The Birthday Dickens

Dickens is two years old today. The mature--and almost contemplative--dog pictured here is a far cry from the lean, dingo-wild puppy that first arrived here, jumping on the bed and chewing up the furniture. Some sort of miracle occurred lately, and he now knows the meaning of the second word in "Golden Retriever." He not only brings the ball back, he drops it when I tell him to. I can call him from across the yard--sometimes from out of sight--and he'll come running, park himself next to me, and lean on my leg. There's a lot of dog to lean, too, since he's still right around 100 pounds, all of it meat and muscle.

The essence of the change in his attitude toward me is that I have, in the words of the people who taught me about dogs, become relevant to him, more relevant than the ball, or the dogs next door, or cats. He also seems to have decided that going with the flow is easier and more fun than swimming against it.

Even Daisy is more comfortable around him. They don't play like they used to--he moves way too fast for her, and her eyesight and hearing are dimming--but the other morning I got out of bed and found them both lying next to each other, back-to-back, sound asleep. And now that I can put Dickens on a down-stay and leave him there, Daisy is chasing the ball again, hopping through the grass, her tail flying, without fear that Dickens will swoop in and grab it from her.

Someone told me I'd miss the puppy in Dickens when he got older. At the time I didn't think so, but now that I see him growing up, and getting smarter--very smart about some things--I think I may indeed come to miss the puppyness. Still, I'm very glad to see the adult Dickens starting to blossom.

Dickens, One Year On

A year ago today Daisy and I got in the car and drove to Eugene to meet this guy. We liked him so much we took him home. Daisy has since had occasion to regret it, but on the whole I believe she enjoys having a big plush toy to chew on and bark at when it sneaks up on her during naps.

Dickens will be two years old on September 11. Given his inauspicious birthdate and his disastrous effect on home furnishings in the first few months of his life here, I nicknamed him Hound Zero. I'm happy to say that nickname has fallen into disuse, although there are still moments when he's every bit the rebellious adolescent--to be expected, I guess, given that at two years old he's the equivalent of a 14-year-old human.

We've been training a lot in the backyard, and if I can get his attention, Dickens does well. He picks up things fast, but he also gets bored fast, so I have to be careful not to let the sessions go on too long. I'm having some work done in the back yard, and when it's over there'll be room for a small agility layout. I have a feeling agility is going to be right in Dickens's wheelhouse.

And now, Year Two...

Snow Day!

"Look out for the Abominable Dickens!"

A rare heavy snowfall Monday night knocked out the power long enough to reduce the contents of the fridge to a science project and make me wonder how, after stoking a wood-burning furnace twice a day for eight or nine years at the old house, I was unable to get a fire going in the small woodstove in the living room. But hey, the dogs had fun, and that's what counts, right?

Dickens Weighs In

My old Golden, Winzer, weighed about 65 pounds for most of his life. He looked bigger than that, but when he was wet he had the proportions of a bobblehead dog, with a huge head, a skinny body, and a ratlike tail. Daisy, now in her 12th year, has never gotten above about 36 pounds. (Update as of Sept. 1: At her last vet visit she was up to 50 pounds.)

Dickens' license expires tomorrow, and the renewal form asked for a current rabies certificate, so I took him to the vet this afternoon for a shot. The doc put him on the scales and when he called out the weight I did a double-take.

Eighty-nine pounds.

Dickens, who is 17 months old, and who weighed about 70 pounds when I adopted him, now weighs just 12 pounds less than Winzer and Daisy together. Dickens is a short-haired Golden, too, so what you see is what you get, and what you see is a dense, thickly muscled dog.

I'm told Goldens are puppies until they're about three years old. No one told me when they stop growing. I'm hoping it's soon, because if he gets any bigger I can get a saddle for him and ride him to town.

Dickens and the Bright Idea

"What's the problem? I couldn't sleep!"

