by the structures we bring to them, the assumptions we apply.

So now that I’ve blathered on about everything but Snarly, I’ll end by saying that a dominance paradigm never worked with Pearl and was arguably the single most damaging relationship I formed with her. It exhausted me and frightened her. Does this mean that I now think of us as equals? I’m wondering: does it matter? We are, in Donna Haraway’s term, companion species. What we are trying to do in living together is to communicate across a rather large difference. I’m bigger, older, smarter in some ways, have more money, and can probably sing better than Pearl. What I understand less is what she can do (smell more and hear better, to name just two) that I can’t. As we live together, I’m trying hard to understand more about her, less about me, and a good deal about the two of us together. It isn’t easy, but it’s necessary.

ouch

After abandoning her Tug-a-Jug breakfast toy this morning (having consumed half of its contents), Pearl skulked into the kitchen. “What’s wrong, Pearl?” I asked. She held up the left foot, scene of so many sad encounters. I won’t repeat the foolish coo-like thing I did at this point until I caught myself, but I did take hold of her paw, check it for any sore places, put it back down, and eventually shut up. Later in the day—skipping ahead in the story—I was holding her leg and checking it out carefully, having remembered somewhere in the course of the day that the first manifestation of Lucy’s cancer was a limp. (Emotional memory is way ahead of cognitive memory, I’m told, and lots more precise.) Anyway, I think she’s probably pulled a muscle in her. . . hmmm. What is it? Leg, I guess, for want of a more specific word.

Again???? You might ask, not even knowing about the freak-accident slice that tore her leg open when she, speeding around the yard, made contact with a tiny edge of sharp rock and might have bled to death if Patrick hadn’t seen her do it and promptly applied pressure to the wound, holding on tight all the way to the pet ER. I should say that he was aided in his perception by Pearl herself who, he reported, stopped dead, looked up with an “Uh oh” expression, and immediately ran to him.

Pearl seems a bit hapless to me, though Patrick insists that it’s her athleticism that keeps getting her into trouble. His perspective comes from years of playing baseball and from spending a part of every vacation when he was a kid in the emergency room (something that would have led me to leave him at home, frankly). Nonetheless, we are fencing the other part of the yard to provide a less obstacle-ridden terrain for frisbee and ball playing. And now, of course, we’re letting her rest her leg by not tempting her into any games.

Pearl hobbled is a very nervous dog. When she’s not completely able, or, as Patrick says, at 110%, she clearly feels incredibly vulnerable, the frail, unsteady wildebeest being stalked by the predator. She spends every available moment under the bed and reacts spookily to almost anything I pick up, move, or carry. She reminds me a little of me in January 09, when an injury to my knee made me feel out of sync with my environment--so much so that I felt a little menaced by life in general, afraid to go out if I couldn’t move quickly and nimbly, if I couldn’t cross streets at a clip. It was a terrible month, after which I recommitted to a light box because I’d clearly fallen into that peculiar depression that comes with unstructured time (long semester break) and the steady retreat of light.

Some dogs seem to get depressed by an injury only if it lasts a long time, and some dogs, I suppose, might be capable of ignoring pain so thoroughly that they immediately reinjure themselves. Pearl notices, minds, and, much to our initial surprise, takes a pretty sensible approach to healing. But like everything else she does , she experiences injury in quick-time, reacting instantly with both physical and emotional signs, reorganizing the shape of her world in ways large and small, looking for comfort and safety in a territory that again seems full of danger.

we have our third lesson

Pearl and I set off yesterday morning to meet Nancy at her home in Hampstead, which is about 45 minutes from me on a good day. We left an hour ahead of our appointment since it was raining and and thus potentially not good. I strapped Pearl (in her travel halter) into the car and hoped I wouldn’t convey any of the anxiety I’d been feeling. The first time Pearl met with Nancy, Pearl lunged and barked like, I’m not exaggerating, a junkyard dog. I guess it was, in its way, the best introduction to the problem of Pearl’s reactive aggression. But I wasn’t looking forward to Snarly's reprising her role. Not only is such behavior startling, but it also makes my heart sink. So I get nervous about getting nervous and heartsick, part of the pattern of reciprocal anxiety that keeps Pearl and me in such crazed harmony.

