dogs – the chook house

July 9, 2016

Pakenham Living

First two days in the studio.

Murphy makes his grumph grumph noises at some of the passersby, but mainly he is relaxed, despite the heavy noise of the street traffic just outside his door. He is happily urinating on the street on the nearest pole. He had a zoomie on Bathers Beach as the denim surf frothed and the wind whipped around.

I speak to the peroxided hairdresser as she smokes a cigarette on the street and compliments Murphy on the hues in his fur, make friends with the Bread N Common waitress from whom I buy my salami flute and have coffee at the High Street Dispensary sitting with my face tilted toward the winter sun.

Nightly drunks and carousers holler up the sidewalk. Swear and swerve, stumble and scream. Every morning the street sweepers clean up after them, but the bin is over flowing and the rubbish men are not due, and so a raven does his best to empty it, signalling to his other raven mates to come and feast at the dish of human detritus, dropping what they don’t want on the bitumen. Road = crow canvas.

I have discovered that butter (anything other than Watsonia) can be bought at Kakulas Sister for a high price and regular linguini is out the front. Despite the fact that the serving women are sour and I feel invisible in there, I purchase.

My hands are dry from too much water and Jiff. I have googled how to remove paint stains from hard wood floors. Rubbing alcohol.

I have cleaned the walls and the blinds to the height I can reach but there is so much beyond that I cannot. Not till I purchase the extendable duster. Joy.

I have no television and so I watch Masterchef on my computer and follow the Tour on the tour tracker. The radio is my companion.

I query the bill from builder for the skip bins and the services disconnection and feel a sense of bewilderment that we are spending so much money on a house renovation when we can easily live like this, in the small studio, with a very limited amount of stuff and not many possessions.

How we complicate our lives with stuff.

How mouse-in-a-wheel-like it all gets – this owning and then wanting more and more of it. And then, finding nowhere to put it, we decide to throw it out and start again.

It is simple here today. I have my old sink, not thrown out, sliced in two by handy men, but still the familiar sink I have scrubbed at for twenty years. Its grain like aged wood. I have scrubbed it when I am happy, and I have scrubbed it when I am sad. At our neighbour’s their corner sink meant it was not an easy sink for me. I could not reach into it and so never laboured at it. Besides, they had a dishwasher. Here I am returned to succour of stainless steel scrubbing.

The laminex table too has been resurrected. Thankfully it was never discarded. Stored in an attic with other one days. It is mottled tomato red and white. It has shapely silver legs like a 1950’s screen siren, but its top is solid and dutiful. It is milk bar, country town. Graham and I worked at it years ago sorting through black and white prints on Ilford paper. Pored over strips of negatives on light boxes. Now a small transistor sits on it playing the local station’s football coverage. Sydney vs Geelong and Sydney need to lower their eyes. What does that even mean?

The men and boys will be out of the winter weather by now. They left at 3 am while the road was still wet and black and the traffic had stopped. I listened to the car start up and drive off and then fell back to sleep till Murphy woke me barking at the some dogs at his door. How dare they sniff.

I sleep fitfully. One minute hot – throwing back the doona and pancaking myself on the cool side of the bed, feeling the icy sheets on the insides of my arms, then turning cold and snuggling back down, only to find myself hot again another hour on. The rain keeps the revellers down. Still I wake at five and take the dog out, watch the lights of the street sweeper advance up the road towards us, sucking the paper cups and used napkins off the gutter.

Today I discover the Italian coffee maker won’t work on induction. I set up the lap top camera to record Murphy while I duck out to the shops. When I return I see I have made a mistake and not recorded a thing. Later I try again and go for a short outing to the second hand bookshop to purchase a book I had seen in the window called the The Last Little Cat. (Books are never unworthy purchases.) But when I flick through it it isn’t what I had hoped and so I decide not to buy it. I look at the other books and stumble across a 1934 edition of Dogs and Their Management and in it find such sage advice as Do not fidget an Invalid – do what is necessary quietly, gently and quickly, and then leave him alone; no glaring lights or suffocating heat as well as nutritional advice such as Sheep’s brains boiled in milk is nourishing and makes a tempting food: it is a little relaxing.

