Walk the Walk

I had a physical recently and the lab results revealed that my cholesterol level is 300. Ooops. The doctor gave me a stern lecture about needing to eat better, lose weight…you know, all the doctorly stuff that goes in one ear and out the other. At some point it must have become apparent to her that she had lost her audience so she threw a Hail Mary. She suggested I take the hounds for a daily walk.

I must admit, that got my attention for a nano-second and then I went back to thinking about a hamburger with bacon and cheese for dinner. Up to now, I’ve taken the furry kids to the backyard, which is nicely fenced, and let them run their little hearts out. The backyard is very good sized and allows two greyhounds plenty of space to run until they drop. For my kids, that’s about three minutes.

The idea of taking them out for a walk has been unappealing because we live in a rural area. There are no sidewalks and the cars speed down our road like we were the first turn at Talladega. Not to mention the insanely high population of horse and deer flies. With all the farms around me, and herds of deer lurking behind every tree we are at ground zero. For any city folk out there who may never have been acquainted with a deer or horse fly, let me enlighten you. These flies are the size of a 747 jet liner. They are the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the fly world. They fear nothing and once locked on target, death is the only thing that deters them from trying to make a meal of you. And they bite. Very hard.

Can you blame me if I didn’t immediately jump at the idea of taking the kids for a walk? (Oh for heaven’s sake, all right! I’m also a bit lazy too. Happy now?) None the less, one day last week after work I threw caution to the wind and called the hounds for harnessing. It had been hot that day but I figured that by the end of the workday we’d be fine because the sun was on its way down and a nice breeze was dissipating the day’s heat. Everything seemed to be in order.

For an inexplicable reason, I decided to leave the house via the front door. This is something that we never do. The front steps are concrete and have a slightly steeper pitch, as well as shorter tread width, than the back stairs. Blue had some experience with the front stairs as there had been a time when we were forced to use the front door after the deck fell off the house (long story). But it had been a number of years since he’d even seen them. Bettina didn’t even know we had two doors in the house. As we stood on the verge of departure, I could see that the kids were a bit hesitant about this new situation. Their solution was to hang back behind me and try to assess it. Mumma, on the other hand, had made up her mind to do this thing so I impatiently urged them to venture forth.

They obeyed. Since they were unsure about these suspicious steps, they did what greyhounds do. They ran. Down the stairs. Fast. I was unprepared for this and thus it occurred to me only while in mid-flight that Bettina was only sporting a 4 foot leash. Since it was going to be more than 4 feet between where I was standing and where she was fixing to land, I deduced that I had a new situation on my hands. Unfortunately, I didn’t deduce the best action to take. What I did instead was start yelling, “WAIT! WAIT!” Blue, by now also in mid-flight, started trying to back pedal to comply with my request. Bettina hit the ground with no leash to spare. She came up short while her momentum yanked me down the stairs behind her. Blue was sandwiched between us. Bettina fell backwards onto the bottom step. Blue came down on the bottom stair and fell on top of Bettina. I came right behind Blue thanks to Bettina’s assist, landing on top of the pile.

Once we sorted out which parts belonged with whom, I did a field triage. Blue, with his paper thin, white dog skin got the worst of it (as usual, poor baby). He had scraped off a section of skin from one hind leg, presumably from the concrete stairs. He didn’t seem to be disabled by the boo-boo so I gave me informed medical opinion that none of us would die from our trauma.

The front door, at the top of those concrete stairs, remained wide open. Having descended the stairs sooner than I expected or intended, I didn’t have a chance to shut the door. It looked a long way away. We had also just discovered that Bettina’s leash wasn’t long enough to reach from top to bottom or vice versa. I went back up the steps as far as I could get. Not nearly enough. I spent the next 15 minutes coaxing Bettina and Blue to not only approach the terrible stairs again, but, in Bettina’s case, to come up a couple stairs so I could reach the door.

I finally managed this challenge. With one arm stretched out fully behind me holding Blue and Bettina’s leashes and my other arm stretched out fully in front of me, I could only touch the closest edge of the door. This happened to be the edge where the door is hinged to the building. The door handle was another few feet beyond that. Knowing I couldn’t bring the dogs back up those stairs, I used my one hand to lever the door mostly closed by inserting my fingers in the gap between the door and the casing. With a final lunge, I grabbed the now much closer handle and shut the door. Whew. We might actually have had to go back inside and just come out the back door like we normally do.

