Sleeping Through the Night

We got our dog Leonard from Atlanta Lab Rescue in July 2014.  He was a terribly anxious dog when we got him but time and Prozac helped.  He settled into our household pretty well and life with Leonard had been mostly uneventful.  Then the last time we took him to the vet, she suggested that we try to taper him off the fluoxetine (generic for Prozac) and see how he did.  So we took him down to every other day, and then we missed a couple of doses and figured we'd just see how he was altogether off of it.

He's always been terrified of storms, but unless the weather is bad, he's slept downstairs in the living room by himself.  Bullwinkle, our previous dog, couldn't climb the stairs in our house, but Leonard could.  When we first got him and didn't completely know what to expect, we'd barricaded the stairs with a piece of plywood that we had to step over and that mostly kept Leonard downstairs.  But then after we stopped the fluoxetine, he started waking up at night at 1:30 or 2 a.m. almost every night, and either hurtling himself over the barricade and coming upstairs, or barking until one of us got up.  We restarted the fluoxetine, but it didn't seem to really help that much.  For the last couple of months, almost every night either Tom or I has spent much if not all of the night on the sofa, keeping Leonard company.

This was not going to work in the long run, so on Thursday we had a session with a dog trainer, recommended by Intown Animal Hospital.  We told him about Leonard and what we knew about his life before we got him and what has happened in our household, and stopping the Prozac and the waking at night and how now we were taking turns keeping him from keeping everyone awake all night.  The trainer listened to all this and then looked at us and said, "Why can't he go upstairs?"

Now there was not any particularly good reason why he couldn't go upstairs; when we'd first gotten him, we hadn't known how he would behave in the house, so it made sense then, maybe, but not so much now.  He does eat loose paper that he finds on the floor, but it's been almost two years and that's probably long enough even for us to get the papers picked up.  So night before last I took away the barricade and called him to come upstairs.  He explored a little but ended up falling asleep downstairs as usual.  I put his smaller bed in the family room upstairs where I thought a dog might want to sleep, and I went to bed.

Around 2 a.m. he came upstairs and jumped on our bed.  I got him off the bed, and he settled down pretty quickly in the hallway.  He woke up a couple of times and after wandering around a little quickly went back to sleep, on the floor in the hall between our and Iain's rooms.  That's where he was, sound asleep, when I got up yesterday morning.

Last night I moved the bed to the hall where he'd slept the night before, but I think he stayed downstairs all night.  He didn't make a sound.

Why Dogs are Good for the Neighborhood

Leonard, the dog we adopted from Atlanta Lab Rescue last summer, is doing better.  Tom says he's now "doggier" than he used to be, and I think that's right.  Even though he still doesn't ask to go into the backyard regularly, he does occasionally, and we can now get him to go outside with the promise of a treat (he's not big on dog biscuits, but he'll do anything for Pupperoni).  So we end up walking him at least twice a day and sometimes more frequently. 

Although I still have one child living at home, somehow it works out that I end up doing the preponderance of the dog walking, at least when I am home.  Tom certainly helps out -- often walking him while I'm at work or sometimes while I'm making dinner -- but when I'm around I do most of it.  And being out on the street with the dog once or twice a day, I've seen the changes day by day in the new house that's being built and the one that's being renovated, and the lack of anything at all happening at the corner, when the apartments used to be.  I've seen babysitters arrive early in the morning and leave at the end of the workday, and I've met neighbors I'd never met before, even though I've lived here a really long time.  And there are other neighbors -- almost all neighbors with dogs -- that I now see regularly enough that I know them better than I did.  If you see the same people enough times, you know them well enough to talk to them, and if you know them well enough to talk to them you might get to know them better.

Caroline gave me a copy of  "Life Between Buildings:  Using Public Space" for Christmas.  In about two hundred pages of text and photographs, Danish architect Jan Gehl picks up where Jane Jacobs left off to identify specific features of the built environment that create places where people want to be.  There are things we have to do -- go to work, go to the grocery store, go home -- that we will do whether they are fun or not.  But if there is something interesting along the way-- if on the way home, you walk by a neighborhood bar or coffee shop and spot friends -- you might linger or take a detour,  Then there are things that you do just for fun, that you don't have to do at all.  And if we are making a choice, we prefer lively streets to dead ones, a shopping district with interesting, unpredictable things to see and lots of people and musicians on the street corners rather than a mall, and places that are pleasant to be rather than, say, walking along Buford Highway.  A common denominator here is there being other people around who might be doing something interesting, or with whom we might strike up a conversation, or we might already know and could catch up on what they've been doing since the last time we saw them.  This is what the book is about,  It sounds obvious, but it's not, or at least it wasn't to me.

