pet connection

I posted several months ago that my Mom had added a new puppy to her family. After my Dad passed away last December, she realized their dog, Cosmo, was 13 years old and not doing well. Not wanting to be alone, she wanted a new dog. So Ginger, a ginger-colored Cocker Spaniel and Poodle mix joined the household.

Yesterday Mom had a knee replaced (her second) and will be in the hospital for a few more days so Ginger is in my house. Cosmo sleeps most of the time now so is still at Mom’s house — two streets from mine — and I will go over there to care for him.

But Ginger, oh poor Ginger. She’s in my house with three Aussies and cats. Cats!!!  Ginger has had no exposure to cats and these cats don’t run from dogs –  they are in charge of the dogs. So she’s already been swatted on the nose, batted on the butt and growled at in cat language — four letter words, I’m sure.

The Aussies don’t respect her, either, and when she’s in the way, they go right over the top of her. When she took her time chewing on her chewie, they took it away from her. When she got pushy and nosy, Bashir lifted a lip at her. Just one lip over one canine, but she got the message.

And then there’s me. I do not allow dogs to run away from me, and she did that twice yesterday. So, we had a training session yesterday and will have another one today. I used lots of praise and treats –  things my Mom will and can follow through with later –  but I also put a long leash on Ginger so she couldn’t run from me.  By last night she was running towards me when I called and didn’t run past me: She stopped in front of me. Good girl!

Ginger is good in the house. She would like to chew, but I have dog toys and chewies available. Her housetraining is good — no accidents — and she’s crate-trained.

There is one thing I am concerned about, though, that I will have to work on with her. Somehow my Mom has taught Ginger, or allowed her to become, helpless. She doesn’t try new things; she doesn’t get creative; and she doesn’t try to solve problems.

I like my dogs to solve problems. I want them to use their brains and think. And I’m not used to a dog in my home who doesn’t. Ginger’s response is to sit in place, not move, and then whine and cry. Perhaps my Mom has saved her every time something hard happens. Or somehow Ginger has learned not to try. I’m not quite sure what has caused this but I find it very sad.

I’ll dig out my Nina Ottosson toys tonight and introduce her to those. They encourage the dog to think and try. And I’ll play some find it games and hide and seek games.  We’ll also do some trick training ==  I’ll have her train with the Aussies. I’ll get this little dog to use her brain!

Image: Ginger as a puppy, visiting with Archer.

A dog rescued many years ago, found as an emaciated stray with baling wire wrapped around her snout, repaid my friend last week by saving her life.

Thanks to a liver transplant a couple of years ago, Linda Thompson is getting back to a fairly normal state of health after years of creeping towards becoming terminally ill. She uses a pump for her diabetes, and just recently began working full time again. This past August I saw Linda for the first time in years. She lives in a suburb of Vancouver. She has been too ill to travel, and I just hadn’t made it out there in a long time.

Emma, an 11-year old shepherd mix, woke Linda up around 3 a.m. to tell Linda she wanted to go out. Linda staggered out to the kitchen aiming for the room behind it, which has the door to the back yard. Emma simply stopped by the kitchen counter and refused to budge. Groggy as all get out, Linda thought Emma wanted food, but her dish was full. Emma kept looking at the kitchen counter and then at Linda, then back to the counter, then back to Linda.

I can just see Emma doing this. She is one smart cookie.

“Eventually, I realized that my vision was quite blotchy and what she was indicating was my glucometer,” said Linda in an e-mail to me. The glucometer was on the kitchen counter where Emma was staring. Linda checked her blood sugar and found it dangerously low at 25 when normal is 90 to 140 (or 1.5 from a normal range of 5.2 to 7.6).

