The Best of All Possible Dogs

As anyone who has ever worked in a school can tell you, the end of the school year can be a wild ride.  Whether it’s spring fever, the promise of summer vacation, the end of high school for the seniors, or simply exhaustion from the ten month cycle of classes, extracurriculars and homework, students start to resemble squirrels on an acorn high more than the dedicated young scholars who have been filling our classrooms since August.  Suffice it to say that Cleo and I have been kept busy these last few weeks.  Add in a wonderful, whirlwind trip back East, and the absence of posts for the last month is explained. 

While I was out of town, John sent me a photo of Cleo taken on their morning walk.  At the time, I thought to myself, You know you’re in love with your puppy when getting a picture of her sends you into paroxysms of delight, even though you’ve been gone for less than a day.  This got me thinking.  Everyone believes their dog is the best, right?  I have a student who insists that her dog flunked out of puppy school.  She says the trainer asked them not to return.  Between you and me, I think this was a problem with the trainer, not the handlers and certainly not the puppy.  Be that as it may, she adores her dog and wouldn’t trade him for anything.  She comes in regularly with a friend and the two of them fuss over Cleo, but spend the entire time talking about how wonderful their own dogs are. 

Now, I don’t have a lot of experience, so comparisons are tough for me.  Cleo is my first Bedlington Terrier, and as I’ve mentioned in this space before, my previous canine partnerships have been limited: a miniature schnauzer who followed my mother around like she was the second coming, an Irish setter who could have made a box of rocks look like a rocket scientist, a Sheltie who I never really connected with, and a Chinese Crested who I loved a lot.  To me, Cleo is truly special.  I don’t want to sound disloyal, but it has crossed my mind that her specialness has more to do with her being a Bedlington than it does with Cleo herself.  (I feel a little guilty even admitting that!)

A regular reader left a comment saying, “For some time now I have been feeling that my Bedlington is as smart as your Bedlington.”  Honestly, I’d be disappointed to hear anything else!  I mean, I would hope that all parents feel that way about their dogs.  But then I read an article about Bedlingtons written by someone who really knows them and who has a wide basis for comparison: She has raised and bred a variety of dogs and has a line of championship Bedlingtons that stretches down through generations.  Full disclosure, I’m referring to Cleo’s paternal grandmother, Lucy Heyman, whose champion Lover Boy is Cleo’s dad.  She thinks they are the best of all possible dogs.  As she described them—their lion’s-roar bark, their loyalty and protectiveness, their charm and sense of humor, their fleet and agile forms—I began to suspect that many of the things I love about Cleo are traits shared by Bedlingtons in general.

So I thought I would ask readers to compare notes.  I’m going to suggest a few identifying traits, and I hope readers will share their own experiences with their Bedlington Terriers, corroborating, debunking or adding to my own insights about what makes Cleo (Bedlingtons?) special.  So here goes.

You know you have a Bedlington when you are three thousand miles away celebrating your sister’s sixtieth birthday and you reach your hand into your jacket pocket and realize you have accidentally brought with you a poo bag and a handful of dog treats.  You experience a rush of joy at the thought of how lucky you are to share your life with your dog, then you tuck everything back into your pocket to have ready when you see her again.

You know you have a Bedlington when finding the right groomer is a years-long, crowd-sourced quest.  If she knows what a Bedlington is supposed to look like, can actually make the Bedlington look like that, and is also kind and patient, she is worth her weight in platinum.  I would sooner give up my own hair dresser than lose the wonderful groomer we have finally found.

You know you have a Bedlington when every day she teaches you something about loyalty.  As I write, even now, Cleo is on the chaise behind me, her head turned over the back so that she can watch me.  Yesterday, I left the house to visit a friend.  I got into the car and started it before I realized I’d forgotten something important.  I hopped out and ran back to the house.  When I opened the front door, Cleo was standing exactly where she’d been when I said goodbye.  She was watching the door in case I returned.

You know you have a Bedlington when your dog is your model of patience.  All through the difficult days of the last few weeks when almost every minute of my workday was filled with meetings or classes, Cleo patiently lay on my office couch, happily greeting guests or accepting the cuddling of students when she could, napping and quietly contemplating the birds in the canyon when there was nothing else to do.