I listen to Radio National – a balm for the soul – a man talks about his love of walking – initially as an escape from a brutal childhood hiding away in wilderness morphs into connecting with nature and healing his past. The treading becomes deeply spiritual. He gets stuck in scrub and only goes 100 metres in an hour. Scrub so thick he couldn’t see the sky. His drawl is strangely hypnotic as he describes the country that he meanders and struggles through. The pocket doc finishes and there is no time to reflect before the news tells of the Dallas sniper who shot five policemen in retaliation for black deaths earlier in the week. If only the sniper had discovered his solace in walking. Or in sink scrubbing.

March 26, 2016

Let’s Talk Language

Today I spoke to vet students studying veterinary welfare, ethics and animal behaviour. It was their first lecture dealing with Animal Behaviour and I wanted to speak about language. I can imagine they might think it is unimportant. But it is the crux of the matter. You will hear it in vet clinics all the time – eroding the bond of compassion and caring that vets have with patients who, through the poor choice of language, become the enemy.

When we describe dogs as wimps, sooks, babies or as nasty, mean, vicious we use loaded terminology. We use descriptors that are full of emotional baggage. When we describe a dog’s attempt at keeping himself safe as an act of jealousy, spitefulness or protectiveness we do him no end of disservice and do not help his owner understand their dog’s choices.

Dogs who display aggressive behaviours do so because they have found a tool that works for them. It is one that people notice (finally) and gets them the outcome they are after – the scary thing stays away.

It is one of the most difficult concepts for clients to understand – that the aggressive dog is most often a very frightened dog, that through practice and rehearsal, and no one listening to his lesser signals (or having had them punished for previous displays), has learnt that going on the offensive early is his safest bet. These dogs are no less frightened than the whimpering, hiding dog that displays his belly, but they have just hit on a more successful strategy. And you can bet they will use it again.

The last thing this dog needs is to have his fears confirmed and continue to not be listened to – then he may resort to his final choice – biting. When we call these dogs protective, jealous, angry or mean we are missing the very point. The dog is communicating fear in the loudest and best way he can, when all the previous and polite signals have been ignored.

I tell the students to ask clients to describe behaviour. Don’t ask for interpretations and steer clients away from that too. What does the dog do? What did you do? What happened first? What does it look like? What would you like the dog to do? Let’s teach that…

Let’s give the dog cues NOT commands. Let’s make the dog feel safe, so he doesn’t have to protect himself by using aggressive responses. Give him choice, a way to escape safely. Let’s not put him in situations he cannot handle and he has previously shown us he does not cope with.

Let’s use the least intrusive and minimally aversive techniques to implement the change.

A prison officer working with youth offenders once told me that the kids in the centre weren’t bad, but sad, and I remember what a difference that change in label meant. Working with sad children engenders empathy and caring. Helping people out of a sad place is worthwhile, whereas dealing with bad suggests that changes aren’t even possible. One bad apple...It even suggests a contagion that is best isolated and thrown away. Use language that helps owners feel compassion and caring towards their pet instead of puts them in a position against their pet, pits them against one another, and tells them their pet is out to garner control over them.

Dogs, like all animals, including us, do what works for them. It is as simple and as difficult as that.

November 28, 2015

Lost Child

Murphy sits at Joan’s feet. Her hand finds his head and rests atop. Her fingers find their way through wiry fur to the bony skull beneath to massage his head. Her fingers are smooth and white. The fingers of an old woman whose hands no longer do work. Sometimes they wrap around a teacup, other times they rest on her lap. Her skin like latex. She once worked on the bodies of others as a physiotherapist. She would have touched a lot of skin. Kneaded many knots from muscles. Now she walks the corridors and attends any excursion she can. Anything to get out. The rest of the time she sits amongst the open-mouthed, the drowsy and the drooly.

