As soon as I got home, I buried her with a favorite toy and the tags from her collar, then planted the pulmonaria on top of her amid a cairn of large rocks to deter curious critters. I knew the body would decay and nourish the plants around her over time, and soon their botanical transpiration (i.e., respiration) would cause them to give off oxygen that I, the other pets, and all animal beings in our environment would inhale, making her immortal in a way as well as part of all of us.

But those metal tags and her skeleton would last a lot longer. And if at some point far in the future someone happened to dig in the area, I like to think they would look at her skeleton and those tags the same way today’s archeologists look at certain ancient canine or feline remains and say, “This wasn’t some stray or feral animal who died here. This animal belonged to someone who cared.”

As a veterinarian first in medical practice and now in a behavioral/bond one who also has shared her life with a lot of animals, I’ve done a lot of grieving in my life. But this time it’s different. Regardless what others may choose to believe, I didn’t put Bee down for just behavioral problems, if for no other reason than that such don’t exist.  I am completely aware of all the physiological and bond (both human and that with with members of other species) components of behavioral problems more than I’ve ever been in my life. Because of all of Bee’s hereditary and congenital problems, I had to know more about and be more aware of this interaction 24/7 day in and day out than with any other being of any species with whom I’ve ever lived.  Because of this, I knew professionally, scientifically, and intuitively what most people only know intuitively: that it was time to let her go.

Because of that, I’m free of the guilt and doubt—my own and that which others would try to impose on me—that’s accompanied other losses. I’m free to experience the loss of Bee as a loss of Bee, and not the the loss of a symbol of someone or something else I may not even consciously acknowledge as real. I don’t feel obligated to feel repulsed because the other animals are visibly more relaxed and playful, although sometimes as confused as I am by all the changes in our routine. Ollie still waits at the top of the stairs for me to pick up Bee and descend first, and I still stop to do just that. I make twice as many trips up and down the stairs as I need to, once to transport any books, cups of tea, cleaning supplies or other paraphernalia, and a second to transport a dog incapable of climbing stairs who’s no longer there.

Even though I intellectually and intuitively recognized the inextricable relationship between health, behavior, and the bond, Bee’s many problems never permitted me of the luxury of denying this as is often possible in other animals. Whether I wanted to or not, I had to be aware of it because her life depended on it. But in the process of doing this, I learned to communicate in a way I’d never experienced with an animal before.

Bee couldn’t hear, her vision was impaired in ways I could never define to my satisfaction, she responded defensively to all but a narrow range of touch, her sense of smell was incredible, but only sometimes. Sometimes she was quite solidly here, but other times she was somewhere else. In short, the kinds of sensory perception that form the foundation of normal human-companion animal communication  were unreliable or nonexistent. So we came up with something new. Not some special form I made up for my own convenience that I taught her using treats like I would have done years ago. This time I summoned the patience and dumped enough of my considerable human ego to let her teach me.

Now I look at the other dogs and know it’s time to play catch-up. Aside from the basic training I didn’t have time for—all I cared about was a reliable response to the come command—I want to rethink my ideas of quality interspecies communication with them as well as the cat. Because of Bee, I stopped being so verbal with them months ago and don’t rely nearly as much on visual cues either. But because they were so stable and reliably good, I never had to develop that—what? transcendent?—plane of communication with them that I did with Bee. I still don’t have to, but now and thanks to BeeBee, I want to.

Because the two of us were so much alike in many ways, I had to practice long and hard as a veterinary student not to let my emotions get the best of me, too. It still isn’t easy, but most of the time I manage to hold it together long enough in those really tough cases to objectively analyze what’s going on, how best to address it, and get the job done. Only after it’s over do I allow myself to break down.

It  hasn’t worked that way with Bee. When problems arose recently, I vowed I’d make a list of all of her existing and potential problems before I called a friend who’s a shelter director about finding a new home for her, and I did. But with each new addition, I realized that the probability of finding someone willing and able to do all I’ve done to give Bee the semblance of a normal life these past two years was about nil. That made me cry. The probability of finding someone who could detect, let alone correctly interpret her unique body language lexicon to pick up subtle signs of change was even less likely. That made me cry even more. Until I made the list, I  didn’t realize creating a semblance of a normal Beebee had required more than 35 years of veterinary and ethological knowledge and a semi-solitary lifestyle in an environment that was, for the most part, amazingly well-suited to the special needs of a deaf, brain damaged dog with multiple physical problems, any one of which could blow at any moment. The awareness that even that wasn’t enough made me cry harder still.

I knew that reaching adulthood would be Bee’s Rubicon. The fact that she apparently believed herself to be a 100% mentally and physically normal corgi had served us well when she was younger. It resulted in an indefatigable joie de vivre and can-do spirit worthy of a Marine recruiting poster. Although I don’t  think she realize it (or cared if she did), her mind was enabling her body to be much, much more than it should have been.

But when Bee reached 2, that same mind worked against her because it told her that 5-year-old Frica should cede rank to her. From the beginning the other animals have been aware of Bee’s limitations and learned to read her foreign body language and tolerate her rough play and the occasionally accidental, but none the less painful, encounter with the teeth in her grossly misshapen jaw. But Fric ceding her job to Bee would be like Hilary Clinton ceding hers to Helen Keller. To the normal canine mind, there was no reason to do this.

BeeBee couldn’t accept that. Her attempts to signal rank over Fric became more intense and unpredictable with that wonky jaw of hers being the ever-present potentially lethal wild card. This week she launched a sneak attack on Fric and attempted to grab her by the muzzle. This time one of her wayward fangs slammed into Fric’s lower jaw and bent her incisors sufficiently that they had to be removed. Given Bee’s intensity and that she weighs twice as much as Frica, it was a miracle that Fric’s jaw wasn’t broken.

At that point I knew that Bee had crossed the Rubricon, determined to assume what would have been her rightful place had her body been as normal as her mind. But it’s not and the result is taking its toll on all of us, a toll that can only get higher the longer it goes on. While the little dogs and the cat stay out of Bee’s way, she increasing alarm barks and charges at something none of the other animals acknowledge as real. The celebratory zoomies that use to have all three dogs racing around the house or yard playing tag have been replaced by intense, short charges back and forth as if  she’s not sure what she wants, to play or to attack. Because of her increasingly unusual signals, none of the animals want anything to do with her and that frustrates her even more.

By the time I finished the list, I knew that the only answer was euthanasia. I couldn’t bear the thought of someone with rescue-itis taking her, convinced that how good she looked couldn’t take that much time and effort for someone with a lot of love to give. I didn’t want her to go to some well-meaning but naive person like my dad, only to have her or someone else get hurt because they let their guard down for just a minute, or because they just couldn’t believe that such a sweet dog wouldn’t like their Aunt Harriet’s peek-a-poo.

No. Far better Bee and I should make that final journey together later this morning and that I somehow manage, once again, to hold it together long enough to see her on her way to what I hope is better place.

For all I observed and interacted with Bee during our relatively short but transforming time together, I never was able to grasp what her reality was no matter how hard I tried. At most, all I had were glimpses of it. She taught me that sometimes words are useless and that hand signals aren’t much better. And those special times when we connected on a level I’d never connected with an animal before, I realized she made me a lot more than I ever thought I’d be, too.

After I bury Bee, I’m planting a large pulmonaria from another part of the garden over her grave.  Maybe this fall, but definitely next spring it will produce flowers that are half blue and half pink, a fitting monument to a dog who tried so hard to live in two different worlds at once.

Bee last Christmas

Early this morning, I turned Bee’s collar on to flash mode and took the dogs out like I always do. As soon as we got outside, Fric and Ollie went off to  do their thing, but Bee stayed between my legs, a behavior she assumes (with any convenient human adult) when she feels unsure of herself. Because the other two went off with nary a second’s hesitation, I doubted there was a wild animal out there that had spooked her.

I wondered what this could be for a while, but soon became entranced by all the lightening bugs that decorated the trees and the sky like countless flashing Christmas lights. It was an otherwise pitch-black cloudy night, the perfect night for a female to transmit her amorous message to a male without interference from moon or stars. For a while I was so awe-struck by the spectacle that I didn’t realize that the corgi between my legs with the hem of my robe and nightgown draped over her head was watching the flashes, too.

So now I wonder. Was it just all those flashes that spooked her? Or did it have something to do with the fact that she flashes, too? Her collar flashes red which I know she, even with her visual problems, most likely sees as a shade of grey that would look whitish in the dark. Could she have thought that she was seeing tiny versions of herself? Has she attached some meaning to the flashes of her own collar that she then projected on those lightening bugs?

I don’t know. All I know is that nothing would induce her to leave her cave under me until I turned and opened the door. And then she turned and quickly scurried inside.

The solution is simple enough: Relative to me, all the dogs are equal in my eyes and all rank below me. They’re free to work out their pack structure among themselves any way they want and change it any time they want because that’s normal canine behavior. What none of them can do is view me as the prize for whoever emerges at the top of their canine social structure. Until Bee matured, there seemed to be canine acceptance of this.

But now BeeBee is challenging this human-canine social structure and this has resulted in a behavioral-bond dilemma for me. She now resists when I put her in the belly-up position to check her over and massage her feet, a ritual she used to love as a pup. The once equally loved daily grooming sessions are now more apt to include periods of canine resistance. Because her upper jaw has continued to grow and her lower one is more crooked than ever, I could easily tell myself that this is occurring because these positions are physically uncomfortable for her. But I also know that these activities communicate my higher status and that she could very well be more behaviorally uncomfortable than physically so.