You know you have a Bedlington when the shrill squeak of a ground squirrel can turn an eager-to-please, loving dog into an obsessive basket case.  Our campus is overrun, especially one ravine that is the Shanghai of ground squirrels.  Cleo will stand, quivering, at the edge of this ravine, staring down at the colony of varmints.  On Friday, Cleo’s friend Betsy and I paused to watch her.  Betsy turned to me and said, “I bet I could outrun Cleo down that bank of iceplant.”  It’s easy to be fooled by that lamblike physique; the fact is that Bedlington Terriers are fast, agile, sure-footed and excellent jumpers.  Betsy took Cleo by surprise as she ran past her and leapt down the first incline.  Within two seconds, Cleo was three yards ahead.  She bounded through the iceplant, reaching the bottom of the ravine in seconds, then, seeing a student by the art building on the other side, ran up the far slope, leaving Betsy to struggle along behind her.

You know you have a Bedlington when a thirty second adventure of running through iceplant is followed by thirty minutes of sitting on the floor of the office while your mom painstakingly separates burrs and foxtails from every inch of your Velcro-like hair.

But listen, don’t let me mislead you.  Though I suspect that Bedlington Terriers all share these qualities, I can’t help but believe that Cleo is the most magical, most sensitive, the smartest and funniest creature that ever lived.

We Are All Boston

I can’t promise how much this post is going to be about Cleo, so I would understand if you decided to stop reading now.  The thing is, there are critical times for our country that I just can’t turn my back on; it feels disrespectful.  I was reading Facebook posts the other evening, and I found myself getting irritated at people who were still commenting on brownies baked, games won or lost, concerts attended.  I didn’t want people to stop doing those things.  In fact, I was glad they were.  I just didn’t want to hear about them. 

I get obsessed.  It’s for people like me that NPR devotes its entire broadcast of All Things Considered to biographies of the Tsarnaevs, that the New York Times has minute by minute updates to their interactive maps of Boston neighborhoods, or that MSNBC replays Rachel Maddow’s amazing geography lesson on the quilt of countries surrounding Chechnya.  I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on Twitter lately; that’s where you go if you want the real moment by moment reporting.  Sadly, you have to weed your way through some tweets from the lunatic fringe, but if you’re willing to take a mental shower every now and then, you can find out more from the guy tweeting from his third floor apartment than you can from Reuters.  After all, they’re getting their news from him, too. 

Speaking of which, wasn’t this week an amazing benchmark of some profound changes in this country?  Within minutes of the explosions, Instagram and YouTube had uploads of photos and videos.  I’d be interested to know, was this the most massively crowd-sourced manhunt in history?  It didn’t take long for some heroes to be recognized, either, welcome bright spots of hope and inspiration.  And, yes, there was a lot of misinformation that got out there, too, but a stunning amount of that was from professional news sources. 

I wanted to hate the perpetrators.  I honestly did.  In fact, I guess I did hate them for awhile.  At least until they were identified.  I can’t even write here what I wanted to happen to them when they were caught.  It smacked more of revenge than of justice.  I watched that loop of Suspect 1 and Suspect 2 walking through the crowd over and over and over.  The thought that accompanied each repetition was, “They’re just kids!”  I don’t know what I expected, or why their youth makes this all so much more painful.  Except I guess I do.  Dzhokhar, the nineteen-year-old, is just a year older than my seniors.  He’s exactly a year younger—they share a birthday—than my step-son.  The life of a nineteen-year-old should be full of hope and optimism, teenage angst coped with through edgy poetry, adulation of Burroughs and Cobain and Plath while all the while knowing that you’ve got a corner on understanding what’s wrong with the world, and you’re going to fix it.  Fix it, not destroy it.

Those bombs weren’t hand-crafted and strategically placed to effect the most property damage.  They were meant to do what they did—tear flesh.  How do we get our minds around what motivated these guys?  How can we ever understand the desire to destroy so many lives?  Strangers’ lives, at that.

I have an ache in the center of my chest, around my heart.  It began with the thought of the families finding out that their daughters and son had been killed.  It grew with the image of the ashen young man clutching his tattered legs as he was rushed down the street in a wheelchair, his face a mask of haunted disbelief and horror.  Scores of people, their lives unutterably changed, waking to months and years of healing and rehabilitation.  A sadness so profound rises from the stories of a mother, father, sister in denial, clutching to the reed-thin belief that this was all a setup and their boys were somehow innocent.  An uncle, overcome with anger.  A wife and her parents retreating into their house and battening down the hatches.  A daughter—a daughter!—how does she grow up knowing what her father has done?

We wait for answers, but they will never be enough. We’ll never have the peace of thinking, “That’s why they did what they did, and this is how we’ll avoid something like this ever happening again.”  We’ll never feel satisfied. 