"Low-intensity contact is also a situation from which other forms of contact can grow," according to Gehl.  

"Contacts that develop spontaneously in connection with merely being where there are others are usually very fleeting -- a short exchange of words, a brief discussion with the next man on the bench, chatting with a child in a bus, watching someone working and asking a few questions,and so forth.  From this simple level, contacts can grow to other levels, as the participants wish.  Meeting, being present in the same space, is in each of these circumstances the prime prerequisite."

If "being in the same space" is the prerequisite, getting out of your house and not being sealed up in your car is really important.  He continues,

"The possibility of meeting neighbors and co-workers often in connection with daily comings and goings implies a valuable opportunity to establish and later maintain acquaintances in a relaxed and undemanding way....Frequent meetings in connection with daily activities increase chances of developing contacts with neighbors, a fact noted in many surveys.  With frequent meetings friendships and the contact network are maintained in a far simpler and less demanding way than if friendship must be kept up by telephone and invitation.  If this is the case, it is often rather difficult to maintain contact, because more is always demanded of the participants when meetings must be arranged in advance."

Every once in a while, someone goes crazy on one of the neighborhood message boards or email lists about dog waste left in their yards, or in plastic bags in their trash cans.  (Trash cans?  Really?)  (My favorite recent one included a long post about what a health hazard dog poop was, full of coliform bateria and other microbial agents, followed by a response to the effect of "I can see why people don't pick it up after their dog - they are afraid.")  Dogs are good for the neighborhood because neighborhoods with people who walk their dogs are going to have closer social connections with their neighbors.

I have to stop writing now. I have to go walk my dog.

A Dog at Home

It's Saturday morning and it's quiet.  Iain isn't up yet and Tom has headed off to Lake Allatoona for the day.  I just got back from walking the dog.  it's a lot easier than it used to be.  Leonard has gone from being so agitated on a leash that we were afraid he would be injured to being the kind of dog that strolls on a leash and does lots of sniffing but not a lot of tugging.  He still sometimes gets agitated when he sees people and other dogs -- especially people who are running -- but this doesn't seem to be aggression.  He actually does fine around most dogs -- he has uneventfully been introduced to several of the dogs on the street -- and is fine with strangers walking up and petting him, even when I tell them to move slowly and they don't.  But he really does get worked up when he sees people running or children playing.

The dramatic transformation of Leonard from terrified and agitated to mostly calm started with using the harness instead of the collar (thank you for that advice, Dr. Fiorillo), and I'm sure the fluoxetine has also helped (that's generic for Prozac, and thank you for that too, Dr. Fiorillo).  And it's been a couple of months now, and I'm sure that the passage of time has also helped.  He's mostly settled down and is acting like a pretty normal dog, except for really not wanting to go into the back yard.  He's still on exercise restriction because of the heartworm treatment, so we haven't pushed that, but once he's not we'll have to figure out how to get him back there enough that he'll get used to it.  He is wonderful at retrieving a ball, and we haven't been doing that either, because of the exercise restriction.  So that's something left to work on.

But why the excitement when he sees people running, or children in the church parking lot playing baseball?  He no longer is afraid of airplanes overhead or bags of yard waste; this, along with his aversion to going into the back yard, is pretty much all that is left in the category of Leonard's inexplicable behaviors.  We did get a DNA test on him to try to ascertain his non-Labrador retriever ancestry.  According to Mars Veterinary's Wisdom Panel, he's a Labrador retriever-Australian shepherd mix.  (This figure makes it looks like he might be a purebreed Lab, or equally likely to be a Tibetan mastiff-Lab mix, but I don't think that's right, and it's not how Mars Veterinary interpreted it.)

I don't know much about Australian shepherds, but what I have learned since we got this result is that they are herding dogs (that's the "shepherd" part), and so his watchfulness may not be nervousness but just his nature.  And maybe that's why when he sees people running, especially children, he really wants to go after them.  They are loose, and they need to be herded up.  

Last night when I was walking him we saw a large possum crossing the street.  He really wanted to go after it.  I didn't let him, as I didn't think it would likely end well for either Leonard or the possum, but you never know.

Scared of Everything

Right now Leonard, our new dog, is lying on the floor at my feet.  At this moment (unlike when I took this picture a few minutes ago) he is asleep, lying on his side, and using my left foot as a pillow.  He finally started eating a normal amount of dog food about four days ago.  Before that, it was just a few bites at a time, and not very much over the course of the day.  I think he was too scared to eat.  But now he's eating, and that's good.

