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.

Luke, by Mary Oliver from Red Birds

I had a dog
who loved flowers
Briskly she went
through the fields.

yet paused
for the honeysuckle
or the rose,
her dark head

and her wet nose
touching
the face
of every one

with its petals
of silk
with its fragrance
rising

into the air
where the bees,
their bodies,
heavy with pollen,

hovered-
and easily
she adored
every blossom,

not in the serious,
careful way
that we choose
this blossom or that blossom -

the way we praise or don’t praise -
the way we love
or don’t love-
but the way

we long to be -
that happy
in the heaven of earth -
that wild, that loving.

Ollie by Myrna Milani from the as yet unwritten Poems for Preparing the Soil

I had a puppy
who loved manure
Briskly he went
through the newly turned garden

yet paused
for the turd
or the turdette
his brindled head

and his wet nose
touching
the surface
of every one

with its bits of
of hay
with its fragrance
rising

into the air
where the flies,
their bodies,
trembling with anticipation,

hovered-
and easily
he adored
every nugget,

not in the serious,
careful way
that we choose
this salad or that dessert-

the way we praise or don’t praise -
the way we love
or don’t love-
but the way

we long to be -
that happy
in the heaven of earth -
that wild, that loving.

that indiscriminate
in our eating habits.

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.

Being the doting grandmother I am, I read the product reviews and discovered that, in addition to some reviewers thinking the poop looked much too much like brown TicTacs (?) and the usual hysteria about little kids eating the pooper-scooper and dying or doing likewise because the toy may have been made in China, some solid medical information about Tanner’s (the dog’s) physiology emerged. Several reviewers noted that Tanner’s diet of treats resulted in constipation that could be relieved by using a paperclip. However, another reviewer noted that, if this weren’t done carefully, one could throw Tanner into diarrhea and the treats would fall out of him of their own accord.

All of this led me to conclude that this doll needs a new name because the dog obviously has problems. Unless he’s some sort of messiah dog who can turn stool into treats, the combination of copraphagia (stool-eating) plus intermittent constipation that ultimately may give way to diarrhea suggests that Tanner’s gastro-intestinal system is not up to par. If nothing else, he’s not absorbing the nutrients from those treats and thus running them through the system again. Fortunately, my granddaughter also has Veterinary Barbie so hopefully she can get to the root of this problem quickly.

Makes me glad all my dollies did, at most, was pee, and all my toy dogs just sat there and looked at me.

And also one of them with their mom and Watson in happier days.

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.

This morning when I came downstairs, the alien was right in the middle of the kitchen floor and the porcupine beside him. The last time I’d seen the alien it was upstairs, and I haven’t seen the porcupine in ages. Maybe Bee sensed the alien locating the porcupine, or the porcupine locating the alien, or the two of them rendezvousing in the kitchen to do whatever aliens and porcupines do in such places. While I was fixing their breakfasts and doing my yoga, all of the dogs walked around the two toys without disturbing them. It was only later when Bee and Fric got involved in one of their increasingly common, boistrous games in which one of them tries the flip the other by grabbing the other by the muzzle that both the alien and the porcupine took a hit.

I guess it’s also possible that something related to the puppies set BeeBee off because she seems to view them far more maternally now than she did in the past. I don’t know if that’s because she’s in heat or because the pups are now big enough they don’t look like rodents of other edibles any more. But even if she sees herself as Aunt Bee, Fric still isn’t convinced. As soon as she sees her puppies getting too chummy with Aunt Bee through the pen, she leaps into it and does the snarly bit. Fric also seems determnined to keep nursing the pups, allowing them to eat just enough puppy food to develop their eating skills, then snarfing up the bulk of it herself. Other times as soon as I put the puppie’s food down, she shamelessly throws herself down beside and flaunts her mammary glands as if to say, “Why eat that when you can have this?” Can’t imagine what Freud would say about that.

Below is the first decent close-up of Bee that I’ve had in a long time. Her wonky jaw is pretty obvious as is the ear that continues to march to the sound of a different or distant drummer of its own.

No doubt about it, they’re definitely getting bigger.