She recognises us each time we visit, her face lights up, and she does not appear to have memory loss. The staff tell me she does. She cannot recall how long she has lived here. Today I find her standing outside one of the centre’s doors on a path through a manicured garden. Her hands come to her face that is breaking. I ask her, are you okay Joan, when I see her broken face. No I am not. I am trapped. I want to get away from here, she says, standing on the path and looking around, as if for the exit that is only metres in front of her. She has clear snot running from her nose and I say I will get you a tissue. No one wants to be without a hanky.

She takes it and holds it to her face. Murphy and I will walk with you, I say. Come sit in the garden. We sit. I offer suggestions as to things she might do. Others are inside playing Bingo after all. She is not the game-playing type. What about crafts or puzzles. Looking for ways to fill her time seems like asking her to pour sand into a bottle and then pour it out again. What would make you happy Joan? A dog.

Meanwhile a gardener is nearby and despite the heat is weeding, head down. Joan throws a question her way about her latest seedlings but the gardener doesn’t hear and so doesn’t answer. She is trying to make light of her tears now. I am sorry for being a bother. Joan tries again to question the gardener, and still she is not heard. She is an old unseen unheard woman, sitting. Beige and blending into paving. She is searching for conversation, for connection. She says she wishes she knew where the family of her dead husband were. Not her children, but still. She loved them, but they live far away and now do not visit. I don’t know where they are. Outside the gates somewhere. Her face is pained again like a small child lost. Gretel in the forest.

I wonder if audio books might be nice or even just the radio. There are so many interesting things on the radio, Joan. Like interesting matters. I don’t know how to use the buttons, she confesses. Come Murphy, sit here with Joan, and let her rest her hand on your head. Let her feel your warmth as giving and trusting as any human hand. Like family. He moves his head under her hand, shifts just a little to let her know she can leave it there as long as she likes. Good work Murphy.

October 16, 2015

Colouring-In for dogs

There seems a growing trend to use meditation and mindfulness exercises to ease anxiety and stress in humans. This is clearly a good idea. Research says that the naming of emotions, even a simple acknowledgement such as, “I feel frustrated” can ease the feeling, because naming requires that the brain think about the emotion, not just feel it. Thinking means other neural pathways are opened up.

Simple tasks such as colouring-in requires concentration on a job that uses parts of the brain that are not part of the emotional brain. You don’t colour in angry. Or if you do you start to head outside the lines and so in your refocus to stay within them there comes a calming. You have to choose colours and make decisions. Simple decisions. Creative, thinking decisions. Peacefully.

When we give dogs cognitive tasks such as searching and finding their food from enrichment devices and food puzzles we are giving them a task akin to colouring-in. In using parts of their brain that are necessary in achieving the goal of getting the food they are not engaged in reactive, primal emotional behaviour. Instead, they are thinking. They are using their senses – noses to locate the food, ears to tell if the device is empty yet, eyes to search out the scattered hidden morsels, touch to rotate and push and hold the device. Making use of these senses is what they have evolved to do. As the ultimate scavengers dogs have evolved to search, find and consume. Denying them this search is akin to asking humans not to be creative. To no longer seek. Seeking is strongly associated with a feeling of well being and we all crave it. Let them seek.

Colouring-in for dogs.

November 25, 2014

Grey t-shirt and Jeans

Today I heard the tail end of Mark Zuckerberg saying he wore the same thing every day to cut down on his cognitive choices. Wearing a grey t-shirt and jeans on a daily basis gave him one less thing to think about. Rather than it limiting him, it freed him.

Some of us have more anxiety over clothes’ choices than others, but even if this gives you little stress, it can still be possible to imagine that ridding yourself of having to choose can be a good thing. A liberating thing. Sometimes this is why I would like to shave my head.