So what to do? Do I play behavioral-bond hardball and gently but firmly do what needs to be done no matter how long it takes? Or should I let her play the disability card and call the shots? My gut feeling about where the little scamp is coming from fights with my desire to practice interspecies political correctness. Plus there’s always the unknown with Bee. God only knows what’s physically going on in that wonky head of hers that could blow any minute.

Fortunately, I’m blessed with two other dogs and a cat whose perception is so much greater than mine that my reality is only a fraction of theirs. All of them, even BeeBee, could be poster animals to illustrate Henry Beston’s insightful  passage in The Outermost House because all of them are “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, hearing voices we shall never hear.” Call it a cop-out, but for now I’m going to use Fric, Ollie, and Whit as a guide when it comes to  dealing with Bee’s “I am the queen.”  attitude.

When I started observing them all in this light, the first thing I noticed is that Fric, Ollie, Whit,  and Bee are much more interested in what BeeBee can do than what she can’t. They’ve also figured out that there is nothing mentally slow about Bee and that she can, in fact, be quite the crafty little demon so there’s no use feeling sorry for her because it will only get you cornered someplace where you’re probably not supposed to be where you could get caught by She With the Infernal Camera.

When this occurs, there is nothing at all wrong with one of you distracting Bee while the other makes a leap to freedom.

And disappears into the office, leaving Bee to wonder where you went

while the other dog relaxes.

As Beston also pointed, compared to us, animals are other nations who are caught up in the same world that we are. Just because they’re different doesn’t mean they’re lesser. Just because they’re different, doesn’t mean they’re wrong.  And in this particular case, just because Bee’s different doesn’t mean that I should allow her to assume a position relative to me that’s beyond her capacity just because I feel sorry for her.

However, once she and Ollie got into the chase mode, I had better luck

These pictures are typical of her running, which usually seems to involve one foot or none on the ground at the same time. Even though she can get up an amazing amount of speed, as you can see there’s nothing graceful about it. It’s as if she just puts her mind into high gear and expects her body to follow.

Below you can see the one-foot-on-the-ground position as she and Ollie play tag. In the photo on the right, notice how she throws her hind end to the right, I assume either  to somehow shift some of her weight from her left front leg or to help her make the turn.

Believe it or not, this next picture is one of her and Ollie engaged in normal dog, but she really looks demonic, doesn’t she? I don’t know if you can see it, but her left eye is rolled down to expose the white which really adds to the effect. Next up in the game, Ollie proves that the best way to slow down a racing dog is to grab her by the tail–even if she doesn’t have one!

If you compare the running Bee pictures above with this one of her walking you can see how deliberate her movement is when she walks, to the point she almost looks like she’s stalking. But if she slowed down that much, I suspect she’d fall over. When she’s walking slowly she sort of staggers and inside I can sometimes hear a back foot scuff the floor or rug when she has trouble lifting it up high enough to bring it forward to place it. In general, she seems to put a lot more mental effort into walking.

To me, the next photo looks like she’s airborne, but I find it interesting the way she tucks her back feet so close to her body. It doesn’t seem like she has the fine motor skills to get them down to propel her forward before she smashes into the ground, but some how she does.

And if you’re feeling sorry for poor Bee who always loses the race, don’t. She gives as good as she gets.

But play is only play, no matter how bad it looks.

But back to work for me. Nap-time for them.

As I prepare to post this, the two of them are sleeping together under my desk, and I can hear BeeBee snoring. She sounds like a very large cat purring.

Whit is also hunting more and once again comes to visit me in the bathroom every night I have to get up to use it. In fact, this is such a peaceful, albeit unorthodox, interlude for the two of us, I sometimes regret when I sleep through the night. Interestingly, Ollie has started sleeping downstairs with Whit. I’m not sure if this is because he doesn’t like the sound of the frequent pounding rains on the metal roof, he’s trying to figure out some way to get up on the counter where Whit’s food is without using the chair, or he just prefers the cat’s company at night. Whatever the reason, he does have a much gentler relationship with Whit than the other two dogs. It will not surprise me if they sleep together when the weather gets cooler.

BeeBee continues or provide irrefutable evidence that you can’t change physiology without changing behavior and the bond and vice versa. As if I needed it. When her infection forced me to have her spayed a few months earlier than I’d planned, I’d hope that the dog-gods would smile down on us and end all jaw growth. That has not been the case. Bee’s upper jaw has continued to grow, but her lower one has not. Now everything from her upper canine teeth (fangs) forward extends beyond her lower jaw instead of just her incisors.

Bee also makes more snorfling and snuffling noises and I’m not sure what’s going on there. It might be that her tongue continues to grow, too.  Because one side of it is paralyzed, it has always curved to one side and the tip of it  protrudes from  behind a lower canine when she’s resting. The tip is still in that same place and, if her tongue really is getting longer, the extra length could be blocking the back of her mouth and airway at times.

As her nose has gotten longer, the angle between it and the rest of her skull has also become more acute. This raises the possibility that any increased length in the roof of her mouth also could be creating a mechanical obstruction when she holds her head a certain way.

Additionally, I think that either Bee can’t see as well under certain circumstances or she’s unable to process sensory data the way she used to. I say this because, in the past week or so when I push the covers back on my bed toward where she sleeps at the bottom because I’ve become too hot, she acts as if these are a threat. She instantly jumps up and vigorously sniffs and digs into them as if they were something new. This behavior does appear to be waning in the past few days, although it’s still there and I have no idea what caused it. And, yes, I could get her off the bed. But if I did, I’d have to put her in her crate at night because I can’t risk her wandering around and hurting herself. If it gets worse, I will.

Bee’s new conformation has other behavioral as well as bond implications. At first when she had one of her snorfling spells, she became very distressed. The other dogs would pick up on this and hover around her, which only made matters worse. Fortunately, over time I assume she’s figured out that she’s not going to die. That’s enabled her to stay calmer which, in turn, ends the spasm sooner as well as calms the other dogs.

On the other hand, dogs communicate with their teeth and when Bee plays will Ollie, what would be a normal mouth hold in a safe place turns out to put the wrong teeth in the wrong place. Ollie had figured out where those teeth were before and positioned himself accordingly. But now some of those teeth aren’t in the same place any more. Worse, when Ollie yells, Bee can’t hear him and I doubt she can see him from close-up play distance, either, so she misses the signals that she’s hurting him that would cause her to let him go.

Do I think BeeBee would hurt Ollie or Frica or Whit? Not intentionally. But accidentally? I’m not so sure. One event this  past week did make me think that once again, she is aware of her limitations and is looking for more acceptable alternatives. She and Ollie were doing their usual rolling around on the floor game behind me while I was working, with each trying to pin the other. Suddenly Ollie let out a godawful shriek. I whipped around fully expecting the worst, such as one of Bee’s fangs embedded in Ollie’s eyeball or sticking into his heart. Instead, BeeBee had pinned Ollie to the floor by firmly planting her fat front feet on his floppy ears. As Ollie would surely be the first to admit, it was a very effective, if unconventional canine hold!

As far as the bond implications go, I try to strike a balance between my concerns about Bee and what lies ahead for her, and my obligation to keep the other pets safe. When I see her suddenly overreact to Whit, I become angry. No, frightened. Could I ever forgive myself if she hurt him? Could I ever forgive myself if she hurt Ollie or Fric? I don’t know. But when I hold her in my lap each evening and she closes her eyes in contentment as I brush her while the rest of the animals doze peacefully, at least for a while all is right in our world.

I find it interesting that my professional prejudice still sneaks through when I think or write about that “stuff” I view as manna from cat heaven when Whit eats it and doesn’t vomit or have diarrhea. Have I been brain-washed or am I just an ungrateful wretch?

Later when I went into the livingroom, I discovered a half-eaten vole on the floor and now everything is up for grabs again. Maybe Whit vomited because of his rodent meal, not the food. Why did I just toss the vomit instead of looking at it carefully? What kind of owner am I? But, wait, he’s feeling well enough to hunt successfully again! I cleaned up the remaining half of the vole and pacified the troops of probabilities pacing in my mind with the neutral: let’s see what happens when he’s back on the other food for a few days.

It’s been more than a day on the new diet and no more vomit, but some soft stool. Is that because of the food or the vole? Or something else? What else could it be?

Well, yesterday I hastily cut down some stalks of rudbeckia, a lovely, large plant with daisy-like flowers, a variety called Prairie Sun. The stalks were so heavy with flowers that they got pounded down by the severe storm last weekend. I brought the stalks into the house and quickly cut off some of the flowers to take to friend, leaving the rest of them on the kitchen counter. When I returned about 15 minutes later, one of the stalks was on the floor and there was chewed greenery and flower petals on the floor. The canine responsible for pulling the stalk off the counter– it had to be BeeBee–and her henchdogs didn’t even have the decency to spit out the evidence before I walked in. Instead, they cheerfully greeted me with slobbery petals and leaves hanging out of their mouths.

I cleaned everything up, but never thought to look in Ollie’s crate which sits besides Bee’s downstairs. Bee has always had a habit of taking treasured objects into her crate for further study, but to my knowledge Ollie never did.

