Poodle problems

My dog looks young and perky. She is still lean and bouncy. However she is 14, deaf, and foolish.

Once upon a time I could let her out in the back yard when we woke up in the morning and she would do her business and come back inside.  My yard covers a third of an acre, which seemed to satisfy her need for exploration. She stayed within its bounds, even though it’s only partially fenced.

Lately she’s taken to wandering. Bored after years of the same damn dogfood every day, perhaps she seeks some hapless workman’s lunch? Bored after years of the same damn yard, perhaps she seeks new vistas? Bored after years of the same damn owner, perhaps she seeks fresh love?

Today she went too far.  Dangerously too far - like all the way to the main drag a couple of blocks away, where she was trotting up the middle of the road.  A neighbor chased her home and rang my doorbell at 7 a.m. with Molly in tow.

Whatever her reasons, I have to put a stop to it.  Legally speaking, we have a leash law and she’s not on one during these early morning meanders. But mainly she needs to be protected from cars, and cars need to be protected from her. She doesn’t hear warning honks so she just muddles merrily along.

I’m beginning to see the writing on the wall. Either I stagger out with her at dawn (in the dark…and in the winter in the rain) or I get a long lead and tie her up in the back yard while I come to consciousness.  (I could just stand there with her but it often takes her up to ten minutes to find the perfect poop place - you could say she’s a picky pooper and as I’ve said, patience is not my strong suit.)

One of the challenges of owning a dog…

Pruning: poodle department

I love to prune. To clip away the extraneous in order to reveal the essence. It’s my favorite part of gardening - partly because you don’t have to do it on your knees as when you remove weeds… but mostly because done well it’s an art form. More about that in another post.

Once a month I practice my pruning skills on my standard poodle Molly. Again, my pleasure is partly due to my natural state of parsimony (the quality of being careful with money or resources, AKA thrifty, stingy), but more to the opportunity to spend quality time, face to face with my dog.

She does not like being pruned. Especially her feet. You would think that after fourteen years (her birthday was two days ago) she would be used to it, but no.

She knows when the pruning is coming because it’s the only time I use my shower (I’m a bath person but the shower has a moveable nozzle, which is perfect for washing doggies). She slinks into the bathroom - drawn by the prospect of the warm water and physical attention, but repelled by the clipping that will follow.

I use the standard Oster clippers which make a loud buzzing sound. She tolerates her face being shaved, but she goes nuts when I work on her feet. Perhaps the buzz and vibration tickles? Because of her age, she has a few skin bumps that I have to be careful not to trim off…

Here she is: lovely face revealed again…

Of course, MY idea of dog pruning and the dog show idea of dog pruning are like night and day. This is a miniature (mid-sized) guy named Minimoto - a winner in his category at Westminster. Holy moly - that is some serious hair-styling!

Poodle’s progress

My dog Molly will be 14 in a week.

Last week, while I was out of town and had left her with some friends who consider her their adopted child, she suddenly developed the colly-wobbles. The blind staggers, if you will. Her eyes started to go spastic and her legs just collapsed. She couldn’t stand up because it was obvious she was completely dizzy.

In a panic they took her to the vet, afraid she’d had a stroke. Turns out it was a very common disorder in older dogs - an inner ear disturbance. Old dog vestibular syndrome is what it’s called. The vet gave her some anti-nausea medication in case she was queasy and told my friends she’d probably be better in a few days.

They called me right away but I was 2000 miles away and could only rely on their good judgment and special care. Molly has been such an amazingly healthy dog that I’ve really not considered what life would be like without her. Just having her constant company by my desk, by my bed, at my chair is a comfort I’ve taken for granted. No more.

By the time I got home Molly was significantly better, though she kept her head tipped to the left as if she were perpetually saying, “Wha??”

Now, about ten days later she seems pretty much back to normal. Still deaf, but clearly not blind because on our walk this morning she took off like a rocket after a rabbit in the bushes.

Phew. Disaster averted for now.

Piles of Poop

Until recently I thought little about what happens when my dog poops. We live outside the city so when she poops by a pasture I let it sit there. What’s one little pile o’ poop in the grand natural scheme?

Then I did the math. If my dog’s daily pile is multiplied by the daily piles generated by the 72 million other dogs in America (= 274 pounds per pooch annually) that’s 19.7 BILLION steaming pounds of poop a year.

If we don’t scoop, it gets into our streams, ponds and rivers, causing sickening levels of fecal coliform bacteria, feeding weeds and algae that choke the waterways and deprive the water of oxygen.

Dog poop carries a variety of other pathogens and parasites that can live on in our lawns for years and infect children who play there and adults who cultivate it. And these pathogens and parasites won’t die in your compost pile.

So now I’m a believer – I scoop.

For now I collect it in the plastic bag my newspaper comes in, then flush it down the toilet where it will be joined at a treatment plant with I hate to think how much people poop. (Cat poop and disposable diapers are a topic for another day…)

But whether or not you’ve got a pooping pet, there’s a much larger lesson here.

We think of ourselves as single players whose actions and inactions are just drops in the national, global or universal bucket. Until we do the multiplication we are unaware of how our individual acts add up.

Even then, we don’t want to conserve at our end if everyone else isn’t also doing their part… why should we suffer alone?

Garrett Hardin wrote a famous essay for the journal Science back in 1968 called the “Tragedy of the Commons” to describe this phenomenon.

The commons is a resource shared by a group or society – like rivers, oceans, the atmosphere, fish stocks, the national parks. In Britain, shepherds often shared local pastureland, which is the example Hardin used. Each shepherd wants to get the most out of this shared resource so he will add sheep if he has the means to do so. Each herder notes that the other herders are adding sheep, so why shouldn’t he? But with each sheep added, the quality of the pasture for all is reduced. No ONE takes responsibility. Ultimately, this leads to overgrazing and the degradation of the resource.

It’s time for each of us to do our part. Our children’s future depends on it.

Play #1

I have two aging pets, Fritz the cat, who will be 17 in a few months, and Molly the standard poodle, who is almost 14.

I’ve been kind of wishing they were a little more fun, a little livelier. But maybe that was too much to expect from such old critters. Maybe what I needed was a young thing (a kitten?) to juice things up.

Then I remembered what Gandhi said: “Be the change that you want to see in the world.” I wondered if the seriousness was not in them but in me. Perhaps I was the one who needed to be more playful.

So when Molly came back in from her morning poop, I stood and faced her and went into the doggy “I want to play” pose - a bouncy semi-squat.

She was surprised for a moment, and then she did the pose herself and started jumping all around, very excited and tail-waggy. We did this a few more times till the energy fairly buzzed in the room. This attracted Fritz, who usually sleeps most of the day. As soon as he came into the room, Molly did the doggy pose to him.

Normally he will have nothing to do with her, but this time he walked back and forth under her nose, waving his tail into her chin. Meowing and purring.

This doesn’t sound like much, but in our small household it was delightful shift.

I think Play may require more than one post…