Old Dog Stuff

My husband and I adopted Roxy back in the fall of 2000 to celebrate closing on a house. We already had one dog, Astra, and she was a social pup who loved canine company. But as habitual renters, finding places with even one dog (and a clowder of cats) was challenging.  I remember all too well the pain of falling for a dog and really wanting to adopt him but being told no second dog by a landlord.

So the first thing I wanted to do once we became homeowners was to adopt a dog. I was training Astra in agility by then, so I also looked forward to training a second dog in the sport.

When we went to the Sacramento Animal Care and Services shelter, I almost missed Roxy, since she was in a kennel with three other dogs. Doug pointed her out, and we fell in love at once.

Roxy doing agility: Ann Clayton Photography

She's a border collie-chow mix, and in spite of the bad reputation chows and chow mixes have, she's always been the sweetest, most tolerant dog imaginable. When she was younger, she was a fairly enthusiastic agility partner and won some titles, including a NATCH and a CATCH. But as she became middle aged, her enthusiasm waned. Unfortunately, chows don't have the most athletic build, and the sport was starting to take its toll on her knees and shoulders.

So I retired her and concentrated on doing the sport with Wiley, my kelpie.

But she remained our special baby. After Astra passed away, we adopted a younger dog, Flick. Flick is a bit of a, well, the name for female dogs applies as a commentary on her character. Lovable but mercurial in her moods, and nervous enough we have to be careful with her and strangers. But Roxy, even as she grows old and creaky, never shows anything resembling temper.

And this is part of what's making it so hard as she gets older. With a dog who is so calm and undemanding, how can we tell when her quality of life has passed into the unacceptable. It's pretty clear that Roxy, at 15 1/2, is in her final approach. It's not just because her old peer group of dogs (ones who were in beginning agility class and were at their peak at around the same time as she was) have been dropping like flies lately. She's been arthritic for a while, and her muscles aren't as strong as they once were, but it's gotten worse lately. Until recently, she got enthusiastic about her walks, though they'd become shorter and slower than they once had. And painkilling and anti-inflammatory meds (Adequan and Metacam) seemed to help.

Roxy as of about a month ago.

But over the past week or two, she's been pretty reluctant to get up when she's been lying for a while, and if Flick jostles her (which Flick does often, being a galut), she falls over. She can still get up with help. I've tried one of those dog harnesses that allows us to assist her, but she really doesn't seem to like it much. She's still got a good appetite, but she's not always so keen to get up and out of bed in the morning, even though she's hungry. She's never been one for playing with toys, so that's not a very good gauge of her overall level of enthusiasm for life. She still likes having her ears scratched.

The hardest thing is travel. We cancelled a planned trip this summer because of the uncertainty over arranging for her care (she can't be boarded and needs a live in pet sitter who will be around a lot, but most leave the dogs for 8-10 hours and are only there at night), while Flick must be boarded in a special care program at a kennel that has trainers to work with stranger-wary dogs that can't just be tossed into their twice daily group play mash up. So needless to say, arranging for pet care for a week-long trip is astronomical--greater than our hotel costs would be, actually (Wiley is sitting here saying, "I can go either way, Mom, I love pet sitters and don't mind boarding kennels!")

And we have a day trip to Carson City coming up, because some relatives will be in town there we never get to see. For normal people, popping across the pass for a day is nothing. But with one dog who can't come for a visit because she's not reliable around kids (and so must be day boarded, since we also can't have them in our yard when we aren't there to supervise), one who can come along cheerfully, and one who can't be left home alone for 10 hours but may find the long car ride and extra stress very unpleasant, well, argh! Roxy is coming, but we'll have to be gentle with her.

This is nothing to what most people have to deal with re caregiving for kids or seniors in their human families (especially special needs family members), since we can at least go out and leaver her for 3-4 hours at a time, but since Roxy is "only" a dog, people tend to be less understanding when we say that traveling is challenging right now

So we're making a vet appointment later this week for assessment and hopefully suggestions about how to keep her quality of life acceptable, and also, when to know that it isn't. In her case, if it gets to where she just can't walk anymore, I think we will know it's time for sure. There are carts and so on, but I don't think one would be comfortable or easy to adapt to for a dog her age.