When Nancy came out to meet us, wearing a rain hat, Pearl lunged and barked again, but not with the same abandon as last time. I settled her down, and within about 15 minutes, she seemed to like Nancy enough to wag and lick and to come to her when Nancy called. We had to work inside because of the weather. Clearly Pearl was doing better: she was less wary, more relaxed, and, as Nancy said at the end of our session, didn’t “stalk"her once. She did, however, try to bite her, but more on that later.

I had been working with the clicker, getting Pearl to touch a variety of objects that I held out and looked at. It took Pearl no time at all to master the skill, and Nancy was now building on it, getting Pearl to touch a long stick-like metal thing with a ball at the end of it. She also got her to put her head all the way into an oatmeal canister in one of several efforts we’re making to diminish Pearl’s fear of objects. Because Pearl is capable of lunging at people when they move, Nancy wanted to habituate Pearl to movement, so Nancy began to touch her own legs with the stick and ball object, walk briskly while clickiing and giving a treat every time Pearl touched the ball, getting Pearl to touch the ball on Nancy’s foot, shins, knees.

Then she wanted to see if Pearl would move between her legs so that she could further desensitize Pearl to human legs and movement. Nancy said, “She’s doing so well I’m going to push her as far as I can.” She lifted her leg to start the next move. . . and Pearl went after her. It was the exact move, in fact, that had gotten Nancy bitten the last time, though at that time she was merely attempting to tie her shoe. This time, Pearl’s bite was really soft, barely a bite at all. But there it was: at the end of about an hour and half of congenial petting, playing, and training, Pearl sparked.

“Talk me through this,” I said. “I know it’s unreasonable, but I have trouble not thinking that my dog just isn’t nice.” We talked about the book Culture Clash, which is terrific for destabilizing useless anthropomorphic notions about dogs. And Nancy reminded me that in the wild, Pearl’s behavior would keep her alive. “It’s what wolves do,” she said. Wolves react to anything new, anything they haven’t seen before,--like Nancy’s rain hat. We breed this out of domestic dogs, Nancy said, and Pearl’s behavior, her extreme reactivity, puts her on the very outer edge of domestic pet world, a world in which ordinary objects and a wide range of people are not supposed to be seen as threatening, but as normal.

I was thinking about the time that I took Pearl to the local pet store for a bath, and her response was roughly the equivalent to what a squirrel would do if you plucked one up from your yard and put it in a bath tub. And I was thinking that if I really want to get in touch with wildness—as I always imagine I do—then I had a pretty good example right in the house with me. But I was also thinking that Pearl is making real progress because of Nancy, whose skills are such that she could probably take on bathing squirrels if the spirit moved her.

When I left Nancy’s training room, I found that in my over-wrought arrival, I’d left some light or other on in my car and now had a dead battery. So out in the rain we stood waiting for the guy from the nearby garage to jump start my car. Not only was he a stranger, but he was wearing a hat, so didn’t have a chance: Pearl lunged and barked with such ferocity that he said “Oh my.” Then he stood way back. The car started right up with the help of the handy device he brought along, and Pearl I headed home, both of us exhausted for different reasons.

can a dog lose her mind?

“Is Pearl losing her mind?” asked Randy sheepishly, as if asking if a beloved relative had a drinking problem. “I don’t think so,” I said, laughing because the notion of a dog losing her mind struck me as improbable. Randy, our loving and gentle pet-sitter, was one of Pearl’s first visitors, sees her once a week, and has spent at least 10 days a year for the past three years with her when we’re away. In the last six months, Pearl had been hiding from him: the minute he walks in the door, he says, she runs up, wags hello, and then, in the same motion, runs upstairs and crawls (now laboriously because she’s full grown) under the bed, where she stays. To our immense chagrin, Randy reported that Pearl spent an entire week under the bed while we were at the beach last summer, emerging only to go outside and to eat.