And so I follow a shared link on Facebook to the video of the catsucking on the vacuum hose and I laugh until that is why I’m crying.  I try extra-hard to really look at people on the street and greet them warmly.  Who knows if they’re feeling sad and alone.  John and I engage the checker at Trader Joe’s in a conversation about her life.  We recognize the humanity in those around us.  We share a moment of tenderness for the old guy crossing the street, bent low over his cane as he walks with his old dog, graying muzzle hoovering the sidewalk for interesting scents.  At critical moments, I tear myself from the computer screen and lie down beside Cleo with my face against her warm chest.  I feel the soft fuzz of her curly hair, the roughness of her pads as they press against my cheek.  There is love and optimism and exquisite comfort in those moments.

So I guess this post was about Cleo after all.

Brains and Beauty

I have a friend who wrote a popular dog-training book called Imagine Life with a Well-Behaved Dog.  This title has stuck with me from the first moment I heard it, I think because the well-behaved dog I imagined always seemed more fiction than reality.  Take Buck from The Call of the Wild who lies around adoringly staring at his master, eschewing the C of the W until his master dies and frees him to explore the tundra.  Or Pilot, the faithful dog who trots around after Mr. Rochester all over Derbyshire and who is the first to recognize Jane Eyre when she returns from her self-imposed exile.  And speaking of recognizing, let’s not forget Argos who, after twenty years, is the only being to spot the disguised Odysseus returning from the Trojan War.  That is one long-lived dog!  And what about Toto who seems to understand (and do) everything Dorothy says to him?

In real life, though, a dog that would actually listen to me seemed too much to hope for.  And then I met Cleo.  Listen, I’m not going to suggest that this all happened magically.  We’ve put two solid years into obedience classes.  I pretend we continue to go only because the camaraderie is such fun for both of us, but we’re still learning an awful lot each week.  Sometimes on our walks, we meet people whose dogs are pulling and tugging and darting around like out-of-control kites with legs.  “What a well-behaved dog,” they say with wonder and admiration.  John and I let Cleo take all the credit.  She works hard; she deserves it.

But you know, In the last couple of months, it really does seem as if the dominoes are clicking into place for her.  She learns new commands faster, responds to known commands more accurately and is just more tuned in overall.  In class last week, Pluis introduced two new hand signals, one for heel and one for stand.  The first two times we tried them, we combined the signal and the verbal command.  Cleo was initially confused by the gesture for heel because it turns out it’s the same one I’ve been using as a release from heeling.  Oops.  Gotta retrain myself and her on that one.  She got the gesture for stand on the second try.  I was so amazed I said, “Wow!” instead of “Good.”  Cleo was busy checking out the Parson Russell who joined class just last week, so she didn’t seem to notice.

This isn’t the only example of her wondrous brilliance, though.   Over spring vacation, my school provided me with a Dutch door to replace the baby gate I’ve been using for the past two years.  This baby gate was one of the swanky ones with a swinging pass-through for people, but the mechanism to open the little door baffled most visitors.  Parents, students, colleagues would stand staring at the top of the gate in utter befuddlement as I scampered around my desk to let them in, all the while calling out encouraging instructions like “Lift up on the little—no, not that, the other—the grey—never mind.”  On the way out, seven visitors out of ten would catch a toe on the metal railing at the bottom of the gate and nearly go flying into the nearby computer monitor.  So I was pretty excited to hear that the Dutch door had been approved and would be installed in early March.  It really is a thing of wonder.  Students, teachers, visitors have exclaimed over it.  Cleo’s friend Betsy took it as a challenge.  It is she, you may remember, who has been teaching Cleo tricks like High Five, Hop, Army Crawl, Look Pretty, and Close the Door.  A couple of weeks ago, Betsy was visiting Cleo and filling me in on her life of late.  As usual, the bottom half of the Dutch door was closed, the top half was three-quarters open.  Suddenly, Betsy jumped up from the  couch and exclaimed, “I wonder what Cleo will do if I tell her to close the door!”  She ran to the door and called Cleo to come.  The puppy positioned herself in front of Betsy and looked at her expectantly.  “Close the door,” Betsy chirped, standing perfectly still.  Cleo looked at the closed bottom half, then turned back to Betsy.  “Close the door,” she urged again.  Cleo looked up, then leapt, extending her arms towards the top half of the door and giving it a swat with both paws.  It swung about half-way closed.  Before she had fully landed, we were both exclaiming, “Good dog!  You are so brilliant!”  Betsy looked at me, her eyes shining. “That was amazing!” she crowed.  Okay, so maybe she didn’t get the door all the way closed, but sometimes, just the attempt is an awesome accomplishment.

