Showing posts with label dogs. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dogs. Show all posts
Friday, January 11, 2013
Dog Daze
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| Our new family member, Merlin, getting used to his new bed and surroundings. So far this is the only good picture we can get of him because he's afraid of cameras! |
A lot has happened since my last regular posts.
A minor project to keep our upstairs from freezing in the
winter turned into a major garage/workshop renovation.
Hurricane Sandy swept through New Jersey and although it
thankfully did no damage to my house, it did knock out our power for months and
months. (Okay, it was really only about a week, but it seemed like months and
months to a tech-geek like me.)
Major changes at work have meant I've been putting in a lot
of overtime which has left me little time to do more than sleep and eat.
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He might be camera shy, but our new dog
Merlin, loves to be hugged. In fact that's the
only way we can get photos of him.
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We adopted a new dog.
That's right, my wife and I are once again puppy-parents!
Regular readers of this blog may remember that we lost the
last four-legged member of our family about 15 months ago ("Still Tuggingat our heartstrings"), and
that his passing stuck me very hard. We only just started looking for a new dog
about four months ago, but had no luck.
Each time we thought we had found the perfect pooch for our
now two-person pack, the dog was either already adopted, wasn't the breed, type
nor temperament we were looking for or the animal rescue organization said we
weren't fit parents because both my wife and I work and their dog couldn't be
left alone during the day.
To say that we were both becoming a bit frustrated by the
process is an understatement, and I was now beginning to think we just would
not be getting another dog again. Fifteen months is a looonnnng time to go
between pets and I was already becoming very accustomed to the freedoms of not
having one. So when my wife asked me last Friday night if we were going to look
for dogs again on Saturday, I said yes reluctantly.
It's not that I didn't want a dog. I just didn't expect that
our visits to the local shelters would turn out any differently than they had
in the past. In fact, I was ready to call it quits if we didn't find a dog by
that day.
So of course, you know what happened.
After checking out a few more places and yet again coming up
empty-handed we happened to pass our local country store, which sells lawn and
live-stock supplies, and my wife noticed that they were having their monthly
pet adoption event that day. So just for the heck of it we turned in, and
that's when we saw him.
They were calling him Abe, and he was a little 2-year-old
black Lab mix who kept pulling himself up on top of the puppy playpen to be
petted by anyone who passed by.
I can't say that it was love at first sight. But he was
cute, affectionate and seemed rather calm. We took him for a walk and my wife,
who's a good judge of dogs (not to mention husbands!) gave him the thumbs up.
Then she asked me the question, which a few months ago I
would not have thought twice about.
"Do you really want a dog?"
Strangely I hesitated.
I missed having Tug around and love playing with and being
around our neighbor's dogs. So why now was I so unsure?
Was it because I had been suckered into briefly fostering
another Lab mix this past summer who turned out to be a little terror? Or was
it because suddenly it hit me that my carefree "childless" days were
over?
I think it was the latter.
As I said, 15 month is a long time to go without a pet and I
can now understand why some people go right out and get another dog immediately
after their last one has died. It's very easy to get used to not having to
worry about running home to take care of your dog or cat and doing whatever you
want, whenever you want. The idea that I was giving all that up for at least
another 12 years terrified me.
In fact, all of last weekend I kept second-guessing myself,
wondering if I had made a terrible mistake. I kept thinking about all that
new-found freedom I had given up and was scared of all the bad things this new
dog would do until we eventually got him trained. I think now for the very
first time, I understand what new fathers go through when they either learn
their wife is pregnant or the mix of emotions they feel when they hold their
first newborn child.
But now just after a few days, I've fallen back into my old
"doggy dad" routines and my fears are all but gone. Thankfully our
dog, whom we've decided to call "Merlin," has proven to be pretty
well-behaved and seems just as laid back
-- if not more so -- than all our other dogs combined.
I'm sure there will be a few challenges with him down the
road. But for now I'm happy to hear the pitter-patter of four paws on my floors
again.