Daisy is getting on in years. Based on the birthday I chose arbitrarily for her when I got her from the pound, she'll be 12 years old on New Year's Day. Her eyesight isn't what it used to be, and at night, after lights out, she pants and whimpers and paces around the house, sometimes bumping into things, until she finally picks a spot to lie down and go to sleep.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and that she was nervous because everything went dark all at once each night. So I got her a night light and plugged it into the socket in the hall. The next night went much better for her. After a few minutes of distress she quieted down and went to sleep. I'd swear she looked well rested in the morning.

Later the following day, as I showered, I heard a loud pop. I opened the shower door and saw Dickens wasn't lying in the bathroom doorway where he usually is when I shower. I called him, and his gait when he appeared can only be called a guilty slink.

He had pulled the night light out of the wall socket and bitten through it, both the plastic housing and the glass bulb--the pieces were scattered around on the floor. I checked his mouth for cuts, then cleaned up the shards of glass and plastic. Later I bought another night light, and plugged it into the wall socket in the hall bathroom, out of Dickens' reach but where it still shines a dim light into the bedroom at night.

I told this story to a friend at coffee that day, and she jokingly suggested Dickens was nursing some sort of grudge against Daisy. I said I supposed that might be possible, providing they were both cartoon characters, but what really gave me chills was the thought of Dickens and his wet, slobbery mouth pressed up against the wall socket while he was prying the night light out.

It's just another reminder that although Dickens is now a member of the family in good standing, he still sometimes throws me a curveball that makes me wonder if he's ever going to have a different kind of light-bulb moment.

Dickens And The Voice From The Past

About 15 years ago, after training Winzer and getting a CD, I decided I knew enough about dog obedience to teach it. I put some flyers in a local feed store and gave lessons one night a week in a freezing cold barn piled high with bales of hay infested by mice that occasionally made an appearance during a lesson, wreaking havoc among the canine students.

I distilled all I'd been taught by teachers far more experienced than me into a six-week course booklet that I ran off on the laptop as needed and gave to the students. I borrowed--that's the nice word for it--liberally from course material I'd been given, rewording it to fit what I intended to be a breezy style of instruction that amused the human students enough to make them unaware that their dogs weren't learning anything in the classes--the humans were the ones who were benefiting from my very fresh expertise.

A subsequent hard-drive crash erased the documents and I'd thought them lost forever until a week ago when I located a single copy in the old duffel bag I used to take to obedience trials. There, under the dumbbell and the extra leash and the show programs was a thick sheaf of paper, a complete lesson plan from week one to week six.

Lately I've been going through the plan to brush up on my training with Dickens. It's odd to be getting this information from the me of 15 years ago, who seems to have been a lot more confident of his ability to train dogs than the me of today, who is older, less patient, and often doubts he can ever recreate the bond he had with Winzer with this new dog, who has the attention span of a gnat and the stubbornness of a herd of mules.

The younger me had some pretty smart things to say about training dogs, though, and he's been teaching me a trick or two that have made a difference in Dickens already. The first of these is consistency, which I preach but apparently don't always practice. Dickens now gets only one command, followed by a nudge in the direction of what I want him to do if he dawdles.

The next job is to make myself the most relevant thing in his universe. He's still young, and easily distracted, so I've gone back to training him on a lead instead of off-lead. There's a risk of making him leash sensitive so that he'll obey only when he's leashed, but the alternative is him dashing off to investigate every noise in the next yard or gust of wind in the middle of an exercise. The younger me said to find Dickens' motivation, whether food or toys or play. I'm still looking; he's motivated by a lot of things, but never the same thing twice running.

For example, he'll take a dumbbell from me and hold it in his mouth, but he brings back a thrown dumbbell only about half the time. The other half he chases it, picks it up, drops it, and wanders away, even if there's a cookie waiting for him. And yet there are signs the cartoon light bulb over his head is glowing more brightly every day. This evening I told him, "Find the ball," a completely new concept, and he did just that, searching every room in the house until he found it and brought it back to me, proud as can be.

I felt like younger me again.

