Letting go, play and Blake

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Blake was a cat killer.  An accidental cat killer, it’s true, but he lost his home because of it. 

Blake leaving his cat killing days behind

Blake had been adopted by a loving, nurturing woman, who also fostered cats for a cat rescue.  She had neglected to ask whether Blake had a benign attitude toward cats or not.  She noticed he was thrilled when he caught a glimpse of a cat or kitten.  He would try to chase them or leap toward them, the same way he had always played with other dogs. 

Blake’s new owner kept the cats on the second floor of her house and Blake on the ground floor, thinking this would be an ideal solution.  It worked for a while for a handful of months, but Blake was always aware that the cats were just out of his reach.  He knew they were there since he could hear their meows and smell their enticing feline smells. One day, Blake saw his opportunity.  His owner wasn’t quick enough and Blake raced up the stairs intent on finding the cats.  Before she could grab him, Blake had found a cat and grabbed it to play and wrestle together.  The cat didn’t survive.

I met Blake’s owner in a mall parking lot on a Sunday morning.  She was weeping but determined to return him, her granddaughter weeping beside her.  Blake stood there, tentatively wagging his tail, knowing something was amiss.  After goodbye hugs, he jumped into my car and watched through the windows as we sped away. He whined for a while, then accepted that life was changing for him.  He lay in the back seat for a while, head on his paws and sighing.  In an hour, halfway to my house, I felt a cold nose nudge the back of my neck and hot breath on my skin.  There was Blake, reflected in the rear view mirror, grinning a tentative grin.

Blake had come from a southern state where someone had named him Spade.  His new, cat-owning mom had never changed it, perhaps not knowing she could.  Before I drove to get him, I asked Cindy, the rescue’s adoption coordinator, “Can I change his name?”  “Go for it,” she encouraged me. It seemed to me that he already had enough baggage what with the cat killing and all.  He didn’t need to keep that particular name.  On the drive home, I tried out names that sounded similar to the one he had.  “Jake,” I said to him.  He looked back.  “Chase,” I tried out.  He looked at me politely.  “Blake,” I said.  His ears pricked up and he gave a small wag.  “You got a new name, pup,” I told him.  He grinned.

Blake was a smart, happy, curious, one-year old dog. He bounded into my house and was thrilled to meet my two dogs.  Very shortly, he was play bowing, leaping and inviting them to wrestle.  His past misdeeds and sadness at leaving his home vanished quickly.  He looked for things that made him happy – toys, treats, praise, new smells, new experiences – and threw himself into each and every one.

He barked excitedly and often.  My dogs didn’t mind that at all.  They stood there listening and never ran away hissing.  They would smile at him, eyes lighting up at his joy in life. Blake always grinned back.  He was also a relentless slipper stealer.  When I kicked my slippers off, he would dart in, grab one slipper and race away.  In the mornings, I would often have to hunt for slippers I had left in their usual spot overnight.  Seldom were they where I had left them.

After a few weeks, a new adopter fell in love with Blake’s picture online.  We agreed to meet at a dog park where Blake could run and wrestle with other dogs and she could see him at his happiest.  She brought a handsome new collar for Blake and was pretty sure she would take him home that day.  I explained that although his paperwork had his old name, he knew his new name, Blake.  “I love the name Blake,” she said.  Best of all, she told me she was allergic to cats and would never be able to live with one.  Blake had landed in the perfect home. “There is someone for every dog,” Cindy told me afterward.  She was right.

Fear, tennis balls and Dakota

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Dakota watching from the sofa

When I took Dakota’s leash to walk her to my car, she dropped nearly to her belly.  She slunk, half-crouched, for the two dozen steps across the parking lot.  When I opened the car door, she jumped in and immediately slumped to lay on the back seat, face pressed to the cushions, eyes mostly closed.  She remained that way for the short drive to my house.

Dakota was what is called a “return” among rescue organizations.  She had been adopted by a family with small children, one of whom had special needs. It wasn’t a good match.  Her adoptive mom told me she had her hands full and the children more or less swarmed over Dakota, sometimes shrieking in her ears.  She had gone from being a happy but shy dog to the one I met, fearing what might happen next.  At the end of one particularly chaotic day, Dakota snapped at the air.  Then it happened again. Her family decided to return her.  I met her adoptive mom in a parking lot and when I took that leash, became Dakota’s foster mom.

I talked to Dakota and sang to her on the ride home, but she still wouldn’t lift her head.  Her trembling stopped and her breathing slowed a bit.  I took those as good signs.  Hopeful signs.

For the next several days, Dakota was ruled by fear.  She was afraid of sounds – the traffic outside, household appliances, my cell phone ringing.  She was terrified of sudden movements – my hand moving close to her head, one of my dogs unexpectedly coming around a corner, even television images.  She viewed new things with trepidation instead of curiosity. She sat on the sofa with her head pressed against the pillows whenever she felt overwhelmed. 