Finally, a little worse for wear, we were off for our walk. We managed to reach the middle of the front yard before a legion of horse and deer flies descended on us. Bettina, Blue and I looked like a small solar system with each of us a planet and the flies a myriad of not so tiny moons orbiting around our heads. The only immediate solution was for me to shoo the flies away from me and the kids, while they tried catching them with their teeth.

As we reached the end of the drive, I stopped at the mailbox where I found a sale flyer for some local hardware store. I grabbed it, intending to throw it in the recycle bin upon our return. But it didn’t take long for me to repurpose it as a make-shift fly swatter. (The irony of my using a flyer to swat flies is not lost on me.) We headed off down the road. Bettina and Blue were madly snapping at flies while their mumma was crazily waving her arms all around using the flyer to desperately try and knock out a few of our tormentors. As I got vociferous in cursing the flies and waving my arms around most vigorously, the kids would stop their walking and watch my antics.

It was at one of these moments that I took a particularly large swing at a fly around Bettina’s face. I miscalculated my parabola and ended up swatting her on the forehead with the sales flyer instead. She reared back with a look of utter horror, hurt and disgust. She was clearly deeply offended that I had struck her and no amount of apologizing and cooing could convince her otherwise. She was making sure to keep both my hands in sight. Thus it was for the remainder of our walk. If I so much as moved the hand holding the flyer, she would flinch and cringe away from me to the extent her 4 foot leash would allow.

We managed to get a few phone poles down the road, moving at a very leisurely pace when I noticed that Bettina was starting to flag a little. Bettina, my just turned two, ball of energy, running in the back yard like a crazy dog all the time girl. Blue was all engines go. I could see no indication that he was beginning to tire. We made our way to the next phone pole and Bettina had begun to lag back behind us a bit. I determined we’d better cut this first walk short and head back.

When Bettina caught up with us, we turned around and headed back towards the house. Bettina went a few yards and stopped. Oh lord. She stood there panting and looking at me. I looked down the road to where I could see our driveway. It wasn’t that far away but at that moment it looked like a long way indeed. There didn’t seem to be much to do but to push through and get back home.

I gave Bettina’s leash a small tug and said in my most encouraging voice, “Come on sweet girl, we’re almost home. When we get back we’ll have dinner.” Blue was all for chow and set off immediately. Bettina dubiously brought up the rear, went another few yards and stopped.

Oh fiddlesticks! (Yeah sure I said that…) This wasn’t good. I stood around for a few moments thinking I would enjoy the drone of the fly horde while I let Bettina catch her breath a bit. Blue stood impatiently looking from me to our driveway and back again. He was drooling slightly. Most likely over the thought of imminent dinner. It wouldn’t be the first time.

I put on my best cheerful mum face and got Bettina on the move again. We made it a few more yards. At this point I was trying to mentally calculate how long it would take us to make it back home at that rate. I had it pegged at sometime right around the next day’s breakfast. Bettina stared at me, stubbornly refusing to be influenced by my promises of food, my entreaties for a break, Blue’s obvious eagerness to get to the food portion of the program or the black cloud of uber-flies trying to make dinner out of us.

I scooped her up and started walking towards home. And by “scooped” I mean bent over with a groan, hoisted her up, staggered around a little and then, when I was sure I wouldn’t keel over, started stumbling in the general direction I wanted to go. This time I made it a few yards and stopped. That was how far it took for the message to go from my arms to my brain informing me that this dog was damned heavy for looking so petite.

Since carrying her home like some fly crazed sherpa wasn’t going to work out, I returned to coaxing (threatening) her towards home. I managed to tug her to our driveway. By this point she was panting heavily. I was worried that maybe, being a black dog; she had overheated and was on her way to heat stroke. Her tongue was hanging far out of her mouth and she had a glazed look. Until, that is, she hit the edge of our lawn and started trotting with Blue towards the front door. Excuse me?

As soon as we were inside, she began dancing and jumping around insisting on the dinner I had promised. I let her have her dinner. Then, just to show her there were no hard feelings; I took her temperature in the time honored way of vets everywhere. She was not excited about having her bum assaulted in such a manner. As a concerned pet parent, I was obliged to be SURE that she wasn’t in the throes of heat stroke. Right?

Her Royal Highness the Crown Regent of Fussypants

Life with Bettina as a member of our family has been, er, interesting. I did not initially realize when I brought her through the door, I had brought home royalty. Make no mistake-Bettina knew darn well she was royalty even if I had not yet been acclimated to that fact. Not only did she know she was royalty, she insisted, from the very first second of her arrival, upon being treated in a manner which suited her station.