Just as the monastic life and a hairless head gives the monk more time to meditate.

I think about school uniforms and the way individuals still attempt to put their personal stamp on their dress style. The skirt shorter than allowed. The hat more bent and battered than supposed to be. The untucked shirt – a duck tail. Some of us strive to choose. But does it equate with making us more content?

Ridding yourself of choices, the program goes on, relieves stress. Even small decisions take mental energy. For this reason I am thankful to have never discovered make-up. I never have to decide on lip stick, eye shadow, powder.

I start to think about this concept for dogs. When we give anxious dogs cues to follow that result in predictable outcomes for their actions we take away some choice. This can be reassuring and decrease their stress. Modern behaviourists also like to give dogs choice. We like to give cues and signals as opposed to commands. But this is not to say that choices are easy for dogs. It does cause them stress. Especially if doing one thing ends in a result that they cannot predict. One time they jump on Johnny and everything is fine, the subsequent time they get yelled at. The next time Johnny is over there is stress around his visit. Should I jump on him or not? What will happen if I do? Perhaps I might nip him and see what happens then.

Watch the dog without direction. The one with too many choices. He is a bouncing jerking mess of mayhem. He is all over the shop – pawing, licking, barking, whining. He is seeking information as to what to do. But no one has taught him to be calm. No one has rewarded calmness in him. He is trying on lots of outfits. Red shirt, blue pants. Green top, corduroys. Loafers, no runners. Top hat, cap.

Make life simple and predictable for dogs to give them back some calmness. Give them some cognitive space. Let them be a grey t-shirt and jeans type.

October 9, 2014

Yunderup

The lapping of the river is like a giant dog licking itself. A constant slurp. It is skinny milk café latte. Sometimes it shimmers. Sometimes it is smooth, muddy brown. Bottomless. When boys get atop canoes and kayaks it becomes Huckleberry Finn territory. They have legs like twigs. Hobbit feet. Notoriously unsteady. They wear life jackets because a father said “what if a boat hits them” – one is unconscious, and then the other is forced to try to rescue a dead weight and then they both drown. Could happen? Fear makes you drive to Ray’s Outdoors and spend more money. Dog eyes make you buy more slow releasing dog food toys since there is a City Farmer’s next door. And whilst you’re at it purchase a piping bag for the Birthday eclair making later in the day. Since Master Chef these things are easily purchased, as is a madeleine tray, or blow torch for creme brûlée.

It is a river that flows and all rivers have their own strength. Beneath its silky surface, it is all force and wanting. Sometimes stronger than the muscles of an eleven year old. Especially ones so sinewy and strapping. More like sapling trees that bend and sway, than meaty boys. So not solid. Rubber limbs. Life jackets makes sense. It gives mothers and fathers peace. It gives boys freedom. Specks now as they paddle away. Urged on. Laughter carries on water.

Mosquitoes keep mothers inside. They suck even through denim. Mighty. Squashed, they are filled with more blood than their size allows. A baby keeps a young girl occupied. She has been abandoned by the sapling boys who have told her not to follow them. Her white blonde hair would make her a Gretel in the forest. She must stay with the women who drink tea and talk endlessly about how to make babies sleep. At least she has Nutella.

The baby is soothed by pumpkin and breastmilk. He seems easy, and hard to please, at the same time. Mothers of saplings remember back and can’t. Have stories, but stories could be made up. Memory is so mutable. It seems hard work – the baby thing – being so attached. Having to be carried, picked up, pushed around. I tell how I have spoken of Jasper in the plural to make him sound like more than one baby. I speak of “children” when I should have said “child.” To make myself sound equal to a mother of six. How hard can one be? I hear them all thinking. So I multiply him.