Last weekend, I had a delightful email from Cleo’s Auntie Kim.  All it said was, “Remind me to tell you how brilliant your dog was on Friday.”  Kim had taken Cleo with her to the wilderness area to change batteries in the critter cams that dot the hundred acres.  The two of them often go over there together because it affords Cleo the chance to run around during the school day and they both enjoy the company.  This time, Kim took an unaccustomed route.  Cleo ran ahead, but each time she came to a fork, she stopped and looked back for instructions on which path to take.  Kim (being a scientist both by nature and training) decided to do an experiment.  At the first fork, she simply said, “Left.”  Cleo headed down the left path, turning back for confirmation.  “Yes,” said Kim, nodding.  Off they went.  At each subsequent fork, Kim gave her instructions, including once, where three paths met, “Straight.”  If Cleo took the wrong route, Kim said, “Stop,” then repeated the direction, but this time with an arm extended for clarification.  Once, Cleo was far ahead and Kim called to her, “Wait by the camera.”  Cleo looked around, then trotted to a tree and sat down, directly beside the camera attached to the tree’s trunk.  Kim is not easily impressed, but her tone, as she told me this story last Monday, made it clear just what she thinks of her brilliant and beautiful four-legged niece. 

Cleo caught on one of the critter cams

I want to say a brief but heartfelt thank you to the twenty-three of you who bought the e-book of The Educated Dog in its first two weeks of publication.  Author notification is more than two months behind actual purchases, so I have only just learned that folks from all over the world responded so quickly in that last half of January.  It’s a thrilling feeling!

Mother...Tongue?

For a podcast of this blog, visit: CleoTheBedlington.com

___________________

The next time you’re in a conversation, pause for a moment to give your brain kudos.

When I stop to think about how much information we process in every encounter, and by process, I mean both take in and send out, it’s an amazing feat to communicate at all, let alone to communicate profoundly.   I always tell my students that the reason we study vocabulary, writing and public speaking is because life can be awfully lonely if we can’t describe our inner experience, the life of the mind, to someone else in a way that is clear enough that they can share that experience.  Words are slippery things, I tell them.  Then we often launch into a lengthy conversation about whether my “blue” is the same as your “blue.” 

On a side note, I heard an amazing piece on NPR—Science Friday, possibly?—on the history of blue.  Did you know it is supposedly the last major color word to enter any language?  The color exists so little in nature that humankind simply didn’t need it.  You’re probably thinking what I thought as I listened: What about the sky?  Isn’t the sky blue?  The answer, according to these researchers, is, No.  It’s grey, it’s white, it’s even yellow sometimes, but it is only very occasionally really blue.  Only last week I was moved to say, “The sky is so blue today.”  But is that a learned response?  The fellow on NPR suggested that it was.  He believes we would never call that clear sky color “blue” unless we had been taught to recognize it as such.  Granted, I came in partway through the broadcast, but I remain unconvinced by the conclusions drawn from the research.

But I digress.  Where I was going, at least at this stage of the game, was that words are delicate, flighty, delicious little things.  They can as easily divide as unite.  (Speaking of which, let’s just give a quick shout out to cleave, clip, overlook, bolt, dust—those lovely contronyms, words that are the antonyms of themselves.)  So just the fact that we can find the right words to express our ideas, then receive those of someone else is miracle enough.

Yet we all know that what we say is so much less important than how we say it.  Any doubt about that, try sending a facetious email.  In the early days of public internet, I shot off a deeply ironic missive to a friend about how obvious it is that animals don’t have feelings.  I thought she knew me well enough to be aware that I would never make such an argument.  Let’s just say I didn’t need to hear her tone in order to interpret her response.

So there we are in conversations, seamlessly (for the most part) interpreting words and registering nuance of meaning as we take in tone of voice.  But that’s just a fraction of what our brains are processing!  We’re simultaneously registering and decoding the meaning of gesture, facial expression, eye contact, angle of the head, body language.  In a nanosecond, we’re subconsciously determining how we feel about it all and what it means for us personally.  Add to this the nuances of scent, taste and touch and we’re taking in thousands of tiny details each second.  Move that conversation from your kitchen table to a cocktail party, a coffee shop, a restaurant, a city park, and suddenly you’re taking in quadrillions of details every second.  So let’s give our brains a round of applause!

