This started out as a podcast describing the mediocre-at-best history of Presidential dogs, but turned into something quite different by the end.

Below is the video of Barney, President Bush’s dog, having the breakdown in communication with members of the press that I describe in the podcast.

Day of Reckoning: Frica Louise gets spayed

Last month I had Frica spayed after contemplating all the pros and cons so many times I was dizzy. I learned a lot from this experience, including that it’s a there are a lot of clichés that can be applied to this sometimes grueling process.

To read more, click here.

Before I forget again, for those of you who live or have animal-loving friends in the Washington, DC area, the seminar next weekend is going to be a good one.  Be the first on your block to understand what those canine and feline behaviors really mean. Tell your friends. :-)  For more information or to register, contact Debbie Winkler at deb@humanedomain.net or call her at  (410) 549-1135.

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This week’s podcast immortalizes the end of an era, and it seemed only right to include pictures to enhance your experience as you listen to this touching tribute.

This is what I saw that fateful day when I discovered the alien had been injured:

And then later when complications developed:

My sincere, but alas unsuccessful attempts to treat the massive injury:

The alien before his narrow escape from the grave:

And then enshrined in his final resting place:

At peace at last.

What could these two topics possibly have in common?  As it turns out, a lot more than you might think.

Anyhow, somewhere along the line, we discovered that the alien was on the bed! I don’t remember who first noticed him–Does anyone remember why I think of the alien as a he? I don’t.– but none of us had any idea how he got there.  Below is a quasi-re-creation of this Great Event. I didn’t take this picture until the bed was back up in the office and Bee was determined to have her rear end in every shot, but you get the idea. It was pretty hard to miss him there.

Since then the alien also showed up on my yoga mat which I only unroll for the 45-minutes or so that I use it each morning.

You would think that, given the shortness of the interval and that I’m rarely off the mat during this time, I would know how he got there. But I don’t. Maybe he was attracted by the mat’s bright colors or sticky surface. Maybe he thinks he needs more exercise…

Currently he’s in the middle of the kitchen rug and I have no idea how he got there, either. When I went downstairs yesterday morning, he was there.

My Ms Clean Gene tells me I really ought to wash the little grub-ball  if he’s going to make appearances when when I have company. But then I remember something Maria Callas supposedly said to photographer Richard Avedon when he mentioned softening the wrinkles in his portrait of her. She told him not to because she’d earned every one of them. So it seems with the  alien’s layer of grubbiness. I don’t know where in his travels he earned it, but I’m sure he did.

Nonetheless I prevailed and we came home and celebrated with Whit’s new best friend: canned cat food. He ate it while I watched and grinned like an idiot.

I grinned because he was so obviously pleased with himself and also because I’d learned at the clinic that the mass on the half of his thyroid gland that was removed was benign. There’s an old saying that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, but sometimes knowing too much can be a drag too. The day of Whit’s surgery, my friend and the surgeon, Andrea Neiley, left a post-op message on my answering machine letting me know how things went.  It contained the usual vet-to-vet  verbal shorthand that communicates something without really saying it. The key terms that stuck in my mind included “large,” “lobulated,” “took longer to get out than I thought,” “saved it to send in for histopath if you want.” She didn’t say it and neither did I but we were both thinking the same thing: cancer.

After I requested the tissue be sent in, I tried to put it out of my mind but of course it was always there someplace.  Even more so than many people, I’ve been conditioned to give those medical test results a lot of power over me. But I’m also very much aware of the mind-body effect and how my feelings can affect my animals. So for those ten days, I deliberately and not without a certain amount of effort saw Whit as a cat I could visibly see improving every day in numerous ways.  Although the big C might have hovered somewhere in the depths of my subconscious thoughts, my conscious ones only acknowledged an increasingly healthy cat.

Which is exactly what he is. If there was any doubt in my mind, the speed and grace with which he flew off the exam table, disappeared under the counter, resisted being dragged out, then purred and ate his way through a dish of food removed it. 

“Oh, ye of little faith,” he might have said to me. “I knew I was fine.”

But he didn’t.

And for that, too, I am extremely grateful.

My apologies for any inconvenience. I’ll try to get my brain and fingers working together better in the future.

Have you ever taken your pet to the veterinary clinic for some problem and gotten the feeling that your veterinarian just wasn’t listening to you? Or you got the impression that the vet had already made up his or her mind regarding the cause and proper treatment of the problem before getting what you considered a complete history or thoroughly examining your animal?

At that time, you might have thought that the veterinarian simply didn’t care about your animal or you. But more often than not, these people really do care. It’s the way they’ve been trained that creates the problem. Fortunately, there are things you can do to help ensure the best care for your pet.

To find out what, click here.