Because of that, I don’t know who dragged the flower into Ollie’s crate. All I know is that somewhere along the line I started making sure Ollie’s crate door was open at night so that Whit could get in it if he wanted. My thinking was that, if I decided to take him in for a work-up or something else, he’d be more comfortable in it. When he started doing exactly that, I was pleased.

Until I noticed those petals in the back of it yesterday evening.

Did Whit get into those petals, too? Are they the cause of the soft stool?

I recently read a recipe for gin-soaked raisins, supposedly a good treatment for arthritis. It’s another gross, humid day with forecasts for rain today and tomorrow that could add up to 8″ in some areas before it’s all over. My knees aren’t really bugging me, but when all the damn questions about Whit attack me, the idea of gin-soaked raisin bran is not without its appeal.

Instead, I’m off to fix a cup of tea and sip it while looking at the stunning constellation of Prairie Suns on my kitchen table, hastily picked lest one of the coming storms batter them into the ground, too.

Whit sleeps in Ollie’s petal-free crate. He purrs. I ache for a magic wand. For all the animals. And for me.

Part of me wants to race down to the basement and dig out the empty cat food cans from the recycling bucket and read the labels. Did I miss something important in my quest to get him to eat? Another part wants me to try a different food, while a third part thinks I should cook him something from scratch. A fourth part reminds me it’s only been one meal and he does have dry food available at all times. A fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth murmur, “Yeah, but what if ___ or ____ or _____ or _____.”

While I’m trying to figure out what to do, when, and how to regain the delicate balance that’s become Whit’s life, BeeBee has entered adulthood like a fur-covered bulldozer. I wish I could figure out why some dogs, like some people, enter new life stages–adolescence, adulthood, maturity–in great leaps rather than as the result of a progression of gradual changes. One day they’re adolescents and the next, young adults who think they know everything. The behavioral changes can happen so suddenly, I can see why some people think their pets must have brain tumors when this occurs because there’s nothing subtle about it.

In Bee’s case, someone got into her brain and turned on the CAP–Corgi American Princess–switch when I wasn’t looking. One day she was my staggering little clown; the next she was a demanding, pushy pooch with an attitude: “Come? Are you telling ME to come? Me? Her royal highness BeeBee? Now? When I can eat all these little green apples that have fallen off the tree? Surely you jest!”  If I call Frica or Ollie in the house, she now charges over and uses her elongated nose like a shovel to flip them out of the way. And she’s gotten much more barky. So I’ve added a few canine attitude readjustment exercises to my daily routine along with everything else.

To someone who isn’t an animal person, all of these adaptations must seem excessive and even foolish in the overall scheme of things. Such people inevitably point to a list of human sufferings or wrongs that should to be righted before we even give any energy to such animal concerns. But what those folks miss is that it’s not an either/or proposition. Although I don’t think I was ever an misanthrope, I do know that my knowledge of animal behavior has made me more understanding of and concerned about human behavior.

I also believe that many of us use our companion animals to dry run certain human events so that we can better cope with our fellow humans. For all I know, our animals use us to dry run animal events, too. At least I hope so. In the years that Whit’s been here, I’ve lost both human and animal loved ones. Maybe he learned as much from that as I did. During that time, I’ve also made the transition from married to single,  limit-setting mother to doting grandmother. And maybe that’s had something to do with BeeBee’s behavior, too.

But regardless what’s happened to me, neither of them needs a doting best friend or unrealistic dreamer right now. Both of them need a reliable reference they can count on. Whether I like it or not, that would be me.

But in spite of the fact that I know all this, I naively thought that BeeBee’s brain problems would preclude these transitions and she would remain in her own admittedly eccentric but fetchingly innocent little world. But that hasn’t been the case. As she’s moved into young adulthood, she seems to have become aware that she’s different, almost certainly at least partially because of the way other people and animals respond differently to her. When she was younger, she seemed oblivious to their reactions. But now sometimes she pays much closer attention to what the other dogs are doing, as if she were trying to learn how to be more like them.

When she can’t do what they do, her behaviors can take on an edge. Her frustration perhaps?

When I see her doing this, I find myself feeling the way I think the parent of an impaired child must feel, aching for her to be like the other dogs. I know it’s foolish because there’s really no comparison. Plus she isn’t like those other dogs and never will be.

A case in point: each morning after I finish doing my yoga, I cradle each dog upside down in my lap while I sit in the lotus position. Then I massage their ears, eyes, and feet, and finish with a tummy rub, all while doing deep breathing and relaxing myself.

I don’t do this in response to some scientific article that said this would be a good calming and bond-affirming activity, although I do employ other such in my work with patients and clients. If there’s actually an Upside Down Dog Lotus Pose, I’ve never heard of it. I do it because years ago I discovered that the dogs would come and lie next to me when I got to this part of my routine. Once they did, it seemed only natural to include them in it.

Over the years, I’ve learned many things from this accidental interspecies interaction. One is that there’s a difference in the way young, adolescent, young adult, and older animals respond. Within the current canine population, Ollie, the 6-month-old pup does the wriggling wagging routine for about 30 seconds before sighing (sometimes more in resignation than relaxation I think), closing his eyes, then going limp and giving into the calming massage message.

Mature Frica reminds me of myself during these brief interludes of relaxation; she sees these interludes as mini-spas and takes full advantage of them, perhaps to fortify herself for another day of putting up with two high-energy young canines. Some mornings, she practically throws herself upside down in my lap, puts her head back, and shuts her eyes as if to say, “Please, please, massage me and send me to that place with the soft ocean waves and broad expanses of empty silver beaches, where I can sleep when I want, gnaw on my bone or play with the toys I want when I want without having to deal with puppies!”

At a little over a year of age, BeeBee sometimes accepts the massage message to relax, but now sometimes she fights it. She never resists me manipulating her feet or rubbing her tummy. But when it comes to massaging her ears and eyes, sometimes she’s OK with it, but other times she isn’t.

At first it seemed odd to me that a deaf dog with impaired vision would be sensitive about me doing something that would limit the function of organs she didn’t act like she depended on that much, if at all. But when I saw this behavior in the context of the other changes she’s experiencing as she enters adulthood, it began to sense.

Like the rest of us, when BeeBee doesn’t feel sure about herself and where she fits in, she wants access to every means of sensory data collection she has at her disposal to make sense–”literally!–of the world and those around her. The more limited a particular sensory collector and processor, the more she wants the freedom to use what little of it she has. I can understand this because without my glasses, my distance vision is pathetic. Put me in a situation in which distance vision is crucial and take away my glasses, and I would resist any attempt by others to interfere with what little visual ability I have.

So for now, I’m trying to find BeeBee’s soft spot, that position in my lap that will allow her the freedom she needs to feel secure at the same time as it teaches her to relax. Today, that meant just cupping her head and ears in my hands. Maybe that’s as far as she’ll ever get. Maybe she’ll never go back to the blissful Ollie-like puppy oblivion that marked her younger days, or grow into Fric’s zoned out bliss as she matures. But maybe with time and patience she’ll make her peace with this new phase of her life and learn to accept and enjoy it as much as she did its predecessor.

Because I know what an important role modeling plays in animal learning and how that includes modeling human behaviors in domestic animals, I look down at BeeBee’s head cradled in my hands and think, “This dog just might help me find peace as I grow older, too.”

Such has been my experience for the past week or so. At first I attributed it to the fact that my shitzu mix, Frica, is in heat. She’s normally a laidback, fun-loving dog, but you’d never know it if you saw her around the other two dogs lately. When BeeBee, the deaf, brain-damaged corgi does something Fric doesn’t like,and I admit BeeBee does a lot of things that would try the patience of a saint, canine or otherwise, Fric’s snarling response gives new meaning to the word “bitch.” When her young son Ollie tries to check out the strange scents emanating from his mom’s nether regions…

Well, a rough translation of her response would be “Get away from me you disgusting male pervert pig-devil or I’ll rip your heart out!”

Still, even though Frica’s testiness has me yearning for large volumes of chocolate, I don’t consider her behavior abnormal. And while the other dogs vacillate between staying out of her way and baiting her unmercifully, I consider that well within normal limits, too.

The only animal who really worried me was the cat, Whittington. He’s 14 and showing his age. Several months ago I started putting a chair next to the kitchen counter where his food dish is because every once in a while he’d have trouble jumping up there. It’s the kind of thing people do to accommodate an older arthritic animal that’s so common, I didn’t even think about it when I did it. But then about a week ago I realized I was filling Whit’s dish a lot more, and yet he seemed to be losing weight.

Being a vet, several possibilities went through my mind.

I didn’t like any of them.

That same day, I put Ollie in his crate, and let the other dogs have the run of house because it was too hot to take them outside with me while I worked in the garden. Normally when I come back into the house, BeeBee is sleeping against the door, I startle her when I open it and bump her, she gives out her godawful deaf-dog screech , this which wakes up Ollie who starts barking the equivalent of “Take me out, take me out! My bladder’s gonna burst!” and Frica yawns from the rocker where she’s been sleeping.

But not that day.