But it was still nearly impossible to walk him during the daytime, when there were more people out and about and lawn mowers and chain saws being used and air conditioners running.  He would get scared, and pull so hard first in one direction and then in another that we were afraid he would hurt himself.  We were still using the red Atlanta Lab Rescue choke collar that had been on him when we got him two weeks ago.  I took him on longer walks early in the morning and in the evening when it was quieter but still a jogger or a dog walker or a bus going by or loud music from a passing car could send him into a panic.  I had never noticed, until trying to walk Leonard, that we obviously are under a flight path for the airport.  Planes fly overhead every minute or two, and I had not ever noticed it, but the sound scared the dog and made him want to run away.  Everything scared him, including children, bags of yard clippings, squirrels in trees overhead, and our neighbors and their leashed dogs.  

So yesterday morning I showed up at Intown Animal Hospital without an appointment.  I got there a few minutes before the time they were scheduled to open because I wanted to increase the chance that we could be seen and hopefully get there before too many other dogs showed up.  He wouldn't get on the scale; I had to pick him up and set him on it.  Thankfully he didn't growl at anyone or at any of the dogs that were there.  Dr. Fiorillo was able to see us, and she prescribed him something to help him calm down.  She was easing into the recommendation that our dog needed something for anxiety, and I interrrupted her.  I'm a doctor, I told her, and I think he needs doggie Valium.  She didn't prescribe Valium but she did prescribe fluoxetine (that's generic for Prozac).  She told us not to use the pinch collar we'd gotten last weekend (we'd already decided that would probably make things worse) and recommended a harness or a head collar.  She recommended that we get some help from a dog trainer, and gave us a phone number for one she says is good.  And she said it was just going to take a while.

As soon as I got Leonard home from his doctor visit, I got his prescription filled at Kroger and gave him his first dose of fluoxetine.  Then I took the pinch collar back to Pet Supplies Plus and exchanged it for a PetSafe Easy Walk Harness.  They didn't have a medium-large so I bought the medium, but when I got home and measured Leonard was afraid it would be too small.  So I took it back and exchanged it for the large which probably is too big even at the smallest setting.  But even not fitting quite right, it's like he's a different dog.  He doesn't pull, and even though he sometimes growls at joggers or other dogs, he often doesn't and sometimes doesn't even pay much attention.  He doesn't panic and try to take off, and he calms down more quickly.  Walking him is now mostly uneventful, although I do still have to tell him that the airplane overhead is not going to hurt him and we can just keep going.  I've ordered the medium-large from Amazon (the pet store recommended I order it on line, because it was hard for them to get the in-between sizes).  But until it comes, I think he'll do okay with this one.

I think the pressure on the choke collar must have scared him, and then when he was startled by anything else it just made it worse.  Without the extra fear from the collar, he's doing much better - I really do think it's that and not one dose of generic Prozac that has made him so much calmer.

So if you see us walking and I take him across the street to avoid a too-close encounter, don't take it personally, and if he growls at you or your dog, don't take that personally either.  It's one thing at a time, and I think now he's no longer afraid of his collar.  Hopefully joggers, other dogs, bags of yard waste, lawnmowers, air conditioners, and planes flying overhead will follow.  

A Dog in the House, Again

Weekend before last, we decided we were ready to get another dog.  We followed up with a couple of Lab rescue groups and before we heard back from the second one, Atlanta Lab Rescue had already lined up a volunteer who was fostering a dog to bring him by our house.  He had spent months in a shelter, but someone there thought he was adoptable and he ended up with Atlanta Lab Rescue.  He'd just been neutered and the person who was fostering him had only had him about 24 hours.  So there were lots of unknowns about this dog.  We'd asked for a lab mix -- Tom thought that without knowing anything about ancestry, we were better off not getting a purebred lab -- and that's probably why ALR thought this dog would be a good match for us.

We said yes.

He's a good-looking dog, who appears to me to be mostly but not exclusively Labrador retriever.  His ears are covered with longer fur, not the short velvety coat that was on Bullwinkle's ears.  He has a white patch on his chest, that doesn't really show on this photo.  His tail -- which also doesn't show -- is muscular and seems to wag uncontrollably most of the time.  When he wakes up and before he exits his crate in the morning it makes a really loud thump-thump-thump.  At the tip of it is a tuft of long, stiff white hair; it looks like a paint brush.