If Randy is right, and 6 months is a marker, then Pearl became more fearful, more aggressive, and even less predictable at the time of her 3rd birthday. I certainly noticed that she nipped a guest when he reached for his shoes, that she was more fearful than ever on our walks, and that she continued, with Kosmo, to bark ferociously at anybody with the temerity to walk past the house. Did this mean she was losing her mind? Can a dog lose her mind?

Dogs are often diagnosed with forms of dementia as they age. We treat dogs in various ways for anxiety, obsessiveness behavior, and for other behaviors that seem to limit their capacity for enjoyment. But somehow the notion of losing a mind seemed a distinctly human construction, something we said—but perhaps less and less—to explain a set of circumstances that couldn’t possibly apply to a dog. Could they?

I might say, “I thought I was losing my mind” if, for example, I distinctly remembered putting my keys in my pocket, but when I reached for them, I found my pocket empty. Or perhaps someone says he knows me, but I don’t know him, could swear I’ve never seen him before. “Thank goodness I’m not losing my mind, “ says a colleague when he discovers that other people share his reading of a news event. So “losing our minds” these days is, as nearly as I can figure, a kind of Twilight Zone experience wherein our perceptions seem to have gone suddenly and inexplicably amok.

In this sense, then, Pearl’s perceptions of threats where there are none, fears of walking on Keswick past Oakdale (but not in the stretch before Oakdale), her recoil at someone taking off his shoes, her fierce determination to hold at bay anyone coming within twenty feet of her—all of these might resemble my sudden fear last night that all of those people mobbing the escalator were going to cause a fatal pile-up like the one that happened at Memorial Stadium in 1964.

So maybe dogs do lose their minds much as we do, temporarily if we’re lucky and without dire consequence now that we understand that losing our minds is not quite the same as losing our keys, now that our vocabularies are a little more discerning and a good deal more tedious. We all made it safely up the escalator last night, and I’m happy to report that since our new training regime, Pearl has rediscovered the pleasures of Randy’s company and the considerable advantages to Keswick in the blocks above Oakdale.

the tao of cute

The first time Pearl met her gentle, holistic vet, Pearl was in high Snarly mode.
“Good thing she’s so cute,” said Grace, homeopathist, as she watched Pearl run obsessively between the door and the window of her office, all the while letting Grace know that a move in the wrong direction would result in something decidedly unpleasant. The remark caught me a little off-guard, as did my own perception of Pearl, later standing outside the vet’s office with Patrick while I made future plans with Grace . As I looked out the door, and before I could fully orient myself, I thought “What a beautiful dog.” I was looking at Pearl, sitting high and lean next to Patrick, her fur aglow in the sun, but hadn’t yet realized it.

Pearl’s looks have been forced to compete with what I wanted her to look like, ie., like her predecessor English Shepherd, Lucy the Good. Lucy, sturdy of bone structure, fell on the large end of breed size. She was tri-colored, with a strong black saddle of impossibly shiny and soft fur across her back. She had freckles on her nose and legs and pouches at her cheeks. From the moment I saw her, I was smitten with her looks, even as her stomach sagged from giving birth and her tail, which would grow large and plume-like, was still skinny. I remember standing at the SPCA and proudly pulling her pouchy cheeks out: “Look at this!” I said, as though everyone would immediately see the extraordinary beauty of loose facial skin.

When my friend Randee, with her penchant for smaller dogs with furry muzzles, first met Lucy, she cupped her hands around Lucy’s face and said, “A face only a mother could love,” no doubt thinking that I agreed. But I agreed instead with a neighbor, whose funny looking dog Bob was an avid frisbee player: “I don’t choose dogs by looks, “ she said, “ but I would want your dog because of what she looks like.”