Mumma wanted to introduce her to her new crate. A crate which had served the previous occupant very well. However, she didn’t find it particularly to her liking and thus, refused to cross the threshold. She dug her formidable nails into the carpet and leaned back like a mule. I pushed from the rear but to no avail. I might get the front half in but she would use the crate as leverage and maneuver her way out again. Or I would remove one foot from the door frame and place it in the crate, only to have another foot that was inside the crate find its way back out again. It was a knock-down, drag-out, free-for-all but I am happy to say that mumma won that one. It would be my first and my last. Once I succeeded in getting HRH Fussypants inside and the door shut, she fixed me with a hair eyeball. A look with which I am ever more familiar.

Once I started letting her stay outside of the crate, she felt her bed was too lumpy, too small, too uncomfortable and too bourgeois. Why sleep on the floor when there is this lovely queen sized bed, raised up nicely where she could survey her domain. Why, it even had the word queen in it, so clearly it was meant to be for Bettina. She started by simply hopping up there with me at the end of the day. After a major kerfuffle, which ended with Bettina off the bed and me half off the bed, she figured out that, like all good deposed rulers everywhere, she was going to have to retake the high ground by stealth. She would come into the bedroom each night and settle herself in one of the two dog beds. She would make loud sighing and groaning noises to assure me that she had no thoughts of sleeping anywhere else. Soon, ever so quietly, I would hear her get up and not long after a pair of amber eyes and a little black snout would peer at me over the edge of the bed. She stared at me intently as if gauging whether she could take me or not. If I told her no, she would come to the other side of the bed and peer over the edge weighing her chances from that side. Many times she determined her chances were pretty good and soon I would have a black fur ball dropping from out of the sky. Hard.

We’d wrestle and eventually I would succeed in dumping her over the side of the bed. Usually I was worse for wear. Once again she changed up her strategy. She would wait with great sighs and groans on her bed until I finished reading and turned out the lights. It wouldn’t be long before I sensed a presence on one side or the other of the bed. Sometimes I would reach my hand out into the darkness to find it full of velvet fur. Sometimes she would wait until I had dropped off to sleep and then wake me from a dead sleep by cannon-balling onto my stomach. For any of you who have not had the joy of being awakened from a deep sleep by an unexpected attacker, I don’t believe I could accurately describe the experience for you.

It wasn’t too long into her stay that Fussypants began training me to be a good lady in waiting to her royal eminence. At various points through the day she would begin shrieking at me in her high-pitched greyhound voice. When I would look in her direction, she rolled on her side and delicately lifted her uppermost rear leg, exposing her belly. If I didn’t immediately grasp her meaning, she would shriek at me louder and lift her leg again. If I still didn’t get it, she would begin raising her voice more and more. This would go on until she could contain her frustration no longer and begin barking at me. She would not be appeased until I was on the ground by her bed rubbing her belly. If I stopped rubbing her belly before she was satisfied, she would spring up and grab my hand with her mouth, bossing me with her insistent shrieks into rubbing her belly some more.

HRH Fussypants also felt that any food within her reach should be hers. She would quickly finish her meal and then stand over Blue’s right shoulder, staring at him while he tried, usually unsuccessfully, to eat his dinner at a more leisurely pace. The poor giant coward would eventually give up his ground and Bettina would take whatever was left. In the end, mumma had to step in and form a human barrier between Blue and the looming Bettina. Like a cow that has been cut from the herd by the horse and rider, she would attempt to get by me to reach Blue. First by veering right and then switching quickly to her left. If mumma stuck with her for each feint, she would go around the coffee table and try to pass me by using the coffee table as screen. Some days she would attempt to go right through me and I would have to walk her backwards pushing her with my legs while she leaned into me hoping to overpower me.

Once HRH Fussypants learned that she was a royal in exile where the sleeping arrangements were concerned, she determined to have the best of the two dog beds in the bedroom. She would stand over Blue, and stare at him until his nerve failed him and he ran out of the bedroom. For a while he would move to the “lesser” bed and sleep there. It wasn’t long before HRH Fussypants implemented her next edict which was that both beds were hers and Blue was not allowed in the bedroom. No amount of coaxing from mumma could convince Blue to sleep in one of those dog beds in the bedroom. He would retire early and sleep in there until Bettina and I came in to bed and he would automatically jump up like his britches were on fire and run to the living room where I heard him plop down with a big groan in his crate, or, on the big bed in the living room.