This line of reflection takes me inevitably to a number of my students for whom social interaction is a mystery on the scale of the ineffable mind of God.  Some of them simply have no social intelligence.  They don’t know that smiling at someone is an invitation to conversation while a scowl is off-putting.  They don’t recognize that a comment about the weather might lead, eventually, to a substantive conversation; instead, they simply “don’t do small talk.”  They haven’t grasped that when someone flinches away from them, that person probably doesn’t want to be subjected to a rib-crushing hug.  Nuance of tone, body language or expression fails to penetrate their consciousnesses.  I’m not talking about students who are on the Autism Spectrum; that’s even more heartbreaking.  The young man with Asperger’s Syndrome who moves through the world in a bubble of isolation as he stares fixedly at the ground, unaware that a world of connection and communication is whirring away just inches from him.  Or the one who charges up to a classmate, standing too close and speaking too loudly as he asks a question about last night’s English homework, all the while making eye contact with his classmate’s left ear or right shoulder.

I started thinking about all of this as I sat in bed this morning watching Cleo make her rounds of the back yard, tail extended straight out except for the last inch which tipped up at a particularly jaunty angle.  She imparts a world of meaning with that tail.  Canine communication may not be quite as complex as that of humans—no contronyms, for example—but no one can say it lacks nuance.  As we walked into the groomer’s this afternoon, she tucked the first three inches tightly against her butt, leaving the middle and tip in a graceful arc away from her body, like a grappling hook.  “I’m nervous,” it said, “but willing to keep an open mind.”  When we went to pick her up from the groomer, she was still on the table in the last stages of being scissored.  Her tail, by this time, was firmly tucked against her backside, the tip curling down and under her tummy, giving a darned good impression of Cleo with a sex change operation.  This tail suggested, with minimal subtlety, “I have just about had it with this nerve-wracking place—water spraying, dryers blowing, shavers chattering.  Get me out of here.”  At night, when we let her out for her last hurrah, she charges out the back door in full bellow, skidding to a halt at the fence.  It doesn’t matter if there is an animal on the fence or not, this is always how she makes her entrance for that last hurrah.  At this point, her tail is ramrod straight, right out of her spine.  I swear, you could put an eye out with that thing.  “I’m fierce!  Watch out for me, varmints!” this tail declares.

There are also, of course, the meanings of the tail in motion: the gentle side-to-side swish of the upbeat-but-sleepy Cleo responding to our “Good morning, puppy!”  The exuberant wag when she greets John as he comes home from a gig.  The minimalist swing as she trots over to greet a guest who has come into our office. 

My favorite of all tail communications is one she surprised me with when she was just a few months old.  It continues to this day.  The thumpa-thumpa-thumpa of a happy, much-loved girl wagging her tail in her sleep.  That speaks volumes without a single word.

Cleo's Menagerie

One of the truly wonderful things about living where we do is the abundance of wildlife.  It offers endless entertainment for Cleo. 

Close to home is the squirrel that lives in the eighty foot Monterey Pine that takes up most of our backyard.  Personally, I worry about this squirrel.  The tree, partly because it’s nearing the end of its natural life and partly because we had it aggressively pruned this past fall, rains sap.  Sap drips from it in giant globules, trailing silver icicles and mournful tear drops, making our fence, deck and outdoor furniture look like they were caught in a glazing machine explosion.  Frozen amber rivers have turned the trunk into a future DNA harvester’s mother lode. Though a backyard excursion leaves Cleo smelling like a car air freshener, she returns with sticky paws, dirt clods sap-glued to her tummy, and pine needles dangling like gaudy earrings.  Liberal applications of eye makeup remover dissolve the sap enough for us to comb it out of her hair.  But who does the squirrel have to minister to its sticky paws or gummed up tummy fur?  It runs along the fence and waggles its tail to provoke Cleo to chase it or strolls around the base of the tree faking vulnerability, then scrabbles out of reach in an exuberant spiral around the trunk, leaving paw prints in the oozing sap.  I’m afraid that some day it’s going to make a leap, but stick to the branch, wrenching its little leg right out of the hip socket.  Not that Cleo thinks about any of this.  She simply loves the game of the chase.

In the evening, she is visited by a plodding opossum who grasps the top of the fence with its under-sized paws, occasionally stopping to stare balefully through our bedroom window at the puppy barking her fool head off.  The torture experts are the raccoons who live under our deck.  They will also sometimes use the fence as a thoroughfare, but more often than not, they enter and exit their den through the neighbor’s yard, snickering as Cleo sets up her fiercest alarm and flings herself at the fence boards or digs frantically at the deck.  She can’t see them, but she sure can hear them.  When they’re feeling especially nasty, they stand directly under her spot on our deck and chatter or scratch the underside of the boards.  It works Cleo into a fury.  She loves it when I come out and stamp on the deck to shut the stupid varmints up.  Honestly, it works for all of two seconds.  I’ve heard them laughing at me, too.