The hardest part is not simply being to ask them what they want. Doug sometimes jokes that Roxy is still alive because of her separation anxiety issues (this was something we had to deal with when she was a pup, though it became manageable as she matured). She simply doesn't want to leave us. But in all seriousness, when do the aches and pains of being so old overtake the pleasure she derives from our company? I wish we could ask her.

It's the hardest thing about having animals.

I've been quiet lately, mainly because I'm alternating between bouts of grading, revising my own novel, and trying to catch up with some critiquing obligations.

I entered my young dog, Flick, in her first agility trial this weekend, and we actually Q'd our first-ever run (touch n go). She ran very smoothly, actually beating Wiley's elite qualifying time (and on the same course). Fortunately, he's not a human to be demoralized by being beaten by his kid sister.

We didn't Q again that weekend, as the subsequent courses and the more distracting environment of an agility trial took their toll, but there were some very good bits in each of our runs together. Once she gets used to the fact that there are these strange people (pole setters) sitting out on the course, and once I get my timing right, she has a lot of promise, and is lots of fun to run. When she was holding her 2-on, 2-off A-frame contact, she decided it would be fun to reach over with her nose and nudge the number cone and tip it over. I have no idea why, but it was pretty cute.

Wiley and I did well on Friday afternoon, but on Saturday, I was a wreck (got very little sleep, so my head, feet and back hurt all day, and my brain was sluggish), and he really picks up on that. My Saturdays tend to be terrible, as I just can't fall asleep early enough to get a good night's sleep when I have to get up at 5:30. If I'm in bed at 11, I still lie awake until 2 or later. When I enter on Sunday as well, it's a bit better, since I'm exhausted enough to drop off a bit earlier (usually). As I get older, I find a bad night's sleep really tears me up in a way it didn't when I was younger. Agility is a terrible sport for a night owl like me.

Wish I had a picture of Flick on course, but unfortunately, the photographers don't come out to our local NADAC trials as often as they once did. I think I'm going to have to enter Flick in some CPE if I want pro photos and videos of some of her runs. And of course, get her to where I trust her outside in the grass arena (which is less enclosed and safe than the dirt one).

I don't completely trust her not to take off in the outside arena if she sees some dog that fascinates her, though she's much more reliable than she was when we started training.

What Dog Agility Taught Me About Writing

                                          Wiley: Photo by Dave Mills Photography.

Wiley and I achieved an agility milestone this weekend: our first NATCH. The term NATCH stands for NADAC agility trial champion, and it is conferred upon a dog who has earned a certain number of qualifying runs over an assortment of classes. Handlers whose dogs earn this title are awarded with a special jump bar, a ribbon, and a plaque from the North American Dog Agility Council.

The specialness of this title has been somewhat diluted over the years, because there are far more agility trials than there once were (you can compete in one practically every weekend in our area if you wish), and people have just gotten really, really good at selecting and training dogs to excel in the sport. Plus, most of the people competing in agility now have been doing so for many years and are pretty darned good dog handlers.

So what this means is that many of the dogs who have been competing in NADAC for as long as Wiley has have gotten multiple NATCHs by now, not to mention equivalent championship titles in other agility venues. But I'm still happy to achieve this milestone. Agility in the US is a nice sport, because it allows you to participate at the level that works for you and to set personal goals without comparing yourself directly to others.

I wasn't always so sanguine, though. Roxy, my now-retired border collie/chow mix started out like a house 'o fire in the sport, breezing through the novice and intermediate levels of competition with very high "Q" percentages. Things looked promising during our first year in the most advanced level in the two venues we competed regularly in (NADAC and CPE). I was confident we'd be getting our first NATCH and CATCH (CPE's championship title) within a couple of years.

It didn't happen that way. Roxy started to slow down on the course. NADAC is a venue that favors speed, and we were competing at a time when the move  in the sport was towards tighter ways of estimating course yardage, and tighter course times ... and changing the nature of some of its classes. We began to miss qualifying runs in jumpers class because of time faults (sometimes being over course time by fractions of a second). I had her x-rayed and took her to jumping specialists, and they couldn't find anything wrong physically, but there was no denying she just wasn't running as fast as she used to, and she was struggling more with the 20" jumps she had to clear.

