While the señor and I visited Wellington, the dogs stayed with the harvestparents. The challenge for the harvestparents in caring for the dogs is twofold. One is hardening their hearts to the level of my household so that when five deep-brown pairs of eyes ask, “what’s that you’re eating? It looks good. Care to share it? Please?”, they can carry on eating without feeling like Bad Caregivers. (The señor and I get much lower-level blandishing by virtue of the fact we don’t eat meat. Elsewhere, when the chicken comes out, the Norwich Terriers will dance for it.)
The second part of the challenge is coping with the way each of the dogs follows you round like a little dog. This is one of my favourite things about them (and quite therapeutic to come home to from a sometimes-antagonistic workplace), but for people who are used to doing their everyday household tasks without a lively entourage, it’s a challenge. I feel particularly guilty about the dogs’ impact on harvestmother’s daily knitting and sewing. Let us just say that they impair it.
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My bitches are in season, or coming into season, and this time around it’s Evie’s turn. My beloved first-born home-bred, whose whole life is in these pages, is now of age to bear puppies herself. I have a terrific vet, a greyhound man, whom I hold in the highest esteem and for whose clinical reproductive technologies I gladly drive across town. He brings the science that makes the whole process not-at-all tumultuous, unlike earlier adventures in different neighbourhood practices when I was first starting out in this game.
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It’s time for that blog staple: low-quality video recorded on a digital camera.
Two weeks ago, Señor Mojito and I drove south to see Ashburton Jay’s new puppy, Anzac. (He is from Australia; hence the trans-Tasman nomenclature). We took Fern with us, who was joined by Finn, Arthur’s eldest surviving son, and Finn’s mama-keeper who is also from Christchurch.
The video is hosted on Flickr and takes a while to load. It shows Finn, Fern and Anzac tearing around, with commentary below-transcribed from the señor and I. The dogs you hear barking are Ashburton Jay’s kennelled posse, although I suspect the correct collective noun for Norwich Terriers may be “seethe”.
Flickr Video
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… is in not leaving things where the dogs can reach them, in this case, an X-box controller, now sculpted. Pictured below the jump is Edwin (not guilty).
Thank you, too for your thoughtful comments to the post on bullying. I will respond to them at greater length tomorrow.
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To live with many dogs is to be part of a pack. Much emphasis is placed, in the dog training literature and media, on being the pack leader, keeping the many in line to exercise your will. By and large, this is what the pack leader does, and is paid back in adoration, grooming and being followed round by dogs. To summarise only thus far, however, is to ignore the functioning of the pack as entity and to consider the ways in which it expresses its collective will.
I may direct the pack, but the pack continually pushes back. Sometimes this is in straightforward acts of resistance: the rare not coming when called and the far more common pretending not to come when called. Sometimes the pack attempts to carry out surreptitiously what it has been told not to do. Have you ever seen a dog dig or chew while pretending it is neither digging nor chewing? Sometimes the pack will direct its junior members to carry out the forbidden acts. There are also more benign pressures. Many of us have heard the story of the pet border collies at a house party who, over the course of the evening, subtly herded all the guests into a cluster in the living room, then sat contentedly to survey their work.
If my pack had its way, my day would consist in staying very still in a selection of locations in which they could pile on top of me: the bed, the couch, the other couch. I would only get up to feed them or open the door. While pack law dictates that this wish cannot be directly expressed (by standing on the couch and barking at me, for example), it can be conveyed in other ways: through disappointed silence as I work at the desktop or in the kitchen for example; through polite and theatrically selfless waiting outside the bathroom while I shower.
Fundamentally then I see the pack as a sophisticated system that is both part of and extrinsic to its members, containing them, serving their needs and developing, over time, into a composite world view. My presence in the pack means that in many ways I live like a dog, sensitive to their social ordering and particular needs. In exchange for maintaining the pack’s solidarity, I get to be the object of their affection. This works well for both me and the señor, the pack’s adjunct senior member.
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Harvest Bird’s Lively Friday Visual Miscellany
30 January, 2009
in at home,commentatrix,dogs,we are family
While the señor and I visited Wellington, the dogs stayed with the harvestparents. The challenge for the harvestparents in caring for the dogs is twofold. One is hardening their hearts