Now the saplings are off most of the time, or else take themselves away from the adults to commune in their room with their own music. Macklemore. What headphones they would buy if only they could save up the money. They run most of the day, jump in and out of pools, scrape knees, chew gum, and then at night fall they are couch-bound. Like heavily worked horses, they need watering, feed bags full of grain.

At night the river turns syrupy. Molasses. Really treacherous now. As if the snags and concealed boughs could move and strangle. It slurps and pulses. It grows stronger. There is a blood moon. It hangs heavy and low in the sky – disguises itself as a street lamp.

The dog stands on the jetty, peering. He is intrigued, but not stupid, and not brave either.

We talk of another dog, left home in the care of a comforting cleaner. Gold dog has had rounds of chemo to little effect to shrink down the size of a facial tumour. Despite the mass, she bounds happily in all types of tepid, stinking water. The smellier the better, you get the sense. If she was a person you might describe her as loopy, as the type to approach everything with gay abandon. The kind to strike up conversation with any stranger. She has anxiety too, and now is on multiple drugs to ease her disquiet. Sometimes she is panicked and wide eyed – her thoughts only on demons. She tears up whole rooms and, when a nail splits, it is as if an ax-murderer has been in the bedroom.

Solving her dilemma might be more than science and love can muster.

A new study shows that women look at their dogs with the same eyes they have for their newborn babies. Makes perfect sense to a woman whose love for her dog makes her curious about what he might be feeling and what makes him happy. He slips out the front when the rest of the house is eating dinner and could easily take off down the street. Instead he waits patiently outside the front door till someone realises he is missing and lets him in. He spends the rest of the night at the feet of the couch-bound saplings.

Babies and dogs are not so very different. Mothers are vets and vets are mothers. Babies are dogs and dogs are babies. Love is love.

May 31, 2013

Doggy Dementia

Just the other day I euthanised a pooch whose owner described him as having doggy dementia. She came in with him clutched to her. He was a sixteen-year-old little white fluffy who spent his days wandering the house, soiling himself and the floor, refusing to let anyone rid his coat of the tangled matts and deteriorating into a bundle of anxious quivering. She didn’t care that he stunk. She did care that he was in pain. If she could have admitted him to a nursing home for dogs maybe she would have. Maybe not. Recently she had had to go away and she’d left him with her sister. He’d not slept for three days.

Now I am reading Rebecca Mead’s absorbing article in The New Yorker about the advanced-dementia care at Beatitudes and I can’t help but think of the little white fluffy. Dogs get dementia too.

The director of education and research, Tena Alonzo, at the unusual and forward-thinking nursing home says, “All behaviour is communication.” With dogs it is even more so, since we never have a verbal language in common to begin with. We cannot ask them how they feel. To be a vet you must watch and listen. To know dogs is to observe and interpret their body language. To understand the demented human, body language needs to be read too. Alonzo gets the staff to practice interpreting non-verbal queues on each other, by having another staff member instruct them in a foreign language. She also gets the staff to brush one another’s teeth and to spoon feed each other – this is how you come to understand what it feels like to be the resident. The dedicated take to wearing adult diapers – to get a real sense of what life might be like for a dementia sufferer.

Alonzo says, “When you have dementia, we can’t change the way you think, but we can change the way you feel.” This might be true for dogs in distress too. We could always do with a little more empathy.

She describes how a black square of carpet at the entrance to the lift might stop a demented patient entering, since people with dementia have been shown to be unwilling to step onto such a black space, imagining it to be a hole. Reading this I thought – how like the cattle grid at the farm gate. Perhaps as we slide into dementia we are becoming more akin to animals. When Alonzo talks about her own old age – she says, “when I have dementia” knowing that cognitive decline comes to nearly all of us. Most of us will go there.

She says, “one of the things that create comfort for people who have trouble thinking is space. If you are too blocked in you feel frightened.” Think again of the animal that cage guards. Lunging and growling at anyone coming near, but as soon as the gate is opened and freedom is sensed, the animal can be handled.