I don't know how much of her change in attitude about the sport was due to her structure being less than ideal for jumping, and how much was her becoming inhibited by my anxiety. I suspect the latter played a large role. She always was sensitive dog, and there's no denying that I was getting more and more upset by all our near misses and by the fact that Roxy's age peers were earning NATCH after NATCH.

We finally did get our NATCH (and our CPE CATCH), but it wasn't too long after that Roxy made it pretty clear to me that agility wasn't fun for her anymore. She'd probably been making it clear to me before that, actually, if I'd had the eyes and heart to see. Fortunately, by then, I had adopted Wiley, and he was much more intense and interested in the sport for its own sake (and not just the cookies it brought). Still, I've really, really tried to avoid putting the kind of pressure on him that I did on Roxy.

And I learned something important from all this: it is a terrible mistake to pit too much of your happiness and self esteem on the achievement of goals that are not completely within your control. I got increasingly stressed during the years I ran Roxy, because the agility venues I competed in kept changing their rules and tightening up their performance criteria, and because my agility partner (Roxy) was slowing down. These were two things I couldn't control. Another piece of stupidity is that I got so caught up in the goal that I almost forgot to enjoy the time I spent with Roxy (and with the incredible people who make up our local agility community).

Roxy's been retired from the sport for several years now (she's 13), and is still my special princess. Wiley is 8, and I hope he will continue to enjoy it for several more years. I'm looking forward to  competing soon with Flick (my nearly 3 year old border collie/Belgian shepherd(?) mix. But I'm really trying to be less goal oriented, or at least to have goals that I have some control over (like improving my handling, keeping things fun for my canine partners etc). I don't do as many trials as I used to, partially because my writing is keeping me busy into the wee hours (and agility trials start at the crack of dawn), but also because I want to keep the sport special for me and my canine companions and not burn ourselves out.

And to never, ever forget that our success in the sport has no bearing on the love I feel for them or the regard in which I hold myself.

This lesson I learned from agility is also informing my approach to writing to some extent. Humans are naturally goal oriented and competitive, and I'm no exception. I want very much to be a published writer, and at some level, it's hard to feel knowledgeable and successful as a writer without some external validation (very much like awards and titles are external validation to a dog sports competitor). I have a hell of a time not berating myself when a writer friend announces their latest sale. I've invested a lot of myself in my novel and stories over this past year or so, and I'm so afraid of failure, I'm sitting on several stories that are in need of revision and resubmission, because the form rejections I've received so far hurt my tender ego.

I met a very helpful writer (Ken Scholes) at the Cascade Writer's Workshop last summer who not only said some nice things about my writing (that I hope were not just kindness), but told us that no writer has ever completely "made it." As an unpublished writer, I tend to think getting an agent or a book contract is the brass ring, but there are always new goals that come with every level of success. And they are goals that the writer doesn't have a great deal of control over, because they involve the highly subjective judgments of other people and the vagaries of a market that changes more rapidly than the rules of any agility venue.

And Ken pointed out that one's career as even a successfully published writer can tank at any time, because no author can force people to buy his or her books. That's a darn scary thing for a writer who has achieved what most only dream of--a chance to give up his/her day job and make a living at the craft. And having something that's got so much of you in it out there in the world for people to be snide about has got to be hard on the ego too. No matter how critically acclaimed a writer may be, there are going to be people who don't like him or her.

I can feel some of the old Roxy NATCH/CATCH stress bubbling in my chest whenever I read a forum post where someone opines that agents or editors rarely touch second world fantasy (what I enjoy writing) anymore, or how the publication industry is on the verge of collapse, or how no one will be reading at all in a few years, once [insert new entertainment phenomenon] is invented. It makes my dream of seeing something I've written sitting on a shelf next to my favorite authors seem impossibly naive and far away. It also reminds me of how futile it is to worry about or invest exclusively in things I can't control.

So the path to maintaining one's sanity in writing seems to draw upon the lessons I learned from my dogs: don't compare yourself to others, have at least some meaningful goals you can control, and don't forget to enjoy the process of what you're doing. These are tall orders, and probably impossible to do 100%. But keeping them in mind may help to prevent bitterness and burn out.

                          

Roxy: Photo by Dave Mills Photography.