That day Bee wasn’t by the door and Fric wasn’t on the rocker. Fric was sitting on the chair by the counter and Bee was in the floor below her. Ollie was in his crate and he immediately started barking about his limited sphincter capacity as usual. In my rush to get him out, the meaning behind the other dogs’ deviation from their normal routine didn’t sink in…

…until later when two things happened. The first was that I noticed that the cat’s dish was licked clean. Although Whit keeps himself impeccably groomed, he has never stooped so low as to lick his bowl clean since I’ve had him. If anything, he leaves little pieces of kibble around as if to point out how inferior what I feed him is to the locally grown rodents he catches himself, even at his advanced age.

That triggered the memory that there have been other occasions when the cat dish had been similarly tongue-scoured.

I then turned to Frica to see if she looked guilty because BeeBee couldn’t have made it onto that chair and then the counter unless Fric put her there with a forklift.

But expecting Fric to feel guilty is like expecting two suns to rise in the morning: it might happen, but it doesn’t seem likely. In behavioral terms, she’s much more in tune with her most ancient roots than I am mine: She accepts that does what she does because it represents the most energy-efficient way to get what she wants.

Just like we all do.

If I want her to act guilty about that, that’s my problem not hers.

I never got the guilty look, but the circumstantial evidence was plentiful enough, I didn’t need it. The most damning piece was something else I’d previously noticed, but dismissed. In spite of cutting Fric’s food way back since she weaned her puppies several months ago, she still hadn’t regained her girlish figure.

It a classic example of human projection, I rationalized this saying that it’s harder to loose weight as one gets older.

Hah! My dog did have the same problem I did, but it had nothing to do with our ages. We were both eating too much.

OK, my part of that was sort of depressing, but I had to admire Fric’s intelligence for getting that food, and convincing me that I was losing my mind and that the cat was seriously ill.

With a triumphant look in Fric’s direction, I moved the chair back to the table beyond little-dog counter-jumping distance. Convinced I’d solved the problem, I took a quick shower to get rid of the gardening grime. When I finished, and returned to the kitchen, I discovered Ollie grazing on the table.

Being the learned professional I am, I also handled this with great skill.

“What do you think you’re doing?” I shouted. “Get your puppy butt off that table right now or I’m going to sell you to a laboratory.”

Or something like that. Whatever, it had the same result as Fric snarling at him and he disappeared under the couch. Unfortunately, the cat was also under there and they immediately started playing so I’m not sure how much of my message got through.

Be that as it may, this told me that Ollie hadn’t been spending all of his time sleeping while Fric was raiding the cat food. Instead, he had been watching and learning.

And making plans.

Sometimes I wonder how long he’s been browsing the contents of my kitchen table, the place where I and others eat. Most of the time, though, I decide I don’t want to know.

So, no ghost snarfing up cat food, no seriously ill cat, one dog on her way to regaining her figure, one human who is probably no more insane or thinner than she was when this started, and one puppy and one brain-damaged corgi who still think that all of life is a game.

Not a bad day’s work.

It began when Ollie–who is back in his crate on the bench at the foot of the bed following a bout of house-training amnesia–began whimpering pitifully, his response to anything unfamiliar. Then Frica went back and forth between the bench and rug a few times, probably weighing the consequences of trying to sleep on the bench in the breeze, but next to her whiney son vs. moving to the rug away from said whiney offspring where it was hotter. I ignored them both and Ollie soon quieted and Fric soon fell asleep on the bench beside him.

As usual, BeeBee offered the most in the way of surprises. The first was that the fan didn’t bother her at all when I turned it on. She merely positioned herself on the bed to take full advantage of it once I made it clear that I did not welcome her 101.5-degree hairy body plastered against mine under these tropical circumstances. She soon fell asleep and I foolishly congratulated myself for shepherding all of the dogs through this novel event.

I don’t mention the cat here because Whit doesn’t even deign to come upstairs when it’s so hot. Instead, he spends most of his time in the basement except for a few forays outside. If I could figure out how to do it, I’d be there myself. As I’ve mentioned before, the house is very old by American standards with the core of it dating back to the 1700s. One wall of the basement  is of dry-stone construction. That is, there’s no mortar between the stones. This allows a steady flow of air from the soil around it. It takes a prolonged string of abnormally hot days for the temperature in the basement to get above 70-degrees (F) in the summer. Anyone with any brains would spend their time there if they could, which is why the cat does. The dogs probably would too, but the stairs are so steep they won’t even try to use them, and look at me like I’m demented every time I do.

Returning to the bedroom where the fan is circulating the soupy air, once before I fell asleep Bee suddenly sprang into full alertness and started alarm barking, setting the other two off, and introducing me to a problem I’d never encountered before. Normally, an added benefit of fans or air conditioners for pet-owners is that they block sounds that normally would alert the animals. But when one is blessed with a deaf dog with an incredible sense of smell, it turns out that a fan also is capable of sucking in a lot of scents from outside that would not have made it in otherwise.

From a physiological and Understanding-BeeBee point of view, this was very enlightening. In terms of getting sleep, it was not. During the night, Bee went through this routine 3 times, although by the third time the other two dogs ceased to respond. I, of course, woke like a shot every time and had visions of serial killers creeping up the stairs or some substance-abuser stealing the voice recorder I finally figured out how to use that I’d left on the kitchen table. And each time I decided I was so hot, sticky and tired that death couldn’t be much worse and went back to sleep.

But even though I did take a cavalier approach to Bee’s warning while I was in bed, that all changed when I took the dogs out the next morning when it was still dark. For the first time, Bee refused to move from my side. And either because she didn’t or because the other dogs could now smell what she did, they refused to move, too.

So here’s the dilemma, Animal-lovers. You have three dogs, one whose sphincter control is marginal under the best of circumstances, one who is brain-damaged, and one who is not above harassingly you interminably to let her out if she has to go, all of whom have not eliminated in 8 hours. Do you try to coax them to move off at least the minimal aesthetically acceptable distance from the house to do so? Or do you say, “Hey, no prob. Obviously something’s out here that’s bothering you. Let’s go back inside” ?

My primitive aversion to cleaning up animal waste in my nightgown is so strong that it unfortunately overcame my higher brain function. I moved confidently into the darkness and called the pets who then, somewhat reluctantly, followed. However, while I’m waiting in the dark for them and watching Bee’s collar flash nearby like a mutant firefly, memories of the black bear and moose who once occupied the very same space I did at about that same early morning time came back to me. (Why is so easy to remember the things I want to forget and so hard to remember the things I want to?) These thoughts immediately caused me to realize that maybe the dogs were right and that we should get the hell back into the house asap. That’s when I discovered that I’d done such a good job of communicating confidence to the dogs that they decided to do a meticulous molecule-by-molecule analysis of the area looking for The Perfect Spot to urinate and defecate.  Or so I thought.

Just about the time I was ready to turn on my flashlight and turn myself into mosquito fodder to reinforce my, I admit, softly hissed rather than commanding, “Come here this instant!” which, obviously the deaf dog couldn’t hear, Bee moseyed toward me anyhow, followed by Ollie with Fric bringing up the rear.

I haven’t looked around outside carefully since it’s gotten lighter and don’t know that I will. Sure there’s a part of me that’s always fascinated by wild animal prints or droppings near the house. And over the years, I’ve gotten used to the feeling–sometimes proven, sometimes not– of being watched by deer, moose, and other wild creatures in the woods above the house. But this time the heat and humidity, coupled with the silence made whatever was out there seem like he or she was everywhere at once. I found that more unnerving than going eyeball to eyeball with the bear or the rabid raccoon.

But now as I sit in the office and the first sunlight heralds what’s supposed to be another brutally hot day, I realize that I probably won’t find any evidence any closer to the house than usual. Although Bee almost surely barked at a wild animal, most likely it wasn’t a real animal out there that brought all the dogs up short when we went outside. Instead, it was animal scent that had been concentrated and perpetuated by the heat and humidity. Undoubtedly my scent-oriented dogs were able to figure that out which is why their fears diminished. Visually-oriented human wimp that I am, I could not.

I’d been afraid of nothing more than a low-lying cloud of animal scent.

When we first arrived, Geneva was still at daycare so I wasn’t paying as much attention to what was going on as I should have been. Consequently, I didn’t realize that the resident cat, Lena, was downstairs until she suddenly came flying by with Bee in hot pursuit. BeeBee loves to play with my cat, but Lena probably didn’t know that and had no desire to learn. Before I could grab Bee, Lena shot up the stairs, but Bee didn’t realize this and made a few more circuits hoping to catch up with her. After that, Lena made herself scarce and my daughter-in-law created a private space for her to eat and drink in the basement. When Lena wasn’t there, she was on top of or under the bed in the master bedroom upstairs to which Bee had no access.

As expected, Bee was excited when she first saw Geneva, but she responded well to kenneling to take the edge off before Geneva got home from daycare, than calming pressure on shoulder and hips coupled with tethering to the leg of the kitchen table. Based on her response to these activities over the months we’ve been together, limiting her motion enables her to process stimulus input more effectively and prevents her from overloading. It’s easy to tell when Bee overloads because she lets loose with high, piercing barks and jumps up repeatedly. Even if you know and love her like I do, it’s annoying.