At school, my office has floor to ceiling windows on two sides.  One wall of windows overlooks a canyon, the other an expanse of lawn.  Cleo will lie for hours gazing out one window or another.  She is fascinated by the lizards that run along the window frame, pausing to do pushups to impress potential mates.  Sometimes she’ll jump up and follow their progress along the frame, pawing at the glass to get them going again if they stop.  Little birds scratch for bugs in the dirt just outside the windows, but Cleo barely even cocks an ear for them.  She is no longer impressed by them since the turkeys have been making regular visits.  We can hear them gobble-gobble down in the canyon, but we both stop what we’re doing to watch them when they come up over the crest and strut their stuff.  Last week we were treated to the spectacle of two Toms in full display, running at each other in mock battle, swerving or pulling up short at the moment just before collision.  Cleo stood on the arm of the couch, quivering from nose to fully-extended tail; she could barely contain herself.  It had to have taken every ounce of self-control she has to keep quiet—our office is in the library, so learning not to bark there was one of her earliest lessons.

She loves to lie on the back of the couch and watch the crows out on the lawn.  Our school has crows the way the Tower of London has ravens, though I don’t know of a legend promising the return of a fabled head of school should we ever fall into a dark and desperate time.  The crows parade around our campus as if they own the place.  They stand, hips casually cocked, on picnic tables, perch on planters, congregate in congresses around the Quad and hang out on gutters, treetops and any other available surface.  I don’t want you to get the impression that we look like the playground full of crows in The Birds.  Our crows are more peaceful and more spread out: four or five here, two or three there.  But they are smart, I’ll tell you.  Crows really are such cool characters.  Above my desk at home, where I’m sitting right now, in fact, there is a slightly slanted skylight.  From the first days of its existence, crows have used it for skiing practice.  They flutter to the high edge, step gingerly onto the glass and screeeeeiiiitttch down the slope to the low edge, then they run around to the top and do it all over again.  Sometimes I’ll have three or more lined up taking turns.  Cleo’s not fond of the noise they make and feels she has to defend me from them, but at school, she loves to play with the crows.  Whether it’s on the lawn outside our office or across the street when we take our near daily walk up to the fields, the crows will stand around jauntily watching her.  She bounds towards them and just as she gets within nipping distance, they launch, wings straining, legs dangling, tempting her into a last optimistic leap before she veers away to chase down an errant scent.  On our walks around the neighborhood, she dives towards the crows standing on the street as if she’s just seen an old friend.

In the last couple of weeks, Cleo has gotten a full look at the baby bunnies that populate the small lawns at the entrance to the Quad.  The first time, she literally did a double take.  She stood transfixed as if she were unable to believe her eyes.  Then she lunged.  Luckily for the bunny, she was on leash.  Now, every time we pass by that area, which we do at least twice a day on our way to and from class or on our daily walk, Cleo refuses to move on until she’s had a chance to look for bunnies.  Given that she’s regularly rewarded with a sighting, there’s little chance I’ll ever be able to walk that part of campus without some delay.

I’m not sure what she’d do if she were allowed to get close to a bunny. When I was a Tween, there was a Peanuts strip that I just loved.  In it, Sally (I think) was trying to teach Snoopy how to hunt rabbits because she thought he was lazy.  She says to Snoopy, “Say you see a rabbit, what would you do?”  Without hesitation, Snoopy stands up on his back feet, smiles broadly and extends his hand for a warm and welcoming handshake.  Maybe that’s what Cleo would do.  My fear, of course, is that instinct would take over and she’d go in for the kill.  Then she’d be upset and sad, or at the very least confused, as she was when she caught a baby rat. 

I was going to say that I would rather keep that from happening in order to preserve her innocence.   After a few minutes of snuggling with her warm and fuzzy, pine-scented body, I realize: It’s my own innocence I want to preserve. 

As always, visit CleoTheBedlington.com for a podcast of this post.

Cleo Capone

With Tax Day rapidly approaching, I’ve been wrapping up the preparations for our annual meeting with our accountant.  The first step, of course, is printing out a report from our banking software of all transactions from 2012.  And there are those figures in black and white, inescapable.  The bottom line on every expense category.  How much did we spend on eating out?  Oh, very reasonable this year!  Go us!  And on clothes?  Hm.  Maybe I could shop at Kohl’s a little more and at J. Crew a little less.  The expense line that sort of took my breath away was the one that begins with a capital C and ends with an o.  Four letters. 

I remember Cleo’s grandmother Jan telling a story about taking one of her Bedlingtons, Sterling, to visit at a retirement community.  As she walked down the hallway, she heard one of the residents say to another, “Oh, look.  That’s one of those dogs that rich people own.”  Funny story.  We laughed.  My response was, “We are rich!  Rich in the love of our Bedlingtons.”  Okay, pretty corny, I know.