Dickens and the Stick

Dogs and sticks. Enemies since the dawn of time. Their mighty struggle for supremacy never ends.

Dickens the Defender

If only he'd concentrate this hard on training...

Dickens and the Deluge

Rain + dogs + carpets = indoor play.

A few months ago I embarked on a renovation of the backyard deck. The work went more slowly than I'd planned, so when it began raining today--really raining, not the drizzle we've had up until now--the back yard where the deck used to be turned into mud.

When I let Dickens out this morning he acted as if he'd never seen mud, and liked what he saw. A lot. So much, in fact, that he tried to bring a few pounds of it back into the house with him on his feet. As previously mentioned he doesn't like being handled, so toweling off his feet was an adventure. He flopped, he squirmed, he mouthed the towel. But eventually he gave in.

Daisy, who has been through many more winters here, simply stood patiently while I cleaned her feet. She enjoys a vigorous rub with the towel to dry her coat, and afterward she gave me a look that said, "What's his problem?"

Last week I went searching for an old tracking harness that Winzer and I won at some dog show or club outing to see how Dickens would respond to it. Along with the harness I found three cloth gloves that I bought to train Winzer for some exercise in the Utility Dog class. I've often wondered if Daisy had any notion that Winzer was gone--it didn't seem to affect her at all when he died, except that she got me all to herself--so I offered her one of the gloves that surely smelled of Winzer to see what she'd do.

She approached it cautiously, sniffed, and then began wagging her tail, something she's not prone to doing often. I can't say for sure that she recognized the scent of her old friend, but I'm going to go ahead and say she did.

As winter closes in, my afternoon motorcycle rides will become less frequent, replaced by drives with a couple of dogs in the car, and subsequent walks. I need to get Dickens out of the house more often to get him used to other people and dogs, and I expect some more leash time will smooth out his heeling. But today we're going to relax. I'm going to make a crock pot of soup, and the dogs are going to catch up on their TV shows.

Dickens The Domesticated

I've been asked to do an update on Dickens and his integration into our pack. I haven't been writing much lately because there hasn't been much to write about. At some point Dickens dialed the crazy way down and decided to go with the flow. Since then life has been easier for all of us.

I've been stepping up the training to include the exercises Dickens will need to get his Canine Good Citizen certification, the first step toward being approved to visit hospitals and care facilities. Recently we've been working on stand on command. So far this has consisted of me telling Dickens to stand, offering him a treat as an enticement, and then watching him take the treat and sit down again. When he does this I take his collar in one hand and reach under his belly with the other and lift. While Dickens doesn't mind being touched, he dislikes being handled, and he immediately flops over on his back.

A very welcome change in his behavior concerns the dogs on the other side of the fence, who Dickens regards as an affront to his very existence. I used to have to break up the barking contests by hauling Dickens into the house by the collar. Now I call him and he comes running, no doubt having decided it's preferable to the old method. The cookie he gets doesn't hurt, either.

The couch drama seems to have ended, too. When I leave the house I put two dining room chairs upside down on the cushions, and there have been no problems.

A note about Daisy. She has figured out that Dickens is sometimes all bark and no bite. She is less hesitant to snap at him if he plays too roughly, or if he tries to steal a ball from her, or if he simply gets too close to her while she's relaxing. Dickens has become more deferential in matters of toys, too, probably as a result of a well-timed nip or two on the nose. All in all, a welcome development on both sides.

There's No Place Like Home

Dickens enjoyed his weekend at Doggy Camp, but he was glad to be home again where he can relax.

Dickens The Displaced

I'm traveling this weekend and so I took Dickens and Daisy to the kennel, which I call Doggy Camp. I board them with Sue, the daughter of a woman I used to train dogs with. Sue lives on a big piece of property in one of the more rural parts of rural Oregon, where dogs can run and swim and play, hence Doggy Camp.

