Content warning: Brief discussions of aggression toward humans and dogs, and behavioral euthanasia.
Please Ignore Us
My house sits next to a small apartment building. As in my driveway is right next to some of their front doors. The building has pretty frequent turnover, and when I see someone new moving in, I try to catch them so I can introduce myself, tell them that they may see or hear my handsome scruffy bestie (Petey the Wondermutt), and to deliver some very important instructions. “If you see me getting into the car with my dog: please ignore us. He’s not friendly.” I’m glad that I am a very direct communicator, because I know that making statements like “my dog is not friendly,” is not easy for everyone.
A couple of years ago, a friend of Big Man’s was staying with us (let’s call him A). These visits are very carefully orchestrated events, and I wrote about the logistics of how we do that in this blog. Having slept in the room where Petey spends a lot of his time (because it’s also my office), A commented that our home life is a bit like a running sitcom gag: we have a dog, but nobody’s ever seen him.
You know that song “Minding My G**d*** Business”? That’s very much how Peter prefers to operate. And being an introvert myself, living with Petey has really allowed me to lean into my hermit tendencies.
In truth, caring for a dog with complex support needs, particularly one that has a history of dog and human directed aggression, is isolating. I know very few people who understand the work that goes into managing a household like mine. And although I know plenty of people who would do anything for their dogs, not many know what it’s like to alter their life in significant ways in order to help them thrive and keep everyone safe.
Let me give you a few examples of what I mean:
- Big Man and I do not travel together during the holidays. There isn’t a good way for us to bring Petey, and we don’t have a trusted place to keep him in our absence.
- Going to the vet always involves sedation. This means we’ll put off going unless it’s time for a yearly exam or if it’s absolutely necessary. Vet trips also require prep and recovery time.
- Our home is a “gated community.” We have permanent management solutions in place all around the house, including window film and blinds, a divider gate that closes off the living room, and baby gates that live upstairs and at the basement doorway.
- The three of us are never in the same room together. There are many reasons for this. Hence all the gates.
- Petey only walks in the neighborhood when we can get out very early in the morning, which means in the summer only, when the sun will grace us with its presence around 6 am. All other walks require a trip in the car, which means they take longer and only happen roughly twice a week.
- Our home is basically Stinky Pete’s Enrichment Emporium. Meds, supplements, snacks, stashed recyclables, puzzles, bowls, food dispensing toys, stuffies, fitness equipment, you name it. We even revamped the back yard to serve as a sensory garden. Since getting out and about is not possible daily, we have to meet his needs in other ways.
Finding Professional Support
The first time I remember wondering if something was up with Petey, we were snugged up together on the giant beanbag in my living room. Big Man approached to join us, but just as he bent down, Petey’s scruffy body flew straight up at his face, growling deeply. We had seen other behavior like this, but chalked it up to him being very new to our household. For example, a week or so after he came home, a group of Big Man’s friends came in to play D&D. Petey was quiet as they walked in, but when they approached and bent to greet him, he lunged forward quickly, growling and barking. A group of unknown men, many with beards, in winter clothes, we just figured it was all a bit too much for him. Don’t get me started on the number of things I’d do differently if I knew anything about anything when Petey came home…
We quickly had a vet and a trainer on our team, we were learning valuable life skills together, but the incidents didn’t get better with time. If you want to make someone who is struggling with their dog’s behavior feel real bad, just show them a bunch of those videos where terrified dogs start to come out of their shells and are seemingly healed just by the presence, patience, and love of their human. Trust me when I say that if love alone could have helped Petey feel better, he would be an ambassador for his species (whatever kind of creature he may be). But, much like our expectations of our dogs, that’s not realistic.
After charging his first vet and muzzle punching his chest, Petey was already on his first anxiolytic when he attacked another dog in daycare while being boarded in 2019. This was our impetus for seeing a veterinary behaviorist. I had just bought a house, so the expense was overwhelming at the time.
I remember the day I brought Petey home from the shelter and called to tell my mom I got a dog. The first thing she asked me was “what color do you want his blanket to be?” Crocheted afghans are her gift of choice for any life event, and Petey currently has several of his own. I am lucky enough to have family as a built-in support system throughout my life, and even luckier that they’re also animal lovers. So it came as no surprise that my parents and brother have been nothing but affirming and encouraging in our journey to support Petey. Having the means to do so, my parents funded our first appointment with Dr. Rigterink.
In our first couple of appointments, I saw Petey lunge and snap at his new doctor, and deeply growl at a child he spotted through the window in the parking lot. I’ll never forget Dr. Rigterink tilting her head and asking me “what’s that all about?” My body turned into the shrugging emoji, and I think she was relieved to find out that Big Man and I are child-free.
These aren’t the only incidents I could tell you about, or even the most harrowing. But they are among the events that helped my little trio of a family create a path together.
An Extended Village
One thing I wish I had known when we started on this journey is that there is a lot of trial and eval. From meds to walk routes to vet clinics, we have been through iterations of our enrichment plan with Petey. Working with a VB led us to our first Fear Free primary veterinarian. The clinic setup was better than where we saw our original vet, but it wasn’t our final destination. That honor goes to Dr. Quinn. I wrote a bit about her practice and our process for getting Petey to the vet in this blog. I know I am enormously privileged to afford the care that we have for Petey. Building a core team of primary vet and VB set the foundation for our work with him.