“If it had dipped any lower I would have blacked out completely,” said Linda, whose new job is a patient advisor for diabetics. “I started eating Dex4 tablets and Emma went outside, where it was raining heavily.  Normally when it’s raining, she runs out and pees and then dashes back in the house.  Not this night.  She lay down in the grass for 15 minutes.  This is significant because I have been known, in a hypoglycemic stupor, to take a couple of Dex4 tablets and go back to bed without checking to make sure it’s coming up and have subsequently tanked.  After about 15 minutes, she came back in and again went to the counter where the glucometer was.  I tried to get her to go down the hall to the bedroom, but she wouldn’t go until I had taken my blood again and told her that it was okay.”

Linda’s pump had been sending out noisy beeping alarms, but that night both Linda and her husband slept through them. It’s impossible to know if Emma was responding to the alarm or to a scent indicating a problem, but she not only knew something needed to be done immediately, she also figured out how to do it.

It’s frightening to think that without Emma, Linda could have died from this one episode after nearly dying two years ago (she was the sickest person her transplant surgeon had ever seen who survived).  Linda’s health issues began almost 15 years ago, around the time I met her through an Internet dog list, and she is one hell of a survivor. I’ve never seen anyone that ill who had such an upbeat attitude every step of the way. In all the years I’ve known her, she’s only cried once that I know of, and not because she was sick or nearly dying: she cried because one of her dogs died in her arms while she was home alone and too sick to race the dog to the vet. Knowing that the dog wouldn’t have survived even if she’d been seen immediately never took away the pain.

At one point Emma was one of several rescued dogs in the house, but because of Linda’s health issues, Emma has been the only pet in the house for a while. Emma wasn’t there the last time I was, so this was the first time I met her. She’s an absolute doll. I took a lot of photos of them, and many of Emma, trying to show how happy she is despite the reasons for the scar around her snout. Linda and Emma have always had an emotional connection that went beyond the one she had with her other beloved dogs.  It’s no surprise to the people who know them that Emma would be the dog to save Linda from a dangerous glucose drop; it would have been Emma if there were ten dogs in the house.

Emma is clearly getting a bit stiff these days, and her gait isn’t quite what it used to be. She has been totally content for years, and is an easy-going, affectionate girl. Whoever cruelly left her to starve with wire wrapped around her snout so that she couldn’t eat will surely get what he or she deserves in this world. Thankfully, Linda and Emma have always deserved each other, and now they have saved each other.

I know you’re all jealous of my life. Don’t try to hide it. Jetting from one exotic location to another, mingling with the pretty people, entre to the most exclusive events, access to the power brokers… who wouldn’t envy me?

Perhaps anyone who could have been a fly on the wall when I had to stop an interview in mid-stream yesterday to unwind all the Borzoi hair from the base of the keys on my keyboard. Two years of accumulation meant I’d hit critical mass and lost the “S” and the shift keys.

Fortunately I was interviewing someone who is as much a dog person as they come, Marthina McClay of Our Pack, the rescue group that turned ex-Vick dog Leo into a therapy dog.

I was interviewing her for my column on SFGate.com, but she made some great comments that won’t fit into that piece, so I thought I’d share them with you here. Believe me, they make better reading than the story of how I had to use a knitting needle to untangle Borzoi hair from my keyboard.

I asked her about Michael Vick talking to at-risk youth about dog fighting on behalf of HSUS. She responded by telling me about a visit Leo made to a school for youth who have been in trouble with the law in San Jose, Calif. — some of them with dog fighting in their backgrounds:

We heard the kids going, “Oh, that’s a bad ass pit bull,” when we walked in. It’s like a cool thing to have a pit bull.

When we got into the classroom, I just took off Leo’s leash and let him walk around and do his thing. I let Leo speak for himself. He just connected with everyone, these kids. They went from hard to soft within 20 minutes.

Then the teacher said, “By the way, would you guys like to know where this dog came from?”

The kids said, “Where?”

She told them, “This dog used to belong to Michael Vick.”

You could hear a pin drop. Their mouths were open, their eyes were riveted on this dog. They said, “What?” They couldn’t believe it.

I could hear one of the kids being interviewed by a reporter from the Washington Post, and he said he’d assumed a dog like this, a Vick dog, would be aggressive and mean. Instead, he said, he’s a nice, sweet, friendly dog. “I really like him,” he said.