Although Daisy is a seasoned Doggy Camper, this is Dickens' first stay. I realized as I was driving them there that every time in Dickens' short life that someone has put him in a car and handed him off to someone else, the first someone has never come back. I had no way to make him understand that wasn't going to happen this time. Dammit, I miss them both already.

Daisy The Devious

"Who, me?"

In my two novels, the lead character has a dog named Boswell. I named the dog after James Boswell, the 18th-century biographer of the English literary figure Samuel Johnson. Boswell’s name has become a synonym for a constant companion and observer, which neatly defines the role that dogs play in our lives. If Dickens hadn’t already had a splendid literary name, I would have renamed him Boswell.

Daisy has certainly been observing Dickens since he arrived, and I’m worried that she’s picked up some of his bad habits. In this house it’s the policy that old dogs get privileges. After a certain age everyone, human or canine, earns the right to slack off a bit, so I don’t ask things of older dogs that I demand of younger ones. Before Dickens came, I offered Daisy the privilege of getting up on the furniture to sit with me; but a lifetime of conditioning was impossible to overcome, and she was never comfortable anywhere but the floor.

This morning, though, I walked into the living room and found Daisy curled up on the recliner as if she’d been sleeping there since the day she was born. I said, “Hey!” and she looked up as if to say, “What? He does it.” True, I’ve walked in the front door after a trip into town and found Dickens stretched out on the couch, but there’s no way my reaction could have been interpreted as anything but disapproval.

Dickens needed some energy burned off him this afternoon, and Daisy needed a break from him, so I left her home with a Kong full of treats while I took him to town. When I got home Daisy was at the door to meet me, but there was something about the look on her face that made me feel the recliner. It was warm.

I’ve never really known what went on here when the dogs were home alone, except for the times Dickens tried to deconstruct the couch. I assumed Daisy slept while Dickens contemplated violence against home furnishings, but I never gave much thought to where she slept. Now I know, and I’m tempted to blame Dickens for being a bad influence.

Or it could just be that Daisy is craftier and more observant than I’ve ever given her credit for. She’s been watching me for 11 years, and probably knows my habits better than I do. Oh, you’re leaving? Have a nice time. I’ll just sleep here on the floor like I’ve always done. Never on the recliner. Nope. Not me.

Hound Zero

Give me patience.

Dickens Encounters Dental Care

Dickens And The Small Miracle

There's no other way to put it: today Dickens was a very good dog. He came when I called him in the middle of a barking contest with the crazy dog on the other side of the fence; he sat quietly by my side as I worked; he stayed alone in the house twice without making a fuss; he heeled nicely during a training session, and came to heel position in response to both signal and command; and he played with Daisy. It's as if I was given a quick peek at Future Dickens to let me know all the frustration and backward steps will be worth it if I just hang in there and stick with the program.

I really like Future Dickens.

Dickens And The End Of Innocence

Dickens will be a year old on Sunday, which by the human-to-dog-years standard means he'll be seven. He's showing signs of growing up already, but it's time to step up the program.

I've been tolerant (more or less) of his puppyish outbursts, his assaults on the couch cushions, his barking mindlessly at the ball he himself kicked under the deck. No more. From now on when he acts out he'll get a time out in the form of a down-stay. We'll train more, and he'll earn his free time. Unlike some dogs who live out their lives doing as they please (I'm talking to you, dogs on the other side of the backyard fence), Dickens has a greater destiny, to bring comfort and happiness to people in hospitals and care facilities. For that he'll need discipline, and maturity, and respect for me.

Rest up, buddy. You're going to need it.

Dickens In Development

Still hasn't figured out the ball thing yet, though.

Tomorrow is Dickens’ one-month anniversary here. Today I re-read some of the early entries in this blog and it’s like I was writing about some other dog--which in a sense I was.

Dickens has been having light-bulb moments every day. This afternoon I put him in the car for a run to the supermarket, and when we got back I opened the tailgate expecting the usual furry red missile to bound toward freedom. What I saw instead was Dickens in a very nice sit, waiting patiently for me to give him the all clear.