Given his recent history, it's not surprising that it's taking a little while for him to settle in.  He still seems to be afraid of Tom, although less so than when we got him.  He is not afraid of Caroline or me, but still is scared when we walk in carrying things.  He doesn't do too badly on the leash but gets very upset when we lead him by his collar.  He's not really comfortable yet in the back yard.  But he's good at retrieving a ball and unlike either Bullwinkle or Lorenzo will usually drop it at my feet and wait for me to throw it again, his tail wagging wildly.  I think someone taught him to do that, at some time.

Saturday night Mark invited us to go to Steve's Live Music.  Yoshi's band was playing Crosby, Stills and Nash covers, and they were great.  As I told Caroline, the place was packed full of people who were Tom's and my age, who all knew all words to all the songs.  It was really fun.  But I'd started the dishwasher just before we left, and it was making an Unusual Sound.  I'd thought about stopping it and letting it finish up after we got home, but I didn't.  We have a history with dishwashers at our house which is not a happy one.  I am thinking about Thanksgiving 2009, when our old dishwasher tried to burn the house down.  So even though the music was great and we got to catch up with Mark, who no longer lives on the street and we haven't seen in a while, I had this image in my head of the house burning down.  I didn't really think this was going to happen, and I didn't call Kathy to check on it, which I could have.  Would the firefighters would know to get Leonard out of his crate?  Would he bark and get their attention?  Would he be too afraid to move?  I was not worried about the house, in this particular mental loop; I was just worried about the dog.

We came home to an intact house (well, it was as intact as it was when we'd left), clean dishes, and a happy dog with a tail that wouldn't stop wagging.  But I left my sweater at Steve's.  I guess we'll just have to go back.

A Dog in the House

At my house, I am almost always the first one up in the morning.  For years, the morning routine was when I come downstairs, the first thing I would do was feed the dog -- our gentle, loving, loopy Labrador retriever.  So now, when I come downstairs in the dark, I still expect to hear his feet on the hardwood floor, his demands for food or water or being let outside or for attention, but it's quiet.  A few weeks ago, while Iain and I were both out of the country, Bullwinkle died.  He had cancer, and we all knew the time was coming.  Iain had a chance to say goodbye via Skype.  Since then we've talked a little about getting another dog, but it seems like it's too soon, like getting married again right after a divorce.

A couple weeks ago we had invited over some neighbors for dinner.  Scott was out of town, but Robyn came and Pawel and Carolina came too.  When Carolina emailed me to ask what they could bring, I cc:d Tom on my response, which was that they didn't need to bring anything, but if they wanted to bring something they could bring a bottle of wine.  To which Tom replied, "Also bring your dog.  Ours died this week and it will be nice to have a canine guest."  We'd gotten to know Lorenzo, Pawel and Carolina's golden retriever, at a recent block party.  So, fine.

That night we cooked pizza in the backyard pizza oven and traded stories.  It was a nice evening, and at some point Tom said to Pawel and Carolina, if you ever need someone to look after Lorenzo, let us know.  They looked surprised and replied, well, if you're serious about that, we're going to Savannah for the 4th of July.  Tom said he absolutely meant it and we'd be happy to look after Lorenzo.  I actually was a little annoyed that he made this offer with no consultation, given that I figured I would end up doing a good deal of the work over the holiday weekend, but it wasn't that big of a deal.  It couldn't be that much work to have Lorenzo underfoot, and as it turned out we were also feeding Karen and Elise's turtle while they were away, too.

Lorenzo came over on July 3, with his food (in single serving ziplock bags, since he's on a diet), his leash, his emergency contact information, and the essential commands in Spanish that we needed to use before entering the street, since Lorenzo has been trained to not enter the street except on command.  And sometime after that, something unexpected happened.  Everyone in the house -- everyone -- was happier, and we all fell totally in love with Lorenzo.

It wasn't just that he got excited when we returned home, greeting us with an unexpected display of joy (and once he even did it when he woke up and we hadn't gone anywhere; perhaps he dreamed that we'd gone away, so he was happy we were back), or that he'd knock things over to get a tennis ball that the kids would throw for him in the back yard or that he'd snooze at our feet; it was a reminder of what wonderful companions dogs are, how they can read our minds and give us what we need and just be there even when no one else is.

We took pictures.  Caroline's were the best; she posted lots of photos to Facebook and we sent some to Carolina and Pawel, who were having a good time on their vacation.  Here's one of mine:

Caroline's are better.  Here are a few:

This one had a caption, "an educated dog is never without a well-stocked library."

On Monday, Iain asked "when we have to give Lorenzo up."   I told him that Carolina and Pawel would be back on Wednesday.