I’m sure it is shocking to learn that my emails to Dr. Rigterink were long, detailed, and infused with humor and love for my scruffy bestie. She told me I should start a blog, and I think of this any time I get to write about him now. I did not start a blog, but I did start using Instagram as a way to catalog our adventures together, share them with people who wanted to love him from afar, and eventually to build a small community of like-minded people who center meeting needs and welfare and wellbeing in their life and work with pets. I have known many of these people for years at this point. As I entered the field as a pet professional myself, I had to start introducing myself as “Petey’s person” when I would encounter them in professional settings.
One of the most important connections I’ve made in the years since Petey came home is his Auntie Jordan. I’m assuming becoming friends with someone whose dog sees the same VB as yours must be a lot like parents of human children becoming friends through their kids. Aside from our communal care team members, Jordan is also a trainer. She now lives with three dogs, and is one of the only people I know whose household management system is more complex than my own. After meeting up to eat meatballs in Ikea in 2021, she made her way up the length of Indiana to spend a weekend in my home attending a virtual conference with me. Since then, she’s been party to nearly every anxiety spiral I’ve been on in the past 5 years, and I like to think I do an okay job reciprocating that role for her when she needs it. I truly don’t know what I’d do without her.
What I’m getting at here is that there are some challenges we face as humans where knowing other humans going through the same thing is extremely valuable. Valerie’s blog from last week echoes this, and provides wonderful resources. In this blog, I wrote about the importance of community for trainers and behavior professionals as we navigate the often murky and often lonely path that is our unregulated industry. Along with our vet team and the friends who live inside of my phone, having a Jordan on MY support team has been incredibly impactful. I wish that every person living with a pet with high support needs could have one (not mine, though, she’s spoken for).
House a Home
I share my life with a man of science. The outdoor kind, not the technology kind. Depending on the season and weather, you may find Big Man crawling in a creek looking for endangered mussels, encased in Carhartt and wielding a chainsaw to cut fire line in the snow, attending a symposium on beavers, waist deep in a bog “botanizing,” or setting up a sheet in the woods to attract moths in the night. His experience with animals is vast and varied. He’s participated in trapping and tagging bears for research. He has worked with two species of rattlesnakes. He spent a summer tracking endangered birds on the side of a volcano in Hawaii. But he was just as unprepared for the behavior we encountered with Petey when we first adopted him. As the “spare human” of the house, his relationship with Petey is different than mine, but no less important.
The most important support we receive in our household happens right inside our home. There have been times that Big Man and I were not on the same page with how to proceed with Petey. Sharing the responsibility of caring for a pet with complex behavior issues is not easy. I’ve wrestled with everything from guilt to resentment. We’ve had many hard conversations over the years, including the one that ends with “if we can’t help him, he can’t go back to the shelter.” We’ve had to talk about behavioral euthanasia in very frank terms. And no matter where we are in our story, we are always monitoring quality of life, for Petey and for us. This is the reality for families like ours.
Anyone who has known me for longer than three seconds knows about Petey. His cartoon image lives on my water bottles, phone, laptop, and car, because I’ll slap a sticker on just about anything. But it takes longer than that to find out that Big Man is a ding dong who loves his dog. After returning from a wildlife conference recently, Big Man told me he had been showing some colleagues photos of Petey. Remember when I said he’s more at home in a creek than with technology? Imagine my delight as I pictured him opening his flip phone to show a group of people the tiny screen featuring this creature he is pals with (most of the time). I’ve always known that Big Man has my back, and I’m lucky he’s got Petey’s too.
Lessons Learned
If you are struggling with your pet’s behavior: I see you. I know it’s hard. And I hope you have people in your life to lean on. Please check out this blog if that has not been your experience.
My life with Petey has been overwhelmingly filled with empathy and encouragement. There are moments I have experienced as a professional where I’ve been asked not to discuss our life together. That adjusting my life to fit a dog who struggles might indicate I am not an effective trainer. I have found the opposite to be true. Being open and honest about our realities has provided me opportunities I could not have imagined, such as participating as a demo team at Clicker Expo. I’ve been told by other professionals that they feel encouraged and validated in their own approach to living a joyful life with their pets.
I was not the only one with the honor of representing Petey in a Clicker Expo presentation this year. For Allie’s talk about protected contact, Big Man agreed to contribute a video showing off Petey’s and his Find It skills. After I captured the video and popped it into the presentation template for Allie, I watched it several times with tears in my eyes. Nobody who watched that video knows the years we’ve worked together on helping everyone in our house feel safe, or the experiences that led us there. They just saw my handsome boys working together.
The lessons I’ve learned in my time with Petey have informed and enriched me in life-changing ways. Long may my creature reign; I will be Petey’s person until the day I die.
Here’s to harmony,
Tiffany
Now What?
Our content theme for the month of February has been community. Building and caring for our communities is more important now than ever. Check out these related blogs if you are in need of or want to contribute to a network:
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