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Category: animals

Dogs Wearing Clothes

Dogs Wearing Clothes

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Our little ragamuffin pooch Copper was glad to see me when I walked in the door Sunday night. I gave him a hug and a pat, and yesterday, when we had more time together, I told him what I really thought about the dogs of New York.

They’re cute, I said, and you would probably like to sniff them out. But then again, you might not take them seriously because … they wear clothes. I mean, not just the random pampered poodle, but the perky bichon and the elegant whippet.  I would say about a third of the canines I spotted in the Big Apple were wearing something other than their leashes.

Dachshunds were the best dressed. They wore knitted shirts and tuxedo vests. And one dog (not a dachshund) in Washington Square Park was decked out in a plaid shirt and tennis shoes. This dog also walked on his hind legs.

I’ve heard there’s a new movement afoot to accord animals the rights of people. If not the rights, then at least the wardrobes. At least in Manhattan. 

The Coverup

The Coverup

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Few activities in life bring as much simple pleasure as covering up the ones we love.

Swaddling a newborn.

Finding the beloved blankie for a toddler in footie pajamas.

Tucking in a child after the fifteenth reading (that night!) of Goodnight Moon.

Pulling a jacket over the sleepy, sullen high-schooler you’re driving to school after she missed the bus.

Covering the teenager who came home late from the party and crashed on the couch.

And, when there is no one else around, tucking in this character.
 

Hesitation

Hesitation

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These are cold days in Northern Virginia (emphasis on Northern)! A person (or a dog) might have every reason to bound out the door, trot across the deck but then screech to a full stop at the top of the stairs.

Hesitation is in season.

“Do I really want to go out in this?”is what I imagine Copper is thinking.

Which is similar to my thoughts this morning:  It’s 6 a.m., 4 degrees F. — and, of course, it’s dark. “Do I really want to go out in this?”

And the answer, for both of us, for different reasons, is yes!

Old Dogs, New Tricks

Old Dogs, New Tricks

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A genetic study of ancient canine bones shows that dogs became domesticated in Europe anywhere from 18,800 to 32,100 years ago. Most likely this transition happened when wolves started hanging around humans in hopes of scoring leftovers from a mammoth (in both senses of the word) kill.

Why does this not surprise me? 

Listening to a radio report of this study  — and then reading about it in the morning newspaper — I’m struck once again by this point: that dogs are still the only large carnivore to be domesticated.

I think about Copper, so loving, so cute. Able to sit on his haunches and beg for food. Clever enough to know that if he sits there long enough he may get a treat.

The human-canine bond is a profound and mysterious one, but at times it is a fragile one. I’ve seen Copper snap when he feels cornered, challenged. I’ve seen the wolf inside him. But still I hug him, pet him, treat him increasingly more like a child.

It’s comforting to know that this has been going on for tens of thousands of years.


(Photo: Claire Cassidy Capehart)

The Encounter

The Encounter

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I saw him on the path to the Franklin Farm Meadow, a placid paved trail adjoining a napkin-sized playground. Fat and sleek, he sat munching grass, completely oblivious of the human two feet away.

His jaws worked each mouthful as he hungrily tore into each new tuft. This was one hungry guy — though from the looks of him he hadn’t missed too many meals.

Groundhogs are always bigger than I think they’re going to be. Good-sized and galumphing. But this one wasn’t budging. He had found a tasty patch of fescue and was going to eat it all or else.

After a few minutes I delicately eased by the guy — and that’s when he sprang into action. He snapped around and assumed an attack position, crouched, teeth bared. I spoke to him quietly, told him I wasn’t after his grass, just on a run.

When I turned back to look at him, he had gone back to his dinner.

A wild thing, observed.


(I’m fresh out of groundhog photos, but this is near where I saw him.)

Frying Pan Park

Frying Pan Park

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As soon as I pulled into the gravel parking lot, I knew it was a mistake. I hadn’t been to this farm park since the girls were young. I was missing them enough as it was. What was I thinking of?

Some sort of therapy, I suppose, the kind where anxious folks expose themselves to ever-increasing doses of what they fear. So I hopped out of the car and started my “treatment.”