Wednesday evening I was going out to dinner with an out-of-town colleague who was in Atlanta for a meeting.  I had promised long before that I would take her to my favorite Mexican restaurant that night.  I picked her up from the meeting and we stopped by the house on the way to Caramba (it really wasn't out of the way) so obstensibly so I could make sure Tom remembered I wouldn't be home for dinner but really because I wanted to say goodbye to Lorenzo.  No one but Lorenzo was home and we were greeted with his trademark happy dance.  I told him goodbye and that we'd enjoyed having him with us.  I know that he's a dog and he might not have understood a word I said (and anyway, I'm not sure he knows English) but I needed to say it anyway.

By the time I got back from dinner, Lorenzo had been picked up.  Iain said he put on an extraordinary display of joy when Pawel and Carolina arrived.  They brought us pralines and toffee from Savannah, and a very nice thank you note.  But really, the thanks should be to them.  It's great to have neighbors who -- when you really need one -- will loan you their dog.  

And also neighbors who will bring you your sweater that you left at Caramba.  Later that evening, there was a knock at the door.  It was our neighbor Marian, returning my sweater.

Teaching the Dog to Read

A couple months ago, on my return from a trip I learned that in my absence Tom had been trying to teach the dog to read.  He said that the dog wasn't making much progress.  On further investigation, I learned that he actually was trying to teach Bullwinkle the alphabet.  I told him that that no doubt was the problem, that the whole language method would probably be more effective than phonics.

Since then, there was an article in the New York Times about Chaser, a border collie that knows the names of more than a thousand objects, along with some additional verbs.  This border collie is owned by a retired psychology professor from Wofford College, who - from the time the dog was a puppy - spent 4 or 5 hours a day teaching the dog words.  Border collies are energetic, smart, obdient, and hard-working, and according to Dr. Pilley, Chaser's owner and teacher, she still demands 4 to 5 hours a day.  "I'm 82," Dr. Pilley told the New York Times, "and I have to go to bed to get away from her."

Now we knew about border collies and their vocabularies before this report; we thought that border collies could learn 400 words, and if border collies could do it, surely Bullwinkle could too. 

Bullwinkle is mature - he's 9 years old in human years - with a graying muzzle and a very sweet disposition.  He is not particularly obdient (see, for example, this and this) and not exactly energetic either, but since he was a puppy he has been in a household where we talk about current events over dinner and we read newspapers and magazines and books, so surely that counts for something.  (Caroline was in a study, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, and every year or so I would be interviewed by phone.  Whenever they would ask how many children's books were in the house and I said "hundreds," I'm not sure they believed me.)

We do think Bullwinkle knows quite a few words; most of them have to do with food.  He is obsessed with food, and I think if he were given the chance he would eat until he was sick, or worse.

Given his food obsession and his mellow disposition and not-so-active lifestyle ("Caroline, there's a dog on your bed." "There's always a dog on my bed."), it is not surprising that he has a weight problem.  Tom buys the diet dog food, and at least when I feed him I definitely control portions, but he is insufferable when he thinks it's time to be fed. 

This is the thing that I don't understand.  This is a dog that will jump on the dining room table and snatch a loaf of bread or a stick of butter, if given the chance.  But the 40 pound bag of dog food is sitting out in the foyer, next to his bowl - the bowl he will toss across the room if not filled with food when he thinks it should be - and he has never knocked the bag over or tore it open to get into it on his own.  It's not that he doesn't know that's where his food is, and it's not that he couldn't get into it - he just hasn't.

We used to have a cat named Rocky, who decided he didn't like sharing his house with the dog and moved next door to live with Kathy and Steve; he died of cancer a few years ago.  When Rocky was still in our house at least some of the time, we had dry cat food sitting out for him so he could eat when he wanted to.  Bullwinkle started eating Rocky's food, and Rocky - I know this was deliberately done out of spite - did knock over Bullwinkle's close-to-empty bag of food and helped himself to dog food.  At the time, I told Tom this proved that cats are smarter than dogs, but that may not be true; they simply may be more devious.

Bullwinkle may not know more than a dozen words, but one morning when I returned from a before dawn trip to the grocery store, he broke out in frenzied barking that stopped as soon as he saw it was me.  He doesn't have much opportunity to be a watch dog but I am pretty sure if anyone did try to get into the house at night he would be as loud as our alarm system.  He also knows the sound of a half of a dog treat tapped against the back window, and even when he is barking at possums on the other side of the fence, he usually will come running.  Not bad for an middle-aged, overweight Laborador Retriever, even if he can't read.