When a patient can’t seemed to be helped with pain killers and distractions Alonzo says, “we’re going to try chocolate.” Hershey’s Kisses are a mainstay at the nursing home, because “it’s hard to feel very bad when there’s something tasty in your mouth.” We manipulate the behaviour of dogs with food rewards and lures too. Trainers and vets have long used the momentary pleasure of food to minimise distress. Keep feeding as nails are trimmed. Offer a popsicle coated in peanut butter to be licked while a coat is brushed. We can change a dog’s perception of something it is frightened of by repeated pairings of a food reward with the thing that is the dog’s monster. All the puppies I see for vaccination are injected, mostly without ever feeling the needle, as long as they are distracted by some tasty dog treat. As patients slip into deeper dementia it is as if the primitive structures of the brain take over. There is pleasure and pain. There is fear and anger. There is flight and fight. These core parts of the brain are similar across all animals so that in the end, when we are old and have lost our cognitive function, we are not so different from a frightened dog. Or horse, or cow. We may no longer be able to operate on a high intellectual level, but we still feel. Emotion lives on, sometimes stronger, unchecked, unleashed. Patients are described as “resisting care” when really they are like the dogs who are objecting to being restrained for grooming – they just want the man-handling to stop. In the nursing home the supply of pleasurable food helps avoid conflicts and makes people feel good, just as the only thing that could quell the white fluffy’s pacing was roast chicken from the corner store.

I think about how vets have learnt a lot from paediatric dentists. Today in the dentist’s there is no fear. It doesn’t even smell the same. Fuzzy green toys hang from the lights. Toys are handed out after the clean is done. The child’s dentist is so very different from what he was like when we were little. No white coat. Now they know how to distract and comfort rather than force and bully. The nursing home is changing too. It is no longer acceptable to bomb patients with antipsychotics (developed for schizophrenia) just to make them easier to handle for staff. Rather than becoming obtunded on Haloperidol, something as simple as Panadol may be all the patient needs to feel less pain and become more cooperative. It is better to lower the bed, so there is less harm in falling, than restrain people to their mattress. People need to maintain dignity, just as animals need to feel calm. It’s all about the kind of handling. You can take them gently by the hand and lead them or you can put a collar on them and pull. Which one do you do?

Just as humans are afflicted with dementia, our pets also suffer from cognitive decline. They seem to do the same things as our human relatives do. They mix day and night. Sundowning for dogs.They wander the corridors and holler for someone to help them. They don’t know where home is. They stand in corners. They forget who their relations are. They hear non-existent noises and bark at them. They are in pain.

Seeing others. Feeling like others. When we work well, at whatever we do, isn’t it because we recognise the emotion the other is feeling? Be it animal, be it human. We aren’t as different from other animals as some humans would like to think. Connectedness. When we strive to understand what another is feeling we make great steps to knowing ourselves.

May 23, 2013

Head cold meets Knitting

Jasper says, “I wish I could knit on the couch while the TV is on, like you do…”

“I can teach you. What do you want to knit?”

“A beanie.”

A free-off-the-web beanie pattern is downloaded. A spare ball of wool is located from the cardboard box beneath the bed. Ninety stitches are cast on. I show him how to knit a stitch.

It is not easy for boy hands. The task is delicate and dainty and very much a sitting still activity. But he is inspired by it. It is repetitious. You get better at it quickly. The thing you are making is growing before your eyes. Be it slowly. Lucky to have knitting when you are at home with a head cold. When the outside is beautiful and still and clear and crisp. But you have a sore throat and a runny nose and a heaviness to your head. And just inhaling the air is making you cough. No outside for you.

Mistakes are plentiful. Bumps where bumps should not be. Holes where holes are not. But knitting is forgiving. Just keep going. A wonky stitch will not ruin the thing. It is a good lesson for him to learn – the boy who hates smudges on paper, or creases on books. The boy who adjusts his singlet and then takes it off. Who checks the used-by-date on his Mocha milk before purchase. A knitted beanie, I tell him, doesn’t need every stitch to be straight. You will see. A few gaps here and there add character, Fremantleness. It will be better because you made it. Because it grew from you. From your industrious hands.