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Still Tugging at our heartstrings
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| FOR THE LOVE OF DOG: Tug asleep on his bed. He shared our home and lives from June 28, 2002 to Oct. 20, 2011.
He would have turned 14 years old today.
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He passed away this past October at the ripe old age – for a Labrador retriever – of 13 ¼ years old. It’s been eight months now and I still find myself missing him. The pain is no longer as acute as it was during the fall and winter and the house doesn’t feel quite as empty as it did in the immediate aftermath of his death. In fact there are some days now that go by without me missing him at all.
In a way, it’s been nice to be dog-free and not have to worry about someone having to run home to let him out or feed him and I know my wife appreciates not being woken up well before her alarm goes off by the wet nose or bark of a hungry dog trying to mooch an early breakfast out of her. (Tug learned early that I wasn’t a morning person and that trying to wake me was nigh impossible.)
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| FIRST AND LAST PHOTOS At left is the first picture we ever saw of Tug. It was his "pet of the week" photo in my newspaper's pet adoption column. At right is the final picture of him taken on Oct. 20, 2011, the morning of the day we had him put to sleep. | |
Always lots of food.
In his last six-to-eight months of life, when even getting up off the floor seemed almost as difficult as climbing the stairs he used to bound up in a leap or two, his only goal in life seemed to be to make us happy. I am convinced now that he solidered on as long as he did because he thought he somehow owed us for rescuing him from the dog pound after the people who had no idea how to care for one dog, let alone two, and couldn’t see how wonderful and smart he was turned him over to the Bucks County SPCA because he was “too difficult.” In the end it was my wife and I who owed him for making us better people. I can’t imagine what my life would have been like over the past decade without my “pal” by my side.
Psychologists have expounded plenty about the nature of the bond between dogs and humans and why we miss them so much when they are gone.
“It appears that dogs have evolved specialized skills for reading human social and communicative behavior,” says Brian Hare, a Harvard shrink explaining the current thinking. He adds that they use this ability to figure out our moods knowing that if they do something that makes us happy they’ll be rewarded with food or attention. We see this behavior as signs our dogs love us while psychologists, like John Archer, from the University of Central Lancashire, sees it as dogs “manipulating human responses,” and becoming “the equivalent of social parasites.”
I think that’s a bit harsh.
Because if Mr. Archer ever had a dog like Tug, he would know dog’s aren’t “social parasites.”
Dogs are social creatures and crave companionship, much the way we do. Yes they learn how to manipulate their people, but then again, so do human children. And after seeing the way some children act these days, I’ve been glad I was just a dog-dad.
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| CLEAN AND HAPPY: Tug sporting a new tie he got after his last bath. |
I also realized that he didn’t have the higher reasoning powers of humans but I firmly believe that dogs understand the concept of love and loyalty. I mean how else do you explain the dog who wouldn’t leave the casket of his fallen Navy SEAL master or the black Lab who refused to leave the side of a canine friend who had been struck and killed by a passing car.
Psychologists would probably just attribute that to “pack instinct,” a vestige of a behavior left over from their wolf ancestors. Call me sentimental, but I think it is more than that just a “trick of evolution.” After all, when you come right down to it, a pack isn’t much different from a family. The same group dynamics apply.
I think that perhaps dogs were made man’s best friend as some sort of divine plan; a way of teaching us to be better people. How to be unselfish, how to be a good friend, a good listener and good confidant. Over the past nine and a quarter years that he graced our home, Tug taught us all those things and more. He taught us that no matter how bad your past was, it is now that really matters. He didn’t let his awful first few years stop from enjoying the time he spent with us. He was simply content to live in the moment taking pleasure in everyday things that we’d probably overlook. I used say his philosophy was “Every so often you need to stop and pee on the roses.”
I am sure that sometime in the future my wife and I will adopt another dog who needs a good home and fall in love with him. We’ll probably learn new things about ourselves from that dog too. But until that day comes, I will continue to remember all Tug’s loveable antics and take to heart the lessons he taught us.
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