It’s not that Cleo, in and of herself, is expensive, even though John always greets our return from the vet with the line, “How much did our little hothouse flower cost this time?”  I recognize that I am the one who insists on taking her to the vet at the slightest provocation.  In fact, I’ll be taking her in the next couple minutes so that the doctor can have a look at a little lump on Cleo’s lip.  I pulled a tick off of her the other day and a swelling at the site hasn’t gone away.  Neither John nor I can bear the idea that she might be uncomfortable.  She’s so stoic that she doesn’t let on unless she’s beside herself with pain.  So off to the vet we go.  She’s our little girl.

And I’m the one who insists on buying her the fancy food.  Truly, we joke that it looks and smells so good, it’s what we’ll buy for ourselves when our retirement money starts to run out.  If we can afford it. 

So the food and the vet bills, the groomer, the toys, the treats, and the training classes all add up.  Here’s what I want to know: How come we can’t deduct our pets as dependents?  They definitely are—I mean, they depend on us for so much.  A fifteen-year-old dog is far more helpless at earning a living than a fifteen-year-old human. 

Many, many years ago, I knew someone who did claim his pets, two cats and a dog, as dependents.  “My wife and I aren’t going to have kids,” he told me, somewhat defensively.  “As far as we’re concerned, our pets are our kids.” Of course, I wanted to know what the pets’ names were because I could just imagine a Snowball Jones or Rover Smith.  Like many people, they gave their pets human-sounding names: Brian, Eloise and—the biggest reach—Saint.  I have no idea if the IRS ever found out.  I guess it wouldn’t be particularly suspicious if you had a cat who lived to be 21 or so; one might imagine a child developing her independence at that age.  But wouldn’t you wonder if a couple’s children kept disappearing from the Claimed Dependents page at the age of 13 or 14, only to be replaced by newborns?  Maybe the IRS doesn’t follow us closely enough to be aware of something like that.  And before you ask, I had the same question: Yes, this fellow and his wife did get their pets social security numbers.  I don’t even want to think of all the laws they must have broken.

According to the Turbo Tax Blog (who knew, right?), the reason the IRS doesn’t allow pets to qualify as dependents is because they won’t grow up to be tax-paying citizens themselves, as human dependents will.  That seems a bit narrow-minded, frankly.  I’m sure most of us could, off the top of our heads, list any number of humans who didn’t grow up to become tax-paying citizens.  On the other hand, an article in Forbes magazine gives some great tips on what one can claim as deductions vis à vis our pets, including moving expenses (in some cases), business expenses for a guard dog, or service dog expenses. 

In 2009, a US Representative from Michigan, Thaddeus McCotter, introduced the HAPPY Act (Humanity and Pets Partnered through the Years—cute, no?) which would have granted a $3500 yearly deduction to pet owners.  Some people felt it was in acknowledgement of the fact that pet owners pour something like 55 billion dollars into the pet-based economy each year.  Unfortunately, Rep. McCotter’s attention shifted away from the HAPPY Act, first to the “jobs, jobs, jobs” mantra and then to scandal-mitigation.  It seems the great majority of the names on the petitions his campaign submitted to get him on the Michigan ballot at re-election time were fake.  Then, a TV pilot which he had written was leaked to the press.  In it, he proposed hosting a reality show the description of which combined the words “crude” and “female anatomy” in a career-ending way.  But really, can one think unrelentingly harshly of a politician who tried to get a tax break for U.S. pet owners? 

At our meeting with our accountant last year, I asked if we could deduct some of Cleo’s expenses.  I wasn’t going overboard!  I was only thinking of the expenses accrued towards getting her certified as a therapy dog, a process directly associated with my work, after all.  He regarded me for a moment with a patient, gentle, non-judgmental countenance, then sighed ever so slightly.  “No,” he said, and flipped the page of our tax planner.

Let me just be completely clear to any IRS auditors who might be reading this: I didn’t, I won’t, I wouldn’t.  And Cleo still has no social security number.  Though I’m not ruling out the possibility that she’ll grow up to be a solid, tax-paying citizen some day.

By the way, The Educated Dog (the book) is now available in hard copy as well as ebook form.  Visit CleoTheBedlington.com to order and to listen to the weekly podcast.

Cleo in Class

For a podcast of this blog entry, visit CleoTheBedlington.com!

Several people have asked lately, “Is Cleo still going to class?”  The short answer is, “You betcha!”  Our Monday night classes are so much more than obedience training, although that is a fabulous and important aspect of it all, too.