In fact, Dickens seems to have decided that sitting is the equivalent of saying "please." It gets my attention faster than barking or running around in circles or making Wookiee noises. I’m encouraging this every chance I get.

Aside from the couch-related incident of a few days ago, Dickens has been good when left alone in the house. Today when I left in the early afternoon to go for a motorcycle ride he seemed to know he was going to be on his own for a while and stretched out on the floor instead of following me around the house trying to get me to play. Dogs are good at recognizing patterns of behavior and what they lead to, so maybe he’s figured out that when I put on those boots, and that jacket, and pick up that helmet, I’m going away for a while.

Dickens will be a year old on the 11th of this month. I look forward to the dog he’ll be by the time another year has gone by.

Dickens The Distraught

Estimates of how long and under what circumstances Dickens will tolerate being left alone in the house are currently under review.

Dickens, Daisy, And The Circle Of Life

Yesterday, as Dickens was in another part of the back yard chewing a stick, Daisy found one of “his” tennis balls––actually one of hers––and took it gently into her mouth. An instant later she was knocked off her feet by a large red projectile moving at high speed that snatched the ball from her and sped off. Daisy, her ears back and her tail dragging, came over to me and curled up at my feet, panting and trembling.

As it has been ever since the first time Dickens did this––and he’s done it many times––my initial reaction was anger. There was nothing to be done about it, of course––Dickens had no idea what he was doing was wrong––so I sat with Daisy and gave her a few treats from my pocket.

So far the toy-sharing conundrum refuses to come to an equitable resolution, but it provided some perspective this afternoon as I was getting ready to go for a motorcycle ride. As it’s been my custom to do, I loaded a Kong for Dickens to distract him as I left the house. I thought about loading one for Daisy, too, but realized Dickens would only take it away from her as he does with tennis balls.

Then I remembered why there are two Kongs in the house in the first place, and the situation came into clearer focus.

Dickens’ addition to the pack consisting of Daisy and me is a repeat of Daisy joining the previous pack of Winzer and me. In the earlier instance, Daisy trotted in and took over, neatly inserting herself in the hierarchy between me and Winzer, who suddenly found himself with two masters instead of one. She routinely hoarded all the toys, even the ones she never played with, just so Winzer couldn’t have them. If I loaded two Kongs before leaving the house, and handed one to each dog, when I returned Daisy had two Kongs, and Winzer had a wistful look.

I’ve read over and over that dogs are happiest in a pack where all the members have clearly specified rankings. If a dog comes into a pack that has no structure, the dog will impose its own, with itself as the leader. In the wild, the pack leader, or alpha dog, has certain duties and responsibilities. The alpha gets the best food, and eats first. The alpha sleeps where it wants to. The other dogs wait their turn, and get out of the alpha’s way when it approaches.

Domestic dogs are little different from their wild ancestors in this way. Dogs who are fed from the table, or sleep on the humans’ bed, are enjoying alpha privileges, and often assume they’re in charge of the pack. This leads to behavior like uncontrollable barking (it’s the alpha’s job to warn the pack of danger), charging doors to be the first in or out (the subordinate dogs defer to the alpha), and other annoying behaviors. Many dog owners don’t realize this is simply the way dogs are hard-wired, and that the things that drive them crazy about their dogs are simply the normal canine response to a power vacuum.

Which brings me back to Daisy. Dog owners anthropomorphize their pets to a high degree, and in that respect I don’t claim to be any different. But I have to admit that what I see as bullying on Dickens’ part might well be seen by Daisy as a simple re-ordering of the pack, neatly mirroring the reorganization that took place when she demoted Winzer all those years ago.

This won’t stop me from giving Daisy an extra treat when Dickens isn’t looking, or scratching her behind the ears when she asks for attention by putting her head on my leg. But it’ll make me feel less resentful toward Dickens, and that’s good, too, because a good alpha not only corrects pack members when they misbehave, he forgives them afterward.