We’re not a farming culture anymore. We have lost our connection with animals. We almost never work hand in hand with our dogs anymore. We go to work in an office or cubicle, or we go to school, but there’s nothing to give us that feeling of how we fit into the world of animals.

So you bring a dog into the classroom and say, “Would you really want something like that to happen to this dog?” Before Leo showed up, I don’t think they cared. The Vick dogs were distant and not connected to them. But after they met Leo, all that changed. It mattered to them.

So what I’m saying is, don’t bring Vick to talk to at risk kids. Bring his dogs. His dogs will do a lot more for people who need to see the light that these are sentient, feeling, loving beings, and that it’s our job to care for them, than Vick can ever do.

By the way, Marthina told me that Leo has found his forever home… with her. As if anyone thought it would end any differently.

I could have written up my thoughts on the No More Homeless Pets Conference, with cogent analysis and provocative commentary.

I could once more dig into the pressing issues of pet food safety and how the regulatory agencies and industry are failing our animals, and us.

I could give you an overview of the interview I’ll be doing with HSUS head honcho Wayne Pacelle this evening, or my plans to liveblog his town hall here in San Francisco.

But instead, I’m going to share with you the single most important news story of the day, a critical development in the world of animal issues: My Borzoi Kyrie’s new raincoat. Enjoy.

And in case you’re wondering, I got it from HoundTogs.com and they couldn’t have been nicer and more helpful. And I’m just a regular customer — I don’t take freebies for review. (Well, I take them, but I don’t keep them after I’ve used them enough to review them.)

And that other stuff? Later. I promise.

Chicago Now blogger Stephen Markley wrote about why he hates dogs. After reading it, my conclusion is that he doesn’t hate dogs and cats, he just doesn’t like them, and in today’s pet-crazed world, that’s tantamount to the same thing. He lists many reasons he doesn’t like them.

What’s hilarious is that some commenters wrote that the reasons he dislikes pets are the very same reasons they love theirs.

While I feel sorry for Mr. Markely because he is missing out on the incredible experiences I’ve had with pets, it is a perfect reminder to those of us who spend much of our day and dreams thinking about our pets or even earning a living with them that not everyone feels this way. Just as we don’t all love football or Thai food, some people are not animal people, and they never will be. We may think of them as missing some important gene, but they are not genetically defective.

I often mention that the lives of people without pets must be terribly dull and unamusing, and I’m certain that parents of human children feel the same way about a childless person like me.

The other day I was reminded that not everyone loves dogs when a computer technician arrived. He clearly did not like dogs, and Dodger was doing his best to meet and greet, and make the technician fuss over him the way everyone else does. No such luck for my poor bouncing boy, who ended up in the back yard while the technician was here.

That guy was in direct contrast to the furnace guy who walked in and said “Wow, an English setter! I used to breed them!” and gave me “an English setter discount” (it was actually because he took so long to get here, but I loved it nonetheless).

Pet lovers, especially the hard-core among us (and you know who you are), need to be reminded once in a while that not all of our guests, service people or friends like animals. They don’t want a dog jumping on them, a cat shedding on their clothes, nor do they want to hold your gerbil or let your bird poop on their shoulder. Some folks are afraid of animals, and some simply aren’t attracted.

Even within animal lovers, not all of us like all animals. My sister’s horses are beautiful and I love feeding them treats, but after seeing my sister end up in the hospital twice after riding them there is no way I am getting ON one;  she stopped asking years ago if I wanted to ride. I like my bones where they are. Furthermore, while I love Melissa Kaplan’s hilarious photos of her huge iguana Mike, she knows darn well I don’t want to hold him, and I don’t want to touch any snake on the planet.

Feel sorry for those folks who are not animal lovers and about what they’re missing, but respect their wishes. I don’t want anyone to force me to sit down and watch a stupid football game, so I don’t force my pets on anyone. Life is all about variety and preferences; the good news is that I don’t have to spend time with those folks who just aren’t animal people.