Doggone Dogsitting, Part II (After This Post, I will Stop Whining)

The Part II of the Doggone Dogsitting fiasco is that four of my friends have stopped talking with me over this incident. For a few weeks I was confused about the brief, civil comments I received over the phone indicating that they wanted to end my call as quickly as possible. On my runs through Minnehaha Park, I would see their cars at the dogpark and wonder why I hadn’t been invited like we always did in the past. No one is talking with me anymore, and so I’m left with an unconfirmed notion is that all of these former friends somehow disproportionately blame Joe and me for Maya’s distress.

Now I’m wondering how I could have befriended people who are so petty that none of them can talk with me about what exactly has upset them so much or are willing to examine what happened from my perspective. “If you don’t know then I’m certainly not going to tell you” doesn’t sit well with me, nor did it when I was in junior high. Two of these friends are a couple that I’ve known for roughly ten years and none of the dogs in this fiasco were theirs. I can understand why Aimee & Dave might not be so impressed with me, but I think they’ve got a lot of owning up to do themselves. They left us with a poorly behaved dog and should have made a stronger effort to pick her up sooner once we contacted them about her stress signs.

Was I perfect at all times? Hell, no. Towards the end of the first long weekend with Maya, I stopped talking to Joe for five hours. I was pissed off that the two german shepherds couldn’t get along and that we had promised to take on Maya for another weekend. Instead of taking out my frustration on the dogs, I took it out on Joe and that wasn’t fair to anyone. After we cried and talked it over, Joe hinted to Aimee & Dave that perhaps they should find another place for Maya the following weekend, but they didn’t pick up on his suggestion.

When Aimee called later that week, chirping about how good it was of Joe & me to take on Maya for one more weekend, I vowed to be much firmer about setting boundaries in our house. I also promised myself that I would call my friends or my father to vent or seek advice when I became exasperated with the dogs’ behavior so that I wouldn’t take my frustrations out on Joe or the dogs. Psyching myself up for the second weekend, I told Aimee & Dave that “Maya is bringing out my strict, German great-grandmother in me” and I think they may have equated strict with mean. I needed one place in my house that could remain clean, safe and calm and that place was my bedroom. Because Maya frequently urinated in the house and readily jumped over baby gates with muddy paws, I made our bedroom completely off-limits to her using the command out.

Mean had nothing to do with setting boundaries. Strict simply meant keeping a close eye on Maya and being absolutely consistent with her. In fact, I rarely had to raise my voice with Maya during the second weekend. I spoke in a calm (almost quiet), assertive tone and used my body to calmly guide her out of the room or body-block her from entering. She challenged this boundary several times and I calmly and consistently re-enforced it each and every time. If her behavior became inappropriately volatile, such as playing too roughly indoors or fighting with Koelle, I would crate her and babygate him in the kitchen until they calmed down. (I would have gladly babygated her in a room. Because she routinely leapt over babygates, I used her crate to control her movement.)

The second weekend was going so much more smoothly than the first weekend. By setting firm boundaries, I found that dogsitting Maya didn’t have to be a crazy, volatile experience. I even began thinking that perhaps Joe and I would be able to dogsit Maya in the future – not anytime soon, but perhaps after Koelle had grown out of his energetic adolescent years. Unfortunately, within 12 hours of having this thought, Maya figured out how to escape from our backyard. I worried about her being hit by a car since we live close to Hiawatha, a major thoroughfare through Minneapolis. After she lunged at a neighbor sitting inside his car next to our house, however, I knew that dogsitting her in the future wouldn’t be an option. I can put up with correcting bad behavior (both in myself and in the dog), but I cannot risk the safety of my neighbors. Nor am I willing to jeopardize the relationships with our neighbors, particularly when it could have negative repercussions on our own dogs.

Meanwhile, though Joe and I were separating Koelle and Maya more often, they were still getting into tense fights. And now we found that we couldn’t separate them by allowing muddy Maya to stay outside while babygating muddy Koelle in the kitchen. Instead, the crate because our option of last resort. When Maya became distressed, right about this time (and I can’t blame her), Joe called Aimee and Dave about returning to the Twin Cities early to get pick up their dog. Like I wrote in my last blog, she panted non-stop for at least 12 hours, hid under furniture and clung to Joe and me. We didn’t call Aimee and Dave because we were at the end of our ropes; we called them because Maya was at the end of hers.

A few weeks later, when I realized that my friends weren’t speaking with me, I again turned to other dog-loving friends to get some perspective on the fiasco. My biggest question for them centered on whether setting boundaries for dogs is intrinsically abusive. Had I done all of this? I talked with my friend Sara who adopted a Great Pyrenees from a local rescue organization. No one could argue that Sara doesn’t spoil her dog – Hannibal gets the freshest, meatiest dog food and organic homemade treats, a special cooling mattress for a bed, the best veterinary care and a small SUV purchased specifically to haul his fluffy white butt around town.

Still, she asserts that she treats her dog like a dog. “Dogs need to be at the bottom of the pack – they need an alpha leader. There are three things that, as an alpha, I control: food; sleep; and movement. As an alpha, I determine where and when my dog will do these three things.” She told me that, soon after rescuing Hannibal, she invested in a canine behavioralist to help her and her family deal with some of his problem behaviors. As it turned out, Sara and her family also had a few bad habits of their own and to re-train themselves to interact more consistently with Hannibal. They had to learn how to act as alphas in order to set appropriate boundaries with food, sleep and movement. Now they have a calmer, well-defined pack and a well-adjusted, well-behaved dog.

Another friend commented on what sometimes happens when couples without children feel that their dogs are their children. “For couples who are replacing children and parenting roles with dogs, anything that you do to question their style is taken very personally. And [not setting boundaries] is also bull shit - dogs, like children, need boundaries.” Elysia has worked with many parents who equate the act of setting boundaries for their children with stifling expression and lowering self-esteem. Unfortunately, it’s these very children that end up with bad behavioral problems – they feel fine about lying, cheating or stealing because they weren’t taught that these behaviors are unacceptable. Her comments echoed an article by Steve Salerno that I read recently. Salerno examines Americans’ fixation with positive thinking; basically, it doesn’t matter how poorly we perform (or behave) as long as we feel good about ourselves. While Salerno isn’t specifically citing the lack of boundary setting for children in his article, he does explore the darker side of falsely praising students for poor performance and shielding them from the consequences of their behavior. What happens is that children develop a narcissistic sense of entitlement and an exaggerated sense of one’s place in the world. In the doggie world, one might think of these children inappropriately assuming an alpha status and dictating when it gets to eat, sleep and move.

I’m going to wrap up this blog because I must continue with my day, if not my life. I have a piece of sectional furniture to see and 11 miles to run. As I have often said in the past, writing helps me process my thoughts when I’m feeling torn or burnt out. Writing these two recent blogs makes me look over the relationships with these four friends and the dogsitting fiasco and realize two things. First, I’ve spent a ridiculous about of time worrying my pretty little head over such a tiny little matter. There is a H1N1 Swine Flu pandemic brewing out there in the world, millions of folks are still losing their homes to foreclosure and, as far as I know, HIV/AIDS, TB and Malaria are still wreaking havoc around the globe. A few white middle class people getting uptight over dogs is far from headline news. Second, my friends are being incredibly lame and they have treated me poorly. If someone wants to scrap a ten- to fifteen-year friendship with me because they perceive that I treated someone else’s misbehaved dog badly AND doesn’t have the balls to talk with me about whatever it is that is truly upsetting them, then c’est la vie. I’m a big girl and I can find other friends who have better perspective on life.