Bettina continued her reign of benign terror at her Grammy’s house. Since HRH Fussypants would not suffer being quiet, mumma could not take her on work trips to stay in hotels. So she would spend these weeks with Grammy. In preparation for her first visit, mumma bought her the cutest soft sided crate. It was pink with blue polka dot trim. But apparently not regal enough because her first time in the crate she ripped her way out of it to greet Grammy at the door when she came home. I suppose I should have known, her highness had warned me that she did not do crates on the first day she took control of her new kingdom.

Fussypants also claimed the back yard as her own. As soon as spring came and the grass began poking up, she would head to the back yard and begin grazing. Mumma would holler at her to stop. She would give me a haughty stare and return to grazing. If mumma came off the steps, she’d run to the far end of the yard and return to grazing. When mumma mowed the grass to fix the issue, she would go out and snuffle along in the piles of clippings until she found one that smelled good to her and she would gulp down a giant clump of grass clippings. She would stand chewing for a while, as though she had a cud. If I attempted to dissuade her she would pretend she didn’t hear me. No mortal tells HRH Crown Regent of Fussypants what to do.

As I type this now, she is laying with me on the couch. She has started at one end, and moved her way down towards me and has herded me to the other end where she is stretched out along the rest of the couch. A paw will occasionally plunk itself down on the keyboard, typing a string of nonsense characters. I move the paw and a hind leg plunks down on the keyboard, kicking at me. I move the hind leg and she grabs my hand with her mouth and I must pause to rub her belly. And yes, she has made mumma understand that the couch is hers to use at will. At least the kingdom of Fussypants is not a bad place to be a subject in. Long live the Queen.

Dog IQ Measurements – My Dog is Smarter than Your Dog?

I read an article about a study that some scientists recently completed with a Border Collie named Chaser. Down at Wofford College in South Carolina they found that Chaser could remember the names of over 1000 toys. Good ol’ Chaser also understood verb-noun combinations (nose the monkey, pick up the carrot etc.). She operates at the level of a small child. Show off.

I have always suspected that dogs were holding back. So I determined to fathom the brilliance of my furry children. The other night, I was sitting on the couch eating from a bag of trail mix. Bettina had posted herself on the couch next to me and was frequently reaching out and putting her paw on my arm to remind me that she was there and she would like a peanut or a cashew, please and thank you. Blue, having lost out on pole position was standing near my feet, nose quivering and slightly drooling as he watched me eat the trail mix.

I’m not too proud to say that when I eat, I sometimes miss my mouth. What ends up in my lap, if left unnoticed by me, generally falls to the floor or on the couch when I stand up. Bettina and Blue are smart enough to know this routine. My first dog IQ experiment already a success! And I didn’t even know I was doing science but I’m not going to quibble over immaterial details.

They also know that occasionally, I will take pity on puppy dog eyes and dole out a little of what I am eating. Thus it behooves them to be at my side whenever I am sitting anywhere eating. If I am completely unreceptive to the idea of sharing, they know that I will wave frantically at them and say, “No, this is mumma’s” over and over again until they finally believe. Depending on their level of determination and the perceived value level of what I am eating at the time, they may, or may not take my warning under advisement.

So, with this sturdy foundation to my scientific endeavors, I set out to prove convincingly that my dogs are brilliant. While distracting Blue and Bettina from the trail mix, I took a peanut that had fallen into my lap earlier and placed it on my knee. No one noticed it. So with each hound in turn, I say, "look" and then exaggerate a stare at my knee where the peanut is. No one looked where I was looking. They stared at my face or at the bag of trail mix. So I physically took Blue and Bettina’s noses and moved them to near my knee while saying, "Look". Result, no one found the peanut. Each time I released the nose it went back to quivering and snuffling towards the bag of trail mix. Next I try pointing at the peanut and saying "look." They look at my finger for a split second and return to looking at my face and then the bag of trail mix, my face, and then the bag of trail mix, my face and then…well you get the idea.

Finally, I had to pick up the peanut and put it in their direct line of sight, say look, let them get a good sniff and then have them watch me as I placed the peanut back on my knee. After a small melee over which one would claim the peanut, it was apparent that this final portion of my experiment had, at least, been a success.

Yeah, dogs are smarter than we thought....