It struck him, momentarily, that knitting was a thing girls did. He sees no males do it. When we searched online for men and knitting the only knitting males involved themselves in was speed-knitting, their hands moving like machines. Needles like drum sticks. How to ruin knitting – turn it into a competition. But something about knitting overrode the girl-thing.

And then there is the sheer joy of a mind-numbing activity. I don’t think enough people appreciate the peace that comes with doing the same thing over and over. Like the person who doodles flowers or stars. Runners get it. Like the swimmer doing lap after lap. Swimming and knitting and meditation and breathing. All the same.

Dogs know the power of repetition. They know the joy of monotony and predictability. They strive on routine and regularity. It mends the mind. Awash in oodles of serotonin, my dog spends all day on the couch. He needs no surprises. He wants for no deliveries, or new friends. At 2.30 pm he begins to predict the school pick up time. He shuffles and rises when he hears me ready myself to leave the house. It is not all he gets but it is one of the predictable walks he longs for. He stretches and arches and shakes off. He will pee on at least three of the Stobie poles. He will mark the dustbin on the corner. He will drag his butt on the braille-for-the-feet street crossing. Knowing him completely is part of his charm. His presentation of his Kong on greeting. His knitting-like nature. Day after day. If he were ill, it would be immediately obvious.

The activities that quieten my mind always seem to have a repetitious nature to them. Like scrubbing the sink. The squirt of the Jiff. The way it doesn’t lift the grime without some effort. Not like on the commercial. One wipe and it is gone. It does require scrubbing. But that is part of it. If wiping were all you wanted, you would not be at the sink with a scourer.

Typing. Tea drinking. Knitting.

April 12, 2013

Hockey Dogs

Hockey training takes place on an oval in Fremantle. It is a multi-use oval with cricket nets and clubrooms shared by both the cricket and the hockey fraternities. For the cricket families it would be a refuge from the heat. Somewhere to get a cool drink and away from the sun. For the hockey mums it offers warmth and dryness.

The building is made from dark brown brick from the seventies or eighties. A building made when we watched Countdown and listened to ABBA. The textured masonry makes you think of a thick slice of chocolate sponge cake. It makes you long for a hot cup of tea. Inside old wooden honor boards with names in gold lettering line the walls. An asterisk beside a name signals the person is deceased. There are the ubiquitous stacks of stackable plastic chairs. Many families have spent hours huddled in here while young ones take to the turf. Already I can imagine being inside when it is cold out and the Juniors are playing, regardless of the weather.

Parents drive up with kids who exit high cars like horse-riders leaping off steeds – gripping mesh bags with their armour (shin pads and mouth guards) – hockey sticks like lances brandished by jousting knights. (Do you sense already I have sat here too long?)

Most parents leave. They have stuff to do. So do I. I could grocery shop. At least I could get toilet paper. I could clean my house. Instead I stay to watch. The children must run down the steep embankment to the field. It’s the kind of steepness you can’t walk down. It makes you run, like you are falling over yourself. The field is marked up with hula-hoops and cones for dribbling and pushing a hockey ball around. I watch from the upper bank by the car park and the charity bins, by the side of the chocolate sponge cake wall. An old swing set waits to be swung on.

Other cars pull up and dogs pile out. They are as exuberant as any child. Some dogs come to the park with owners on foot from nearby houses. It’s that time of night – dog walking time. Some owners bring plastic tennis ball throwers while others bring a tug rope. Some bring just their pooch (and a pocketful of yellow poop bags).

In one afternoon – a puppy dachshund, a Siberian husky, a newfie, two bostons, a bunch of poodles, a border collie, a blue stuffy, two whippets, a pit bull.