There was the big barn where we’d admire the baby pigs and the field where we’d watch the young goats rut and run. There was the chicken coop, the old tractor, the field where the pardoned Thanksgiving turkeys (given to several American presidents, who chose not to slaughter them) now run free.

Mostly there were the shadows of my three daughters. One running ahead, a second clambering on a fence and the third holding her nose because “this place really stinks, Mom.” For a moment the memories overcame me and I had to stop and compose myself.

As I stared at the light on the early fall fields, a young father raced ahead of me, his two children pulling on his arms. He looked harried and hassled — and seeing him helped me remember the high drama of those days, the endlessness of them. My trips to this park were often out of desperation.

But I also recalled the way it felt to pull in the driveway after one of our outings, secure in our togetherness, feeling, as I rushed to start dinner, that everything was exactly as it should be.

Before and After

Before and After

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Time for a warm-weather hair cut. Everyone needs one.

The new Copper is about five pounds lighter. He frolics around like a young lamb. A young, shorn lamb, that is.

Now we know it’s really summer.

Pack of Two

Pack of Two

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The book I was reading as I fell asleep last night was Pack of Two by the late Caroline Knapp. In it she describes the unique bond between human and canine.

And coincidentally, the canine most in my mind and heart right now was sitting at the top of the stairs, where he knows he shouldn’t be, when I woke up early this morning. I wanted to be angry at him, but I couldn’t. It’s because I had just read words like these:

Here I am with my dog. Me and my dog. The closeness feels like a private bridge, extending from human to animal …  The causeway is constructed of ritual and repetition and simple moments, of behaviors discovered and then executed exclusively between human and dog, and there is something exceptionally restorative about crossing it day after day.

The bridge I cross most often with Copper consists of throwing the little guy a day-glo orange tennis ball. He runs, jumps, leaps, catches it on the fly or sometimes trots into the bushes to retrieve it, and lopes gratefully back to drop the ball at my feet so we can repeat the ritual over and over again. For some reason, he does this best (actually only!) with me.

It is our “causeway,” our “private bridge.” And I’m grateful for it.

Zoobiquity

Zoobiquity

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Authors Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, M.D., and Kathryn Bowers coined the word “zoobiquity” to describe their efforts to use animal behavior and the latest finds of veterinary science to solve some of the great puzzles of human medicine.

Take fainting, for instance. Turns out that animals faint, too, and can better elude predators when they do. It’s not just “flight or fight,” then, but “flight, fight or faint.” A important lesson — that stillness is another way to fight stress.

Or take obesity. It’s common in the animal world, and studies on dragonflies raise the possibility that the condition might be caused by a parasite, raising the more intriguing possibility that obesity might be infectious.

Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist and psychiatrist, has observed first-hand what fear can do to the human heart — and she honed her theories by learning about animal hearts, how restraint or fear of capture can kill an otherwise healthy bird or beast. She then applies this to what is known about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and a study that found a threefold greater risk of this among swaddled (i.e., restrained) babies put to sleep on their stomachs and exposed to a loud noise. The combination of noise and restraint triggers a slowdown of the heart in the young of many species, Natterson-Horowitz says, and calls for more collaboration among animal physiologists and pediatricians. “Powerful yet vulnerable, the heart-brain alliance usually saves lives,” the authors write. “But every once in a while, it can also end one.”

Zoobiquity is big-picture thinking at its best.

Nothing Personal

Nothing Personal

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This happens quite often, especially as the days lengthen and the air warms.

I’ll walk outside first thing in the morning (on days when I don’t leave before dawn), and I’m greeted with a great flapping and scampering. It’s the robins and jays flying away as the door squeaks open, and the squirrels scampering up the tree as I head past them to the mailbox.

But the overall effect is one of breaking up a party. It’s like entering the room of a teenager or joining a conversation that suddenly stops as you come near. The birds and small mammals have obviously been up to something they don’t want me to share. And that’s okay. I understand, really I do!

All of this is to say that wild things have their own world, their own hearts and habits. It’s comforting to know that I don’t belong; it’s comforting to know it’s nothing personal.