No, this isn’t a morose podcast. Just some thoughts related Whit’s surgery and recovery and my emotions’ effect on it. One thing that occurred to me after-the-fact is that I used the word “crate” which might be confusing to some. The term is now used to refer to those small enclosures that were designed to transport dogs and cats, usually by plane. Originally these were called dog or cat carriers, but then soft enclosures were added to the line-up and given the same name.  To avoid confusion, the original carriers were then referred to as crates. This is a picture of Whit’s crate which started out as Ollie’s crate until Whit appropriated it when Ollie wasn’t around. Now they both use it. Because Ollie’s scent obviously doesn’t bother Whit and possibly even comforts him since he was so close to my other dog, I left the same bedding in it when I took Whit to the clinic.

Having once again proven that, let me begin by saying that Whit had his surgery last week and did extremely well. Even though neither picture is that great, the pre-opt Whit on the left and the post-op Whit on the right pretty much sum up the improvement. He’s definitely more interested in what’s going on around him now.

Whit had the surgery Wednesday morning and I picked him up  about 24-hours later. If you couldn’t see his row of staples, you’d never know that anything was wrong with him. He’s also gaining weight. Whew!

Something I want to mention, in addition to the excellent surgical skills of veterinarian Andrea Neiley, that has meant a lot to Whit and me  is a gift from a client, Susan Sibulkin. She sent Whit a fleece covered pillow made by a friend of hers that he loves. The day it arrived, I put it on top of the folded rug he’d already claimed and he immediately claimed it, too. It’s become his favorite sleeping place and I’m sure it’s helping his recovery.

However, this is not any ordinary pet pillow. At each corner there’s a sturdy clip,

an ingenious addition that enables you to snap the pillow into a crate to form a hammock. I know that Whit would love this, too, but I haven’t tried it because I know the dogs would also think it was the best thing since sliced bread. His treasure’s current location enables him to easily fend off any potential pillow-swipers with a well-placed swat. But it would be much harder if not impossible for him to dislodge any dog who claimed his hammock in a crate.

Whit is  on no medication because only one lobe of his thyroid gland was involved and so far the other half seems to be functioning normally. The mass from the other has been sent in for analysis and the results will give us a better idea of what lies ahead for him. But for now, peace and recovery reign as fall descends, leaves turn, birds migrate, and I harvest the infamous squash and get ready for a seminar here next weekend.

The solution is simple enough: Relative to me, all the dogs are equal in my eyes and all rank below me. They’re free to work out their pack structure among themselves any way they want and change it any time they want because that’s normal canine behavior. What none of them can do is view me as the prize for whoever emerges at the top of their canine social structure. Until Bee matured, there seemed to be canine acceptance of this.

But now BeeBee is challenging this human-canine social structure and this has resulted in a behavioral-bond dilemma for me. She now resists when I put her in the belly-up position to check her over and massage her feet, a ritual she used to love as a pup. The once equally loved daily grooming sessions are now more apt to include periods of canine resistance. Because her upper jaw has continued to grow and her lower one is more crooked than ever, I could easily tell myself that this is occurring because these positions are physically uncomfortable for her. But I also know that these activities communicate my higher status and that she could very well be more behaviorally uncomfortable than physically so.

So what to do? Do I play behavioral-bond hardball and gently but firmly do what needs to be done no matter how long it takes? Or should I let her play the disability card and call the shots? My gut feeling about where the little scamp is coming from fights with my desire to practice interspecies political correctness. Plus there’s always the unknown with Bee. God only knows what’s physically going on in that wonky head of hers that could blow any minute.

Fortunately, I’m blessed with two other dogs and a cat whose perception is so much greater than mine that my reality is only a fraction of theirs. All of them, even BeeBee, could be poster animals to illustrate Henry Beston’s insightful  passage in The Outermost House because all of them are “gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, hearing voices we shall never hear.” Call it a cop-out, but for now I’m going to use Fric, Ollie, and Whit as a guide when it comes to  dealing with Bee’s “I am the queen.”  attitude.

When I started observing them all in this light, the first thing I noticed is that Fric, Ollie, Whit,  and Bee are much more interested in what BeeBee can do than what she can’t. They’ve also figured out that there is nothing mentally slow about Bee and that she can, in fact, be quite the crafty little demon so there’s no use feeling sorry for her because it will only get you cornered someplace where you’re probably not supposed to be where you could get caught by She With the Infernal Camera.

When this occurs, there is nothing at all wrong with one of you distracting Bee while the other makes a leap to freedom.

And disappears into the office, leaving Bee to wonder where you went

while the other dog relaxes.

As Beston also pointed, compared to us, animals are other nations who are caught up in the same world that we are. Just because they’re different doesn’t mean they’re lesser. Just because they’re different, doesn’t mean they’re wrong.  And in this particular case, just because Bee’s different doesn’t mean that I should allow her to assume a position relative to me that’s beyond her capacity just because I feel sorry for her.