Pearl, on the other hand, is sable and white and as close to small as the breed gets. She’s also lanky and incredibly agile, with much thinner fur than Lucy’s and a tendency to sometimes smell like a dog, as Lucy never did. In other words, besides being the temperamental opposite of Lucy, she is also, breed limitations withstanding, her aesthetic opposite. So the idea that Pearl might be cute was something that escaped me at first and still has the capacity to catch me by surprise.

Is it, then, as Grace said, a good thing that Pearl is cute? The quality of cuteness, we are beginning to think is an evolutionary feature, the cuteness of baby animals a way of making them compelling to us, of making us care about them despite their tendency to offer us enormous challenges, to require of us immense energy and patience. “Cute” suggests many things, but perhaps primary among them, it suggests vulnerability. With vulnerability, need, and with need, the seduction to care for and about.

In the early days of Pearl, but with nothing very particular in mind, I made the picture below the screen saver on my computer at work. The picture was taken during the period when Pearl’s ears, which have now settled on both sides of her head, seemed to be traveling, so that on any given day you might find them anywhere. When I pointed the camera at her, she looked up, causing her errant ears to stand straight up, if floppily, on her head. Though I didn't think about it then, I see it now as a picture that catches something vulnerable about Pearl not otherwise in view at a time when she was all barking demands, snapping teeth, willfulness. And it’s a picture that probably kept me connected to her until she needed me less, or differently, when I could replace it with my current screen saver, a shot in which Pearl seems to be laughing--at me, of course, and not necessarily with me, but certainly not imploringly and certainly not with the kind of heart-melting cuteness that could save a person's life.

two dogs and a dirty stove

Last night, the oven reached that critical point of too many pizzas cooked directly on its racks. That is, when we pre-heated it for a Trader Joe’s chili relleno,the cheese bits adhering to the bottom of the oven started to smoke heavily. But it all began subtly, only growing eye-wateringly dense with smoke as the oven heated up. In the moments before we noticed anything amiss, Pearl ran to me—eyes wider than usual, ears pressed to her head, her whole body a curve of worry. “What is it, Pearl?” I, dull human, ask. I have seen and heard nothing to frighten her. She jumps up on me and paws me in a slightly fevered way, then turns around and runs. I watch her, puzzled by the extent of her fear, but unable to make out its cause. And given Pearl, it could be anything, really. She disappears, only emerging with prompting from under the bed in the front bedroom, her favorite place to escape a vast number of unsettling possibilities.

Pets have warned me about smoke before, most notably Gilly, kind-hearted tabby cat. I’m sorry to say that for a longish period of my life, I was afflicted by a pyromania solidly based in a lack of common sense. In other words, I regularly set fire to things through sheer stupidity (note: few actions put an end to a romantic moment as decisively as will setting the curtains ablaze). Gilly’s heroism occurred when I lit a candle too close to a lamp shade, and the shade, made of god-knows-what material, began to smolder. Seeing it—as I did not—Gilly ran back and forth crazily between me and it until, at last, I looked in the right direction just as the shade caught and produced a flame. Good Gilly!

But Pearl, it seems, is harder for me to read, her actions more ambiguous, and truth be told, I’d have trusted the 12-pound Gilly to pull my inert body from a flaming room, but very much doubt Pearl will find the self-possession to do so. Nonetheless, she was trying to tell me something, and what she was trying to tell me was worth saying.

Later, rellenos cooking happily while the ceiling and exhaust fans diffuse the smoke, we find Kosmo sleeping peacefully on the floor beneath the fan, its blades whirring gently overhead.

footprints

Last night a light dusting of snow covered just enough ground to record footprints, the visible signs that several different creatures were in the yard when we weren't looking. The squirrels' feet etch the ground with a curiously graceful print of tiny, tiny paws and spider-thin toes. Elsewhere, a cluster of three prints suggests rabbits, mostly up and around the apple trees. Who knows what the others are? Maybe foxes-- I've seen a mother and two kits making figure eights in the snow, and once a larger fox munching calmly on some cereal I'd thrown out for the birds. Raccoons are always disappearing down nearby storm drains and, occasionally, dismantling our garbage can.