Once Bee settled down I began implementing The Plan, The Plan being that Geneva and I would walk BeeBee around the fenced yard with Bee on my left, me holding the bulk of her leash in the middle, and Geneva holding the end of the leash on my right. That didn’t last long because it soon became clear that Bee had no intention of going anywhere other than where we were going while she was leashed. Although I was always right there, it wasn’t long before Geneva was walking Bee herself and we spent many hours walking around that yard. In fact, I soon felt like I was on first-name basis with the individual blades of grass I’d seen them all so many times.

Needless to say, I also got pretty good at cleaning up after Bee. Granted this sounds like an idiot simple task, but everything is more complicated when there’s a very active 2-year-old around, the grass is high, and one is wearing bifocals. It’s amazing how fast one can miss a pile of dog-do and said active toddler can find it under those circumstances. “Look, look! See, see! Oh, oh. Yucky!!!” Call me anal, but I didn’t want to go there.

Because of this, part of my walking-in-the-yard ensemble included two garden trowels. One to scoop with and one to scoop onto. Not exactly haute couture, but very functional. In fact, I got so good with my tools that I could even get one trowel under Bee so she defecated right on it. Alas, this isn’t the kind of skill that impresses many, and I doubted the 2-3 it might lived in that neighborhood, so I limited my use of this newly discovered skill to when no one else was around.

If this gives the impression that not much went on during those walks around the yard, that’s pretty much true with two notable exceptions. One was a virtual downpour of spiraling maple seeds, which I’ve since discovered are actually maple fruits with the lovely name of samara that filled the air like thousands of miniature pinwheels.The majority were the familiar light brown color, but there were also much smaller ones that were green and magenta. Watching them spin in the wind with the brilliant blue sky behind them and the sun turning the brown to gold was a spectacular site. Hearing them at night hitting the roof was an eerie experience. Imagine being in shower of hale with wings. 

The other notable outdoor event occurred when I noticed Lena observing us from her perch on the sill of a basement window. Because she was eye level with Bee, I figured this would not be good. However, before I could point this out to Geneva, she took Bee right up to the window, squatted down and talked to the cat, and Lena spent all of her time hissing at the dog. Throughout all this Bee was oblivious to Lena’s presence.  If I had to guess, I’d say this resulted from a combination of the wind that caused her to focus on more readily available scents, plus the glare on the glass that rendered the cat invisible to an animal with Bee’s decreased vision.

Inside the house, Bee was equally well-behaved although she quickly proved that the part of her brain that contains the Little Kid Eating = Free Food on the Floor Center works fine. Because of that, she spent all of Geneva’s mealtimes tethered to the leg of the kitchen table where she quickly fell asleep. When Geneva was napping and I was working, she’d spend a few seconds looking for Lena and then sleep at my feet. When Geneva was awake, she wanted to be where Geneva was and had less interest in Geneva’s toys that Geneva had in Bee’s. The one exception was Mr Potatohead’s arms for reasons I can’t guess unless it was because Mr Potatohead was a horse’s patootie in Toy Story. But we didn’t watch that movie until later after I threw the cable/TV/DVD/alien-summoning device into a seizure that made watching anything else impossible.

My big concern relative to Bee prior to our arrival was the zoomies, the zoomies being those racing spells dogs get into, either as a form of celebration or a stress-reliever, depending on the context in which they occur. BeeBee, Frica, and now Ollie all experience several daily sessions of these both inside and out. In Bee’s case, these begin with a peculiar jump in which she arches her neck, lifts the front end of her body, and leaps forward. I assume she does this to create the momentum she needs to get her uncoordinated legs working in a coordinated manner sufficient to reach zoomie speed. Even though the resultant gait isn’t normal, it does enable her to move low to the ground at an impressive speed, although she can’t turn as quickly or maintain the pace for as long as the other two.

When she zooms indoors, she sometimes likes to zoom in and out of her crate or under the dog couch in addition to making repeat circuits around the center chimney. These variations usually result in the crate being propelled across the floor and her ricocheting off the couch because she lacks the fine motor skills to avoid collision.

Although the joie de vivre communicated at such times always delights me, the idea of a 2-year-old getting clobbered by Bee during a fly-by or my dog hitting someone else’s nondog furniture did not, so I was always on zoomie alert. But not once during the long weekend did BeeBee zoom.

The trip home was as uneventful as the trip to my son’s, but that all changed after we arrived. Such a joyful canine reunion! Purely speculation on my part, but the dogs’ interactions so reminded me of those that occur when little kids are reunited after similar interludes away from their favorite playmates. All of them were vocalizing at once as if trying to describe what they experienced and ask about the other’s experiences during the separation. No sooner did I let them out than they zoomed.

And zoomed.

And zoomed some more. 

In addition to pulling out all the toys I’d just put back in the toy box, they zoomed inside, too.

But I’d expected them to do that. What I didn’t expect is that, in the week after we got home, Bee would have her own private zoomies, some of them even when the other dogs were asleep. It was only then that I realized how much she had contained herself during all those walks with Geneva and as they played together in the house.  Because she’d done this so willingly and seemingly effortlessly, it never dawned on me how much self-control this required.

Does this mean that I think Bee didn’t enjoy herself with Geneva? Not at all. I think she enjoyed all the new challenges and experiences every bit as much as I did. But once she got back in her familiar environment, she wanted to celebrate all the new experiences she had survived (mostly all by herself!) and all the familiar ones here that she’s come to love and trust in our time together.

At the end of my last entry about BeeBee, I was sitting in my car sobbing, but I didn’t remain that way for long. For one thing, there were too many nice people coming to the clinic who would surely come over to ask me what was wrong.  If they did, I knew I would immediately start blubbering along the lines of, “I just left my brain-damaged, deformed dog to be spayed and what if her too long upper jaw and too short and crooked lower one makes it impossible to pass the tube into her trachea and give her gas anesthesia? And even if that’s not a problem, what if the parts of her brain associated with respiration are as wonky as the rest of her? She sometimes makes a snorffling noise when she’s sleeping: what if that means something? What if _____? And what if ______ or ______?” Sob, sob, sniffle, sniffle ad nauseam. It would not have been pretty.

So instead of sitting in the car crying where everyone could see me I ducked down and fumbled for the box of Kleenex I knew was somewhere on the floor in the back seat. True, I knew that more than a few women had torn their rotator cuffs taking similar actions, but if I did that and someone pounded on the window and asked if I was all right, at least I’d have a more rational reason for my tears.

After a few minutes of hanging with my head upside down on the back floor of my car with my body wedged between the front seats crying and blowing my nose, I felt composed enough to drive home. It’s not a technique I’d recommend for everyone, but it seemed to work for me. I spent most of the day working outdoors transplanting perennials and getting beds ready for planting, and doing other busy work that didn’t require a lot of concentration because I didn’t have any available. Like most people under similar circumstances, I was torn between thinking about Bee and not. As it turned out, it didn’t matter. My thoughts went where they wanted to go. At five, I called the clinic to see how she was doing.

I’d like to say that everything went well as I knew it would, but the truth is that everything went well and I was thrilled. Because she’s normally staggery and because she and the other dogs spend so much time playing, I decided not to pick her up until the next day.

Time for another digression. When you own a high-energy dog who is also high-maintenance for some reason, there’s a tendency to view being separated from that animal somewhat ambivalently. On the one hand, you love the animal and only want the best for him or her. On the other, the idea of not having to deal with all those attendant responsibilities for a day or two seems like a mini-vacation.

Once I knew that Bee was all right, I got caught up in the mini-vacation mode because everything took less time: feeding the dogs, taking them out, working in the office, going to bed. I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it. Even so, I looked forward to the time when I’d pick her up and bring her home.

After she arrived home, Bee reacquainted me with another post-op phenomenon I’d forgotten: the quiet dog who wants to sleep. Instead of enjoying what I knew would be a brief interlude, I wished she’d back to her usual bouncy-staggery self and playing with the other dogs ASAP. What in the world was I thinking?

Bee had to have a few words with Ollie before he accepted that she did not want to roughhouse with him as usual, but Fric knew that something was different right a way. As Bee did with Fric the last week of Fric’s pregnancy when Fric was in no mood to play, the first day Fric laid quietly beside Bee and studied her while wagging her tail slowly. Aside from that she let Bee alone. She did the same thing the second day, only this time brought a toy and placed it in front of Bee. The third day, Bee picked up the toy.

Other than not liking the remnants of the iodine spray on her abdomen and removing it as quickly as an uncoordinated dog with a half-paralyzed tongue can and a change in antibiotics to get the remnants of the infection taken care of, BeeBee’s healing progressed uneventfully, as they say. Not surprisingly, she never missed a meal. I suspect you could offer her a bowl of food when she’s anesthetized and she’d eat it.

With each passing day Bee became more active. Worse–OK better but some days I’m not so sure–she became even more active than she was prior to the surgery. At first I thought I was imagining this, but Fric’s increased tendency to seek high ground for a rest and let Ollie and Bee play together seems to support this contention. It’s as if I had two adult dogs and a puppy before, and now I have two puppies and one adult.

Although logic tells me that Bee’s infection should have been triggered by her going into heat, I now have to wonder if it had been percolating for much longer. It was only after she went into heat that she mastered the art of keeping herself clean and the coordination to do that. Prior to then, I’d wash her daily, a task with which she did not cooperate at all. I know I did my best, but also accept the possibility that it might not have been good enough.

Just something else about Bee I’ll never know.

