Dogs Are People Too

If you have ever lived with a dog, this is a no-brainer for you. You know with absolute certainty that dogs have personalities and emotions the same as humans. If you are a scientist, it has taken you a little longer to accept this conclusion. Like maybe a century. Up until recently, most scientists who study these things have believed that dogs reacted to events around them, but were incapable of feeling the human emotions of love, jealousy, animosity, joy.

Listen up, all of you scientists out there who took so long to begrudgingly admit that dogs have distinct personalities and are capable of feeling and expressing emotions the way humans do. Let me tell you about the quirky personalities and loving natures of the dogs who have blessed me with their presence in my life.

Since neither my husband nor I were allowed to have a dog growing up, because both of our mothers had chanted the same mantra –“ If we get a dog, I’ll be the one who has to take care of it”, we welcomed a dog into our home as soon as we moved into an apartment complex that allowed them.

HONEY

We knew nothing about Rescues, so we did what any young clueless couple who never had dogs would do. We went to a pet store and bought with our hearts, not our heads. We fell in love with the thick, soft, cuddly fur and beautiful face of a Dutch Keeshond puppy, a breed we had never heard of and about which we knew nothing. It didn’t matter to us. One cuddle of that heavy, soft fur, and we were goners. $350 goners, which was a lot of money to spend on a dog in 1973.

I am going to give us credit for reading up on the Dutch Keeshond breed and how to train a dog. Sure, it was after we had purchased her and brought her home, but at least we were open to learning.

The first odd quirk we noticed about Honey was that she was apparently jealous of our sex life. I guess. What else would account for her throwing herself against the closed bedroom door when she heard sounds that she may have interpreted as rambunctious play in which she was missing out? Or when she was in the bedroom with us, jumping up and down at the foot of the bed, pulling the blankets onto the floor?

She also had a weird habit of walking backward. Not all the time, of course. It’s not how she navigated the world, but sometimes, for no reason we could discern, she would get up from where she was lying and walk backward around the room.

At the young age of 2, she developed epilepsy that manifested in frightening grand mal seizures. As I said at the beginning of this story, knowing nothing about dog breeding, we purchased her from a pet store. It wasn’t until years later that we learned about puppy mills, the deplorable conditions in which those dogs were bred and then sold to unscrupulous pet store owners. It was a certainty that our beloved Honey was one of those puppy mill dogs and her epilepsy was a result of poor breeding practices. It’s also possible that her backward walking mentioned above was the result of a coordination difficulty side effect of the phenobarbital used to control her seizures.

She had an odd habit of burying bones. What's odd about a dog burying bones, you may ask. It's in their nature. That's what they do. Well, yes, that is what they do. Usually outside in the dirt. Not our Honey. She would take her Milk Bone snacks and bury them all around the house. Under couches and chairs. Under Joel's crib. Under our bed. The vacuum was always running into them and crunching them, much to her dismay when she returned to retrieve them.

Her protective nature was always on display. She would lie on the floor next to our baby’s crib while he slept. She never left his side.

I guess good pet parenting superseded irresponsible breeding practices and poor health because our little fluff ball lived to a pretty good old dog age of 12 ½.

PEPPER

Pepper, a German Shepherd/ Labrador Retriever/ a lot of other stuff, entered our lives when Honey was 2 years old. A neighbor’s German Shepherd had an unholy alliance with a stray of questionable heritage, resulting in a litter of 12 of the most mixed-up mongrels you could imagine. My husband had always wanted a German Shepherd, so we enthusiastically agreed to adopt one of the 12 that most resembled a German Shepherd.

Honey lovingly accepted this tiny new puppy, acting as a surrogate mother, allowing baby Pepper to sleep snuggled into her soft fur. From the moment Pepper came into our home, the two were inseparable. Except when Pepper’s most prominent personality trait was on display – Wandering.

Nothing, not even a 6-foot stockade fence surrounding our ¼ acre yard could contain that dog. She dug under it, jumped over it, climbed up snowbanks to scale over it. If we opened the front door a crack, this 120 lb. dog managed to squeeze through the opening and take off. She was too fast for us to catch, but we learned soon enough that after her adventures, she would always return home.

She never wandered when she felt she was needed. She stood guard over the baby carriage when a friend of mine came to visit and barked to alert us when the baby cried.

She lay next to me or my husband on the bed when either of us was sick.

These two dogs taught me that dogs feel and freely express emotional hurt. When my sister’s first child was born, I spent a week at her home in Chicago, helping her with the new baby. I assumed that my dogs would be thrilled to see me when I returned. After all, they got excited when I came back from a 5-minute trip to the mailbox.

After a week away, I opened the front door to both of my dogs standing still, side by side, staring at me. No jumping. No tail wagging. Just staring. Then, in tandem, they turned around, walked away from me, and settled into a corner of the room. Glaring at me. They wanted to let me know that they were quite angry that I had left them for a week. Message received. Still possessing the loving nature of dogs, they got over it within 10 minutes and greeted me with the wags and kisses I had expected, but that incident taught me just how deep a dog’s emotions can run.

