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.