For the dogs, the new snow lies atop the crusty remains of the existing snow, where their own footprints have worn grooves that now make walking a series of navigations. Their feet fall through the crust in one place, wobble along an established trail in another. In other words, it's no fun walking in the yard today. Pearl rushes for the ball, but quickly finds that running is even harder than walking.I throw the ball against the fence, but even the bounce is dulled as it lands with a thud in the hard--but not quite hard enough--snow. Pearl makes a game effort to find this barely bouncing ball challenging, but pretty quickly we both know that no real play is likely to be. . . afoot. In a desperate move, I throw the ball hard--right over the fence and into the alley, now inaccessible because I can't get out the side gate for the pile of snow on the other side. Pearl looks puzzled. "Let's take a break," I say, with a sigh of resignation.

Probably as well, though, because I don't want to occasion another sliced carpal pad like she got at Christmas while chasing a frisbee in icy snow. Just in the last couple of weeks the pad has finally closed up, the hair grown densely back. And just in the last week, she seems to be able to run indefinitely without suddenly stopping, dropping the ball, and looking at me. "Does your foot hurt?" I've learned ask. She holds it up: yes. Game over, we go inside.

So now, game over, we go inside, feet mercifully intact, making wet prints into the house and across the kitchen floor. Interminable winter.

Name That Pet

I don’t have a knack for pet names and frequently find myself embarrassed in retrospect by the names I choose. My first dog came ready-named in the days when I didn’t understand that you can change a dog’s name. Jody. Then I named the puppy I adopted when Jody died for a mawkish reason related to Jody. Then we adopted Josie and kept her name because I thought, mawkishly, that her name uncannily combined both of my previous dogs’ names. I don’t remember how we came up with Lucy, but considering that at least 100,000 people in our neighborhood alone would also have dogs named Lucy, I’m assuming the name was just somehow in the air.

Kosmo is a dog who could have many different names. In fact, at least once a week, we say something like, “You know, we should have named him Bongo,” or recently, I wish we’d named him Mouse. We waited to find an essence, but when so many appeared, we named him Kosmo. The SPCA called him Jeffrey, which seems kind of inappropriate for a dog, but Kosmo being Kosmo, it would have been workable. In fact, he looks a little like a Jeffrey.

Nancy (behaviorist) said we might want to consider renaming Pearl since “Pearl” for her now has a mix of associations, only some of which are good. And thus began the
Name-That-Dog conversation that thus far has come up empty.

The second time Pearl tried to bite Nancy, Nancy said “Why you little snapper!” And I thought, “Hmm. Snapper. That’s pretty good.” An essence, maybe. Patrick liked it, too, and it remains his favorite among about 1,000 names I’ve offered. The name can’t be serious, so try as I might to find, say, a Native American word that would catch her essence, everything possible is too somber. Lately I like Sparky because I think of the word “sparky” not as a name, but as a comment one of my favorite people in the world wrote in the margins of a student's essay. The idea was, she wrote, “really sparky!” a sentiment otherwise hard to express and one I agreed with completely. And lest “Sparky” seem like a boy’s name, I’m prepared to make it short for “Sparkle,” which I think is kind of a funny name—in a sparky sort of way. But Patrick isn’t going for it.

lost in translation

If Pearl were a public figure, she'd be said to be "polarizing." In the private world in which we skulk, I occupy both poles all by myself, rising high one day and falling low the next, arguing both positions fervently, feeling protective of Pearl who is under assault by. . . me.