Her stitches are out, the lower canine (fang) that was pressing against the roof of her mouth has been filed down a bit to decrease its pressure on the roof of her mouth, the antibiotics are all gone.

And all is right with our world.

When we got to the clinic, at first Bee wanted to take a closer look at the donkeys and the llama, but as we got closer to them she decided that wasn’t such a good idea after all. She would have liked to get to know Rosalita the hospital cat who was sunning herself near the steps, but this time I was the one who didn’t think it was a good idea. Rosalita and I have had a few discussions over the years regarding who has dibs on the room where I see my behavioral/bond clients at the clinic and these have taught me two things. One is that Rosalita plays dirty. The other is that she doesn’t like to lose. Not being in the mood to add bite wounds (canine or human) to the agenda, I scooped up BeeBee and made a wide arc around the cat who took a swipe and hissed at us anyhow.

Once inside the clinic, BeeBee gave me yet another lesson in perception. Because of all the years I’ve spent in companion animal practice, I thought I was pretty good at estimating dog and cat  weights. And because I carry Bee up and down the stairs multiple times on any given day, I felt confident that the 20-22 pound weight I’d assigned her was well within the ballpark. Wrong. As she staggered around the platform scale, it quickly became clear that she weighed no more than 16 pounds. And when she finally settled on it, that dropped to 15.5.

I admit that I could be getting weaker as I get older. In fact, I know I am. But I don’t consider carrying BeeBee comparable to carrying a normal dog. When you pick her up, first she throws her head around a few times, and then she becomes dead weight. I have no idea if anyone has ever calculated the perceptual, if not the real, difference between live and dead weight, but to me it’s considerable.

After I got her weight–or she gave it to me–we settled in to wait our turn.

Although BeeBee loves people, dogs, and cats, I’m never sure how they’ll respond to her. What I did find interesting is that all of the people who interacted with her in the waiting room thought she was both normal and quiet beautiful. And what can I say? There’s something very special that happens when people discover this little dog with the very dark brown eyes is wagging her nonexistent tail at them, first tentatively and then vigorously when they acknowledge her. It never fails to make people smile, including me and I’ve seen it a million times.

BeeBee wasn’t such a hit with the other dogs, though. It was difficult to tell whether they were uneasy because they were  at the clinic or they realized there was something wrong with her, or a combination of the two. Rather than have her do her joyous bouncy shrieky bark thing and really upset them, I kept her close. All in all thought she did very well. The four rats who were in for physicals didn’t comment one way or the other.

When our turn came and I put Bee on the examination table, she was very well behaved. And she continued to be very well behaved when the veterinarian who was going to do the surgery took her leash from me and put her down on the floor again after checking her over. While we discussed the surgery and Bee’s limitations, she sat patiently and didn’t make a sound. Nor did she make a sound or move a muscle when I backed away to the door.

Instead, she locked eyes with me and I read so much into that gaze I went numb.

“She can certainly see you from here,” the veterinarian said as I continued backing out the door.

I nodded, quickly shut the door, and retreated to my car.

I barely made it inside before I started to cry.

Alas, Bee’s grooming that day resulted in one of those bad news/good news deals. The bad news is that I noticed a, um, uh sort of, sounds like pussy/pusy/pussie/pusy discharge from her feminine nether regions, a.k.a. a purulent discharge from her vulva in vetspeak. Let me digress here a moment to note that I am referring to pus, not a very small cat oozing out of my dog. For all the years that I have thought of exactly what I saw coming out of Bee as a pus-sy discharge, it never occurred to me that I had no idea how to spell it and even if it was an actual word. As is so typical of Spellcheck’s idiosyncratic nature, it pleaded ignorance to all definitions of the word but had no qualms about commenting on its proper spelling. This struck me as somewhat mystical. Is the proper spelling of a word for which one recognizes no meaning comparable to the sound of one hand clapping?

To continue: the bad news was that Bee obviously had an infection that was producing a gross discharge.

The good news was that Bee had an infection that was producing a gross discharge from her vulva.

At this point you might be asking yourself how this could possibly be good news. Or perhaps you’re thinking I’ve finally gone round the bend as you suspected I would one day. BUT it was good news in that the most likely place that discharge was coming from was an infection in my very long dog’s most likely proportionately very long Y-shaped uterus. Far better that that gross stuff was flowing out rather than trapped within her uterus because that spelled the difference between a relatively normal dog and one who could become direly ill in an instant

Not being one to look a gift discharge in the mouth–how’s that for a disgusting play on words!?–I was very pleased when I was able to schedule Bee for surgery a mere two days later.

That morning, I had to face the first challenge related to this event. You might be thinking this meant the surgery. Nope. I’m referring to withholding food from a dog with a greatly enhanced sense of smell that compensates for her deafness and visual limitations. I have not tested this, but there are days I think this dog easily could smell a single molecule of dogfood from a least a mile away if the wind was right. Moreover, she believes that every such molecule is created specifically for her and it is her mission in life to locate and eat it.

As you might have guessed, feeding two other dogs while not feeding Bee was like telling the Pentagon they can’t have more money. Oh, the noise, the drama! I put her in her crate while I fed Frica and Ollie because I had no doubt she would bulldoze them out of the way and snarf down their food. Although she couldn’t see them daintily eating their breakfast, she knew what was going on and she was not pleased. Had I possessed a magic decoder ring, I suspect I would have heard some deaf-dog profanity that morning because the sounds she was making were unlike any I’d ever heard her make before. My favorite was a half-howl, half-croak emitted from an upside down position with all four fat feet extended heavenward. This I decided was meant to convey the needless tragedy of a certain dog’s immanent death if some heartless, cruel, and abusive poor excuse for a canine bitch didn’t feed her immediately.

When said heartless cruel and abusive saintly (in my version of the story) individual did not and after Bee had sucked up every invisible molecule of food said villain missed prior to freeing her, she was back to her usual self. After stomping Ollie a few times, she acted like nothing had happened.

Until we got to the clinic…

Previously I wrote about putting a Gentle Leader on BeeBee in hopes of reducing the troubling edginess she displayed around the puppies. It worked well and I rarely saw her acting as if it bothered her in any way. Because of this, one evening when I was brushing her (dog grooming is a daily routine with me and further evidence that I have no life) it surprised me to see that she was missing some hair on the skin between her eyes and the nose loop of the collar. Because the loop is loose enough that she could easily get it off if she wanted to, I couldn’t understand what was going on. But then I started to watch her more closely and discovered that this was a consequence of a game she now played primarily with Ollie, although sometimes Fric and the cat joined in, too.

The game consists of Bee pounding on Ollie who then races under the chaise with Bee in hot pursuit. But although Bee can wriggle under it, she has to slow down to do it. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t get her head down far enough. When this happens only her needle nose goes under and the rest of her head plows into the padded chaise and suddenly stops the action. Concurrently, the nose loop of the collar gets shoved up on her muzzle with enough force that, after multiple shoves, it’s worn the hair off. While all this is going on, Ollie or whoever is under the chaise escapes, gets Bee from behind, Bee backs up, and the game is on again.

That solved the mystery. But what to do about it? I did consider wrapping the nose loop with duct tape simply because duct tape is my first answer for everything. However, I quickly dismissed that idea for reasons too numerous to mention and decided moleskin was the way to go. 

So off I went to the local Wal-Mart to support the Chinese economy, undermine the American way of life, and hopefully find some moleskin. As it turned out, once there I remembered exactly where to find it because I had been misdirected to it by a clerk the previous week. Yes, you read that correctly. I did say “misdirected.” I forget what I wanted but the clerk I asked told me I could find it against the wall next to the pharmacy. Wrong. All I found there was such a dizzying array of condoms and vaginal creams and douches it made me wonder what went on in Claremont that I didn’t know about, but then I decided I didn’t want to know. Because what I wanted obviously wasn’t there, I’d wandered around a bit in that general area and found what I was looking for next to–in case you were wondering where this was going–the feet-related section with its moleskin products among others. Thanks to that what I now I considered a fortuitous past event, I could find what I wanted immediately.

Because one of the trials of being anal is that you worry about things that no sane person would, I worried about how Bee would act when I removed her GL long enough to put the moleskin on the underside of the nose loop. Would she immediately charge after Ollie with the idea of prodding him to death with her nose to make up for all those weeks she’s behaved? Should I put her in her crate to prevent this?

As so often happens with my anal worries, they turned out to be groundless. Not only did Bee not go after Ollie, she never left my side the whole time I worked on her collar. In fact, she kept her eyes glued on me and that collar the whole time. She reminded me of a little kid watching her beloved security blanket being mended. When I had finished, she stood perfectly still while I put it back on her.

Then she looked at Ollie, gave her peculiar but nonetheless loud and irritating deaf-dog bark, and chased him under the chaise.

Since my last post several weeks ago, a lot has happened  to remind me how much the quality of our realities depends on how we process the sensory stimuli we receive from the world around us. It began when winter ended. I don’t mean “ended” as in “It gradually started to get warmer and the snow gradually melted.” I mean ended as in kaput, pffffttt! One day and it was winter and the next, the Big Thaw was on. Plow lines along the road, driveway, and front walk shrank so rapidly, I felt disoriented and even somewhat vulnerable. Until it wasn’t there, I didn’t realize what a safe cocoon all that snow made. Human and animals had been pretty much limited to the walk and small parking area in front of the house with few distractions. By January, the plow lines on either side of the road and driveway were so high and deep that skidding while driving wasn’t much of issue. True, I might bounce off a snow bank, but there was no way I was going to go through one and down an embankment or into a ditch.