BRANDY

Our first Golden Retriever joined our household after Honey, at age 12 1/2 was called to cross the Rainbow Bridge. Pepper was terribly lonely and we thought a new dog companion might cheer her up, so enter Brandy.

Brandy’s personality was the complete opposite of Pepper’s. Whereas Pepper’s wanderlust was never satisfied, Brandy could not bear to be away from home. Her story is told in the piece I submitted to the Unleashed Challenge – A Letter From Dog Heaven.

As told in that story, one time a section of our fence blew down in a storm. I had let Brandy out for a “potty break”, and only turned my head for a minute. When I looked again, she was gone. Having experienced Pepper’s nomadic ways, I panicked. I ran back into the house to get my car keys, preparing to drive around the neighborhood looking for her. When I opened the front door, there was Brandy, staring at the door, waiting for someone to let her in!

Her emotional perceptiveness was demonstrated to me the day I found out a good friend had been diagnosed with breast cancer. I sat on the couch and cried. Brandy came over to me, put her paws on my lap, and licked the tears from my face.

From Brandy, I also learned that dogs’ facial expressions are no different than those of humans. One afternoon, my friend and I were treating her to little scraps of our lunch. A piece of turkey here; a bit of hamburger there. She was happily chowing down whatever we gave her until………………the carrot. As soon as that carrot piece entered her mouth, she stopped chewing and looked at us with saucer wide eyes. The expression on her face and the message it conveyed was as clear as if she had spoken. “What the Hell is this???” She stared at us with the unchewed carrot in her mouth for a good 10 seconds and then spit it out onto the floor. Jenn and I laughed until the tears ran down our faces.

CASEY

After we lost Brandy to cancer in the year 2000, our house was devoid of a dog for the first time in 37 years. When we returned home from the vet, although it was the middle of July, we opened the door to a cold house. Frigid, still, and empty. It needed the warmth and love of a dog. We could not adjust to life without it.

My hairdresser told me about a client of his who was looking for a home for her Golden Retriever. With a third baby on the way, an unfenced yard, and a husband who was running two businesses, she and her family no longer had time for him. I am thankful they cared enough to find their dog a good home. And so our final dog, Casey, entered our home at age 6.

Casey, although a Golden Retriever, could not have been more different than Brandy. There is a hierarchy in the dog world. Some dogs are Alpha, the head of the pack. The rest of the dogs in the pack are expected to follow Alpha’s lead. We had never had an Alpha dog before Casey joined our family. We were used to Brandy, who was so far down the alphabet, she could have been labeled a “Z” dog. She would do anything to please us.

Alpha Casey stood tall and proud, refusing to give eye contact. He asserted his dominance by escaping, Houdini style, from his locked crate. Which we only used, by the way, when we left him home alone for a few hours. We weren’t yet sure how he would behave wandering the house alone. Honestly, I still don’t know how he accomplished escaping that crate.

His former owners kept him (tried to keep him) tied up on a chain in the backyard. He managed to escape the chain and the yard almost every day. Nothing was going to restrain this mighty dog. When he wasn’t escaping, he was digging holes to alleviate his boredom.

When he came to live with us, he had free run of our ¼ acre fenced-in yard. It was the only time there was any display of hesitancy in his personality. We would open the door to let him out, and while he tentatively walked around the yard, he would always look back at us as if to say, “This is okay? I can run around here?” It took more than a year before he was fully comfortable running around the yard unleashed. When he finally realized he was “free”, he would sit on our deck, his head resting on the railing, “surveying his domain”, taking off to chase a squirrel or rabbit whenever he felt like it, knowing there was no leash to hold him back. In the 6 years he was with us before it was his turn to cross the Rainbow Bridge, he never once dug a hole or tried to escape the yard.

As befitting his Alpha status, he would “strut”, rather than simply walk. Every night at bedtime, we would say, “Time for bed, Casey.” He would take his blanket into his mouth, stand tall, and STRUT to our bedroom, where he would drop the blanket and settle himself onto it for a comfortable night’s sleep.

His favorite quirk – all dogs seem to have them – was trash trolling. He thought he could furtively pull tissues out of the trash and get away with it. He would saunter out of the bathroom as if nothing had happened. When we asked, “What did you do?”, he would give us a “Who me?” look. It never occurred to him that the tissue stuck to his nose gave him away.

Four dogs. Four different personalities. Four dogs capable of human emotions and facial expressions. Four dogs that filled our family with cherished love, laughter, and loyalty.

****NOTE- Except for the picture of Brandy, I had to use stock photos from the Internet of dogs that looked exactly like Honey, Pepper, and Casey because the pictures taken of them are currently buried deep in a storage unit.