Having a really reactive dog puts a strain on my interpretive abilities: is she good or bad? is she nice or nasty?One reason I'm not an intuitive dog trainer is that I really do misunderstand dogs. I don't entirely misunderstand cats, though, and I think the big difference is that allow cats their wildness, concede that on a very profound level, they are going to remain inviolate, locked in their own very separate consciousness. Just moments ago, Squeex the Cat seemed to want to be brushed, so I started brushing her very, very gently because brushing is not something she's always tolerated. In no time at all, she got annoyed and tried to bite me. Now I'm not crazy about this reaction, but I know that she's doing what she's doing because she doesn't like what I'm doing and is letting me know. Not all cats do the same things, of course. But I've had cats who were absolutely devoted companions who might, nevertheless (except for Gilly, who never did) bite if bugged enough or at the wrong moment. Nervous cats hiss at me, and I don't mind a bit, and, in fact, I get really annoyed with people who take cats' behavior personally. Cats are great. Cats are cats.They aren't like you and me, at least not ultimately, not importantly--which is part of what makes them interesting.

But dogs. Whereas I know that Pearl keeps tormenting the long-suffering Kosmo because she's got crazy energy to burn, sometimes when she's yanking on his collar, I think, "Now that's just plain mean." And whereas I know that she's likely to spook in an instant, when she tries to bite the well-meaning pet store person who just gave her a treat, I'm mortified and horrified all at once, and I can't help thinking that Pearl just isn't nice. And my heart sinks, but not before it goes hard as a stone. I understand the problem here, I really do, but I can't always talk myself out of my emotions as they rocket around. So Pearl is a dog. There's wildness there. She's not a wolf anymore, but she's not a person, either.

what is that man doing?

Today Pearl is recovering from her sudden and unexpected apprehension that Patrick is imminently dangerous when he does a little sideways dance in the kitchen. There we were: Patrick, me, and several furry Others; Patrick was illustrating something in what we both thought—in that briefest of moments when we were young and happy—was a funny manner. Then Pearl did her best leap and lunge, nipping Patrick’s arm. I grabbed her by her head-collar-with-short-rope-attached and asked her to sit. Bucking ensued. And now she appears hung over and not quite sure if Patrick is someone she should take her eyes off. You can see her thinking, “Will he do that dance again?” I’d like to say, as I might once have done, “Well, Snarly, you never know.” But in truth, after the fracas, Patrick said, “Geez, I wish I hadn’t made that move.”

the turbo-driven life

Ok. The snow can go away now. Instead, the 8 foot piles of dirty gray snow are going to melt very, very slowly. It's still February,after all, and there's a lot of snow around. Both dogs are sort of done: Kosmo wants desperately to get to the end of the yard, and Pearl needs more ways to burn off her turbo charged energy. In fact, if we weren't in the midst of the new regime, where we never say "no," but do a variety of diversionary things instead, we'd be saying no all day. No! Leave Kosmo's collar alone! No! Get down off the counters! No! Stop pacing and lie down. And so on. We all took a walk ("When Pearl pulls, take one step back") and Pearl pulled, I took a step back, Pearl pulled, I took a step back, and Pearl pulled, and I took a step back, and then, at long last, the walk was over. We have been playing lots of ball in the snow. For the first time, Pearl is willing to use her nose to find a ball that she can't see. She's really a lot of fun doing rabbit-hops into the deeper snow, digging around, looking to me to see if I'm still going to say "Keep looking." I make a huge fuss when she finds a particularly buried ball, and she seems enormously pleased.

snow

We are absolutely crushed under the snow, which has flattened trees and bushes and weighed down power lines. On the first day of it, Kosmo decides that he’s not leaving the porch, but Pearl keeps launching herself into a bank of snow, trying to find purchase. As always, I have to admire her spirit and the way she seems hardly to notice that since the last time she came outside, 30 inches of something white and wet has covered everything familiar and turned the ground into, well, into something white and wet and deeper than she is tall. But it doesn’t trouble her, doesn’t even merit a second look. She doesn’t love it, and she doesn’t hate it. She appears to regard it with complete equanimity, much as you’d think she’d regard, say, the teapot, except that she’s afraid of the teapot, or the broom, except she’s terrified of the broom. So I suppose this is what it means to be a little feral: if you find yourself in 30 inches of snow, you just look for shelter and curl into a tight, warm ball, preferably with a member of your pack if you have one. Nobody remarks upon the weather. But if a teapot shows up, it’s every pup for herself.