The snow melted so quickly that I had the distinct  feeling that, sans all that snow on either side, I could fall off the walk and into the flower beds lining it. The slight feeling of vertigo that accompanied this fortunately waned before questions regarding my mental stability had time to form. As the snow receded in the parking area, I felt like a dog confined to a run whose barriers suddenly disappear: Where did all this space come from?  As the area exposed rapidly grew larger and larger, I also discovered another faulty perception on my part: the dogs hadn’t been eliminating around the perimeter of the parking area; they’d been eliminating around the perimeter of the plowed parking area. Because this area kept shrinking, that meant quite a large area.

Another perception that bit the dust was that I’d been able to clean up after them all winter, except when there was a storm. On second thought, that perception was probably pretty accurate. It was just that we had so many storms that there still was a lot to clean up. The worst part of that was that some of it was Watson’s. In that instant I sensed what it must feel like to stumble upon the disintegrating remains of droppings left by the last member of an endangered species. Seeing that irrefutable physiological evidence of a being once so alive who was no more and never would be again hit me very hard, much harder than finding one of Watson’s old  toys.

But while I was trying to negotiate this metaphysical morass, the puppies, Fric, and BeeBee were in heaven. Each day brought a new layer of scents for them to process and more ground to explore. Best of all, it brought puddles of water and mud to chase each other through. I’m sure there are those who would disagree, but I don’t think any breed of dog can get as much splash distance out of a mud puddle than a corgi who hits one at full speed with his or her fat front feet. The only exception might be a brain-damaged corgi named BeeBee whose normal high-speed gait consists of lunging attacks on the ground with her front paws. This is not a dog you want to be wearing your white prom dress around on a rainy day! In spite of this and providing further evidence of my questionable mental state, I took the puppies out every day and watched them transform themselves and each other from fluff balls into sodden lumps of mud and debris.

Since I last wrote the last two puppies have gone to wonderful homes and things dried out in more than a week of days so dry and sunny I felt giddy.  The pups’ departure was easier for Fric this time (see http://www.mmilani.com/commentary-200606.html for a description of what happened the last)  because this time one of them stayed, although there are times she looks at him then at me as if to say, “Remind me again. Why was it that I didn’t want them all to go away?”

Getting back to perceptions, from the time the puppies were born, I had to constantly remind myself that they weren’t deaf. I’d become so use to linking “puppy” with “deaf” since BeeBee’s arrival that I had to consciously override that inclination. Now that it’s Fric, Bee, and Ollie, the human-canine communication is such a curious mix of signals for the deaf, visually impaired, and uncoordinated, a “normal” adult, and a “normal” puppy that–I admit–I periodically get confused. So, for example, I sometimes might give a verbal command to Bee and an exaggerated hand signal to Ollie. Interesting (and thankfully!) Bee is becoming very good at reading my lips or the body language associated with those verbal commands while Fric has mastered the exaggerated signals I use with Bee and is teaching them to Ollie.

What’s even more interesting is that there are times when BeeBee is, as I refer to her, “the good dog.”  This usually occurs when I use both a verbal and a hand (more correctly a sweeping arm) signal when I want the dogs to come in after a play session. Perhaps because she intuitively recognizes that she needs to stay on my good side more than the other two, Bee is usually the first to respond. Fric has already figured out that, if Bee comes, pretty much all of her excuses for not coming go down the toilet.  I can easily imagine her saying to Ollie, “Son, if the deaf, half-blind brain-damaged dog obeys when she gives the signal, you’re gonna have a hard time convincing her you didn’t know what she was talking about.”  Whatever the reason, Ollie’s response is getting much better, although I’ve had to remind Fric on several occasions that verifying that the young and disabled are headed safely into the house is not her signal to take off and do her own thing.

Meanwhile the yellow alien has vanished and reappeared so many times, I’ve lost count. I assume it has something to do with Frica because, until the past two days, she’s the only one I’ve ever seen pay any attention to it. However, two days ago Ollie discovered it and likes to drag in under a chair where he’s safe from Bee’s probing proboscis. Once there, he happily gnaws on it for a while until the cat goes by or Bee turns her back. Then the chase is on.

And so life continues.

Sunday was a gorgeous day and the snow was still melting so the puppies had lots to explore. Although playing “King of the Snow Mountain” and “Let’s Sneak Around to the Back of the House and Watch the Old Girl Stagger After Us in the Deep Snow” kept them busy for a while, by far the favorite game was “Chase Your Brothers Through the Puddles and Slush.” In addition to what it’s name implies, the latter also includes stomping in said slush and water to see what happens, with its corollary being”America’s Favorite Puppy Dirtbag,” which involves running full-speed at “She Who Might or Might Not Be Obeyed” and leaping on her to confirm one’s grubby status. Because jeans or sweatpants, a sweatshirt, and LL Bean boots have been my at-home ensemble all winter, this wasn’t that much of an issue.

At this point I could describe how ecstatic I was when various puppies defecated or urinated outdoors, but I do not want to provide further proof of the limited life I lead.

The other newsworthy event this past week was introducing BeeBee to Ollie outside of the pen. From the beginning, I’ve allowed her to sniff all of the pups and to have her front paws on my lap when I checked them daily. Although she never did anything harmful, BeeBee is BeeBee; because of her deafness and visual problems, she lives in a world in which things can appear and disappear without warning and sometimes this upsets or frustrates her. And because she’s so low to the ground, there isn’t a piece of furniture in my place that a puppy could go under to escape that she couldn’t get under, too. Still, I knew I had to introduce them downstairs where it was more open and away from the rest of the pups.

But I chickened out. Or rather, semi-chickened out. Because the image of what Watson did to Bee was still fresh in my mind, I knew I couldn’t trust my emotions not to interfere in any evaluation of Ollie-Bee interaction. In that case, my fear could turn what otherwise would have been a neutral or positive encounter into something negative. Hoping to avoid that, I invited best buddy Ann over to observe the action with me because I knew she would have the objectivity that I might not. So she held BeeBee and I brought Ollie downstairs and after a few minutes Ann tactfully observed that Bee was a very “drivey” dog, which is one of those terms that elicits images of an out-of-control-freight train. This is actually pretty accurate if you think about it because corgis are working dogs and like all working dogs they’re more aggressive. This isn’t to say that they’re more violent, but rather than they’re more responsive to changes in their environment. If you imagine a 25-35# dwarf bred to herd cattle, I’m sure you can appreciate the value of this. However, when the change to which you’re responding is a 3.5# pup who, in Bee’s reality, conceivably silently pops in and out of her visual field, an increase in the level of reactivity to keep track of this new addition is the logical response.

That increased reactivity extends to her paws and BeeBee doesn’t use her paws like other dogs, either. Because she lacks the fine motor skills and coordination to easily lift one paw and lightly bat another dog in play, she either hits with both paws or throws herself on the other dog. The more aroused she is, the more energy she puts into these displays.

Ann and I watched the two of them a little longer and then both agreed that BeeBee needed a Gentle Leader head collar to, we hope, help take the edge off. And, in fact, it settled her down a great deal and she barely resisted the message. So for about a week, I’d take Ollie downstairs and let him run around while I held a leash attached to Bee. She knows the signal for “Gentle” and I had to use that initially, but then I realized that, aside from using that nose of hers like a shovel, she was no rougher on Ollie than Fric was. Still I hesitated to let go of the least, let alone let the other pups out with her.

Until today. It began last night when the puppies had so much energy they just about destroyed the pen. Every paper that could be reached was shredded. Everything that could be tossed or stomped on was. Every loud noise that could be made was. More exercise was obviously needed. To remedy that, I took them outside to run and run and run and run some more, including up and down the plow mound and even over the lower parts of the woodpile. When they all had their little tongues hanging out, I stuffed their soaking wet bodies into my coat and brought them in. Bee was very interested in then as usual when I went out, but she stayed when I told her to. Ditto when I returned. Later, I was working in the office and the puppy frat house got into full swing behind me again. Because I wasn’t getting any work done anyhow–puppy chaos is not conducive to putting together a presentation on pet loss–I took Ollie downstairs for his daily dose of Aunt Bee. Each day she’s gotten better and fueled by the memory of last night’s rowdiness, I brought her and Ollie back up to the office and got the other pups out of the pen, too. As soon as I did that, she started trying to herd them, probably because they look herdable, kinda like the tribbles in that famous Star Trek episode. But Bee quickly discovered that, quite unlike the tribbles who only wanted to please, the puppies had no desire to do anything so, so bovine.

It started with the biggest puppy sizing Bee up while Fric watched.

Then the attack began and it was merciless. My worst nightmare was coming true. No, wait. That’s not a defenseless puppy being attacked. That’s two rowdy puppies attacking poor Aunt Bee! Ho-hum says Fric.

Oh, the canine carnage! Here you can see the puppy formerly known as Peanut Buttercup now known as Finnegan launching an aerial attack while Ollie comes in for the kill.

And a great time was had by all.

If BeeBee wasn’t sound asleep on my foot, I’d get up and take one last picture of them all zonked out.