Dogs, like people, can let fear run their lives.  The energy of fear infuses their reactions and expectations.  Dakota adapted by shutting down and withdrawing as much as she could. Her natural curiosity, joy and friendliness were blunted. In her adoptive family, she’d needed a quiet space to withdraw to and she was overwhelmed by the constant, noisy attention of small children.

I gave her time to adjust to the predictable routine that my two dogs thrived on.  I gave her breathing room to view her new world from a distance.  My dogs would greet her when she came to the kitchen for meals, give her space when they all went outdoors and try to entice her to play.  She relaxed and walked upright, no longer slinking.  I wondered what would be the one thing that might push her out of her self-imposed withdrawal.

It was a tennis ball.

Like many people with dogs, my house has a dog toy box.  There are rope toys to play tug-of-war, there are stuffed toys with squeakers and an assortment of things to chew on.  Way down at the bottom were a couple of old tennis balls.  One day, after pulling out all the toys on top, my chocolate lab, Josie, pulled out a tennis ball. Not a fan herself, she dropped it and it rolled in Dakota’s direction.  Her head lifted and her eyes lit up.

She carefully hopped off the sofa and went over to the tennis ball.  She sniffed and prodded it and looked up with a grin.  I grinned back.  Her eyes never leaving my face, she brought the ball to me.  I threw it, she retrieved it and dropped it at my feet.  Her tail wagged.  We did it again. We played ball for a long while.

Dakota loved every ball she encountered – tennis balls, squeaky balls, rubber balls and kong balls.  They made her happy and she knew it, grinning when she spotted one.  She simply couldn’t feel terror while looking at a tennis ball.  The tennis ball was magic.  Because she loved it so, she was ready to let go of the fear of things that might happen and focus on the wonder of the tennis ball in the here and now.

For Dakota, courage wasn’t the antidote to fear. Love was.

Bossiness, harmony and Chelsea

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 “You’re not the boss, the dog trainer said to me.  “You think you’re the boss but you’re not.  Chelsea is.”  I looked at Sue, our new dog trainer, in disbelief.  “But she did everything I asked – perfectly!”  I protested.  Chelsea, my yellow lab mix, just grinned.

Twenty minutes earlier, I had arrived at Sue’s house with my two dogs, Teddy and Chelsea.  She had me bring them into her side yard along with her German Shepherd, Oscar, to see how they all interacted. Sue instructed me to call them over, have them sit and lie down.  I thought it was going great.  Teddy had watched me, listened and done what I asked.  Chelsea had also followed my commands.  So, what could be wrong?

“Chelsea didn’t look at you once,” Sue said.  A dog who knows that you are in charge will look right at you to see what you want next.  “Not Chelsea,” she went on. “She knows she’s the boss.”  I looked at Chelsea.  Now that I didn’t need her to, she met my gaze and held it.  Again, she grinned and grinned.

We went home with only one training exercise.  Every time that Chelsea and Teddy wanted to go in the back yard, they had to look at me before I opened the door.  Every time I fed them or gave them a treat, they had to meet my gaze first.  Chelsea fought this every step of the way. She made me wait until she was ready to look at me or she would sit docilely for her food, looking at a spot somewhere over my head.  It took three long days until she decided — and she made it clear that she was the one deciding—to do the training exercise.  She looked at me, she stared and I swear one time she winked.  She owned it and made it hers.

We had met Sue by accident.  I was walking Teddy and Chelsea (or they were walking me) on the day we passed Sue, with her dog Oscar and two smaller dogs.  She told all three of her own dogs to sit and wait and they were like polite statues, frozen in place while we walked by.  Chelsea yanked us over to say hi, while Teddy tried to sniff a tree in the opposite direction.  I asked, “How did you get your dogs to do that?” Sue looked at me with sympathy and said, “I’m a dog trainer.  Would you like my card?”  I grabbed it and that’s how we ended up at her house, where I was told I was not the boss.

I had seen Chelsea’s online picture and read that she had been pulled from a high-kill shelter in the nick of time.  She was scheduled to be sold the next day to a research facility that used dogs for cosmetic and medical product trials.  The rescue said she was just too nice a dog to have a fate like that. I agreed and clicked the “apply for adoption” button.  There was no mention of bossiness in her online profile.

It became clear that while Chelsea became happy to follow my lead and listen politely to what I asked of her, she never quite believed that anyone was the boss of her.  She was smart, exuberant and a heart-winner.  She lived in harmony with life, expanding her love for everyone and everything in her world each day.  She would look into my eyes, giving me her joyous grin, saying “Life’s better when we’re a team and nobody is the big boss.”