The dog walkers take to the perimeter. These are dogs used to the hockey. They don’t go for the ball. They’re not spooked by hoards of teenage girls, ponytails bobbing, running up and down the banks for fitness. The dogs have eyes for one another and perhaps their own ball. Politely, they sidle up and do the nose to tail greeting. They prance off. They ask another dog for a game of chase. A play bow is offered. Invitations are made. There is zooming and frolicking of the most infectious kind. Smile-inducing dog play. In a corner of the park a man flies a kite and the poodles are off and over; launching themselves into the air, barking, necks arched backwards and noses pointed up, wondering what that strange bird in the sky is doing so damned high.

As the sun begins to dip the swallows are out flying low across the grass hoping for an insect. They make for good chasing. They are, of course, uncatchable. It has never stopped a dog. If you have the energy to run, then run. If your legs hold out, keep running. Never give up, no matter that thing you are aiming to catch is a bird. Ceaseless trying – is a dog’s great attribute.

March 13, 2013

Thinking about Spencer

Thinking about Spencer.

I am not supposed to be doing this. I am supposed to be studying. But somehow the picture that his owner, Janet, gave me as a thank you for my assistance in his leaving this world, has caught my attention. He is a small terrier with a big bone in his mouth. His fluffy foxtail is blurred with movement. It is a dog’s joy, is it not, that captures us?

I know she is bereft. We have done what we can do, as humans. We have given him a calm and dignified farewell. A cancer in his belly was growing like a hungry gourd. He felt nothing as he slipped off a needle of very strong anaesthetic. I recited the words the Tibetan monk gave me so many years ago on a Buddhist retreat.

Geshe-La was surprised, wide-eyed, to know, that as a vet, I routinely killed things. He had not long been in the West. He had imagined only the healing. He didn’t believe it was good for my own karma and gave me a prayer for that. At the end of each day I was to use it for purification. I have not remembered it. He gave me another for the animals, and that, I have memorized. The words are supposed to ease the transition from this life to the next. Perhaps the rebirth following will be better, more enlightened. (Of course to believe that we are more enlightened than dogs to begin with is a whole other question.) The short prayer is said in Tibetan and repeated as I inject. I don’t know how it translates and all I have is how the maroon-robed monk told me to say it. What happens if I pronounce the words incorrectly? I carry the mantra in my head. Like Chinese whispers, who knows what wish I am finally asking for and for whom I am asking it? He told me it must be said out loud to the animal as it dies. It is what I do.

Tayata om muni muni maha munaye soha. Tayata om muni muni maha munaye soha.

We clipped some fur for her to remember him by and made a paw print too. We struggled to get the print right and somehow that helped us, the room of people left behind, meddling around looking for something to do, as a spirit lifted off. She wanted to be the one to carefully slide his body into the black plastic that, necessarily, was his transport to the crematorium. There was a feeling, at that moment, that Janet might gladly climb into the bag to stay with him. Spencer had with him a favourite blanket, a squeaky ball and a saliva stained hand puppet, Collin, who had been his chew toy. A dog needs little in the way of possessions to be joyful. A week later his ashes were returned in a well-crafted wooden box. Such a small bundle in the end. The crematorium rang Janet to say, Spencer was ready to come home. What else can humans do?

Janet tells me he still feels present in the house. A collar he wore will be cherished. His bed remains where it was and she senses him. Of course she does. It is only ten days. He was as loved as a child. The loss of him is human-sized. How long do you think it will take to no longer mourn him? A new puppy is on order and perhaps this will help. After all it’s a Griffin. Its piddly, bitey ways will surely distract. But an old dog is priceless. They know us. We don’t need to learn, as I have in my behaviour course, that dogs innately read human gestures, even better than primates. Dogs just get us. They see with our eyes. Owners know dogs understand them. They have always known this.

(Thanks to Janet and Spencer for permission to retell some of their story…)