Sometimes I think of these sessions as Mommy and Me time.  There is plenty of bonding that goes on as a dog and handler train together.  We exchange more eye contact in that forty-five minute session than in an entire class-free day.  As we heel—fast, slow and normal—about turn, circle left, circle right, down your dog, stand your dog, step away, figure eight, long distance recall, prolonged sit and stay with handler across the room, and then add any exciting new twist that Pluis, our trainer, decides to throw in to liven things up, we spend a lot of time gazing at each other.  When we’re far apart, I adopt a goofy grin that mimics a happy dog (though I keep my tongue in my mouth), just as Pluis taught us humans to do in our first few classes together.  Cleo’s expression ranges from concerned to long-suffering to sleepy, depending on what else has gone on in class that evening.

Which takes us to the second benefit of class: the all-important lessons of adaptability and resilience.  Cleo almost never has the opportunity to interact at length with other dogs.  Once a week she is surrounded by six or eight that she has to co-exist with for an hour.  For the most part, it’s a structured environment, and she knows what’s expected of her and of the others.  But every now and then, something unpredictable happens, and it’s a good opportunity for her to improvise, to see that she will survive the unexpected and uncontained.

There are a handful of dogs that started with us at the beginner’s level, nearly two years ago.  There’s Veronica who is a Norwich Terrier, I’m pretty sure, with a personality far larger than her diminutive stature.  Veronica and Cleo earned their Therapy Dog certifications at the same time.   Then there is Chance the English Sheepdog.  I have cast aspersions on his intelligence in the past, but I want to retract all that now that I’ve gotten to know him better.  He is the embodiment of “Keep Calm and Carry On.”  It doesn’t matter what happens in class—a dog gets loose and takes a few victory laps around the barnlike interior, applause crackles from the conformation class, a fracas breaks out among the dogs waiting for the eight o’clock group—he merely turns his massive head and regards the offenders with a placid, not to say vacant, gaze, then swivels it back, owl-like, to stare at his mom.  We have Prix (Prie?) the Border Collie who is very sweet and totally OCD, just as you’d expect a herding dog to be.  As long as he doesn’t lock eyes with another dog, everything is hunky dory.  Cleo knows all of these dogs and exactly what to expect from them.  It’s the newcomers who require her to dig deep.

Oh, she doesn’t mind Teddy the Shetland Sheepdog with an intermittent bark so shrill and piercing that even his mortified mother winces.  I swear, I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that Teddy had been dognapped by the CIA for use during enhanced interrogation.  Cleo seems to respect the tiny Border Collie whose name I can’t remember, petite and delicate who, at the age of seven months, is already so beautifully trained that she puts the rest of us to shame.  Cleo’s issue is with Luna the black German Shepherd and—Buster?  Oh, why can’t I think of his name?  Bobby?  I think I’ve blocked it.  Anyway, a big galoot of a black Lab who has way more energy than sense. At some point in class, one of them will make a break for it and charge the littler dogs.  When Pluis is there, she can sense that it’s about to happen and most of the time puts a stop to it, but when we have a sub, it’s a different story.  There’s nothing mean about either of these dogs.  It’s just that they both should be named Lennie.  You can almost hear them saying, “But, George.  I was just pettin’ it.  I didn’t mean to break it.  It was too little, George.”  Cleo has been bowled over by each of these dogs at different times.  And let’s just say, once bowled, forever shy. 

But I want her to know that she has what it takes to deal with these boisterous boys.  She really is a tough little dog.  Sometimes when she and John are playing, she skids on the hardwood and smacks her head into the hearth or a kitchen cupboard.  She barely even pauses to shake it off before she’s back into the game.  So it’s not the physical roughhousing that intimidates her; I think it’s the unpredictability and the sheer energy coming her way. 

Two weeks ago, the Lab broke from a sit-stay when Pluis was running class.  He made a dash at Cleo who scrambled away from him.  And where did she scamper?  To Mom?  No, directly to Pluis and huddled against her left leg.  Without moving that leg, Pluis lunged with her right, grabbed the exuberant Lab by the collar, spun him around and handed him to his dad.  She looked down at Cleo.  “Well, that was exciting, wasn’t it?” she asked her, enthusiastically.  Cleo gazed up at her, unsure of how to answer, but trying to be positive.  Then Pluis turned to me.  “Don’t worry, Mom.  I was just the closest port in a storm.”  She wasn’t, actually.  I was marginally closer.  But as Pluis is always fond of asking the dogs, “We all know who the alpha bitch around here is, don’t we?”