So all that worry for nothing. Still, I know myself enough to know I could not have done it any other way. Now the puppies have a new playmate and, if I’m lucky, she’ll tire them out before bedtime tonight. And every night from now on.

The puppies are now 8 weeks old and will go in for exams, health certificates, and their first vaccines this week. They continue physically and behaviorally developing at what seems like a breath-taking rate. Nonetheless, Fric believes they still need a mother’s touch as well as some comfort nursing so they eat half their food and she eats the rest in addition to her own and continues nursing. I remain in awe of her dedication to this because all have a full mouth of parahna teeth and are do big she must stand while they nurse. Still I doubt she’ll give up this part of her maternal duties until she thinks it’s time. As I watch her I have to wonder if, as in cats, the act of nursing also keeps puppies in the learning mind-set relative to those things their mum thinks they need to know to succeed in a human world.

Just for the heck of it, I removed the small crate from the pen today and replaced it with a small cardboard box. In no time, they were all playing King of the Mountain. But no sooner did the Masked Marvel get up there than he started eying a clean towel draped over the edge of the pen beyond his reach. Darned if, as I’ve been writing this, they didn’t push the box over under that towel. When I just turned around to see what they were up to, he was on top of the box and the towel was in the pen where the puppy Formerly Known as Peanut Buttercup was vigorously attacking it.

And speaking of the Masked Marvel, I’ve decided to keep him rather than Cori. I realized that my desire for a female arose EBB, i.e, in the era before BeeBee. As I’ve watched her develop into a typical corgi (aka, a saw-offed German shepherd dog) and recalled my own recommendation to have as much difference between dogs in a multiple dog household as possible, I realized another female, and especially a spirited one with at least a few twists of leprechaun DNA like Cori might add a degree of spice I didn’t want at this stage of my life. It was a very difficult decision to make because she really is something special, but the Masked Marvel, whom I’m thinking about calling Ollie (as in “I don’t know, what do you think Ollie?” rather than colleague of Kookla and Fran), is much more laid back.

This week also brought a progression of visitors which was good for three reasons. The first was that it was very good for the puppies. The second is that the weather was decent enough that it was possible. And the third was that the hole in the driveway didn’t get any bigger with the increased traffic.

On the downside, it also brought a problem Watson has been having to the forefront much sooner and in a way much more dramatic than I was prepared for. I’ve been aware that he was aging rapidly and that his sensory perception was waning. And for years he’s had minor seizures, but these were sufficiently infrequent and short that the side-effects of the medication would have been more problematic than the seizures themselves. He was responding well to a new painkiller for joint-related discomfort and I’d worked through several scenarios regarding what I’d do the day he couldn’t make it up the stairs by himself. Having dealt with this with BeeBee, it wasn’t a big deal. I also notice that sometimes he became disoriented, but chalked that up to his loss of hearing and vision plus confusion created by wind, etc. When he reacted with an uncharacteristic amount of vigor when the pups were harassing him on Thursday, I chalked that up to the stress of company and the more numerous trips he’d been making up and down the stairs associated with this. Yes, and not for the first time, the niggling thought occurred to me that all was not well, but I could find plenty of reasons not to believe that.

Anyhow to make a long story short, Saturday morning he had what we suspect was a psychomotor seizure. For no reason that I can discern, this incredibly tolerant lovable lump o’hound suddenly went into attack mode and repeatedly lunged and bit at something I could neither see nor hear. Unfortunately, in the process of doing this, he encountered Bee and she wound up with multiple puncture wounds on her face and head. And damned if most of them weren’t on her good side. As I pulled him away from her, he growled at me, but it was an unusual sound, not only because he so rarely ever growled but also because it didn’t sound like a normal growl. It was obvious he had no idea who I was or what he was doing. The whole episode only lasted a minute or two, if that, and when it ended all of the signs I didn’t want to see suddenly became crystal clear. After I was sure Bee was OK, I took him to the clinic with me when I went in to see a client. He was the first of my animals with whom I did not stay or euthanize myself. I knew it had to be done and that it was the right thing to do, but I could not bring myself to remember him any way other than as I saw him on the drive to the clinic, hanging with his head out the car window so he wouldn’t throw up while I froze to death driving the 20 miles.

By time I got back from the clinic, all I wanted to do was make sure Bee was OK yet again, feed everyone, clean up the puppies and go to bed. Instead, after crying most of the way home, I had a major weep-out, talked to Ann and cried again, and talked to Dan and cried some more.However, the puppies would have none of my blubbering. They’ve become accustomed to me letting them out of the pen every day so they can race, bounce, jump on, leap, climb, slide, fall, roll, and do all the other things puppies like to do with mad abandon until they drop. And so I did and they did. And then I went to bed.

I think I mentioned in the BeeBee Chronicles that because of her pronounced (greatly!!) overbite and semi-paralyzed tongue, Bee’s breath normally smells like a wet dirty sneaker. Because one of her wounds is inexplicably on the inside of cheek and there was still a small amount of blood seeping from it, sleeping with her in the bed last night was like sleeping with a +20 pound used tampon. Although my aesthetic self screamed at me to have her sleep elsewhere, I didn’t have the heart to do it. Instead, I put a healthy slug of lavender oil on either end of my pillow case to drown the stench. She’s living proof of lavender’s calming effect because she slept like a rock. She’s a little more subdued than usual, but not enough to cause her to miss a molecule of food last night and this morning. That and some swelling are about it, and I can’t say I mind the subdued part all that much because I feel pretty subdued myself.

I feel like I should write something about Wats and what a great dog he was but the words don’t come. It happened too fast. And, yeah, he was just a dog. But like all living beings, he was unique.

“Time to chill,” say the puppies. They’ve now pulled down a little rug that was also hanging over the edge of the pen, dragged it to an open area behind me, and are now sleeping in a pile on it. Beats me how anyone could look at that and not think that all was right with at least their little part of the world.

Now to set the scene for what happened when I got home. Earlier this week I got an email from a college student who wanted to debunk the myth of domestic canine behavior being related to wolf behavior; she asked if I knew of any peer-reviewed studies that would confirm this. She opened her request, as some people do, with a list of all the notables she had contacted who were unable to help her. I can never figure out whether I’m supposed to be flattered by being lumped with this group, albeit at the end of the list, or whether these people are telling me they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel by writing me. Anyhow, I told her the obvious (kindly!) which was that I doubted she’d find any peer-reviewed articles on that subject because I couldn’t imagine anyone with any background in canine ethology writing such an article or, if someone (I did not say “some idiot”) did, I could not imagine any academic wanting to put his or her own credibility on the line by giving such a good review. Saying domestic canine behavior had no relationship to wolf behavior was like saying human and primate behavior had nothing in common. She, btw, was grateful for this insight.

Fast forward to late yesterday afternoon when I arrived home in the middle of an icy cold downpour. The adult dogs greeted me with their usual, “Thank God, you’re home, my bladder is about to burst!! How could you leave me so long?!” routine. This lasted as long as it took them to look outside when I opened the door for them to go out. Then I had to practically throw them out and stay out there with them until they did what they’d told me they were dying to do. When I came back in, I fixed dinner for everyone. For the puppies, that meant a plate of high quality commercial mush. But the bigger dogs are on a raw diet, so that meant a turkey neck for Watson and chicken necks for BeeBee and Frica.

While the canine adults were gnawing away downstairs, I took the mush up to the puppies and assured them that I would never desert them and they would never starve to death, etc. etc. and that although I might not be as good as Rita, I was all they had. Soon Fric came up with one of her chicken necks and I automatically assumed that she wanted to be close to me because I’d been gone so long. I picked up the chicken neck and took it back downstairs and she came with it. Downstairs, I discovered she still had two chicken necks left. But she immediately started eating them so I didn’t give it another thought and instead went back upstairs to do some things in the office. A short while later, she came back up, too, and I assumed she did because she’d finished eating and wanted to check on the pups. Wrong. When I turned in response to a scuffle in the pen, I saw her on top of the crate peering down at the four pups clustered around a chicken neck she’d obviously dropped among them as if unsure whether it was friend or foe. About the time the Hulk decided it was his, I made a grab for him and convinced him it wasn’t.

Then I had a discussion with Fric, reminding her that she’d missed a few critical steps in the wolf/wild dog mealtime evolutionary sequence. When she got tired of nursing, the next step was to eat her prey and then regurgitate it to her young a while later when it was partially digested and nice and warm. Once their digestive tracts got use to that, then she could introduce them to chunks they could grind up themselves. She naturally looked at me as if I were nuts, as all the pets (and some of my students) do when I try to educate them in the finer points of their heritage.

Fric didn’t do this with her first litter which suggests that either having one more puppy or being older triggered the behavior. That she by-passed the barfing stage of the wild sequence doesn’t really surprise me because that seems like a behavior that humans would have selected against. Even if our ancestors didn’t, even the best intentioned contemporary owner (myself among them) often has difficulty providing positive reinforcement when the dog pukes in the house. I can see a good bitch not wanting to subject her pups to that negative human response. What Fric thought about me flying over the pen, grabbing the Hulk, and taking away the chicken neck is a different story, as is what she thought when I gave the spit-covered morsel to Bee.

Still, I wished that college student had been there to see this (sans my flying leap, of course) because the behavior was so clearly a variation on an ancient theme that had ensured the survival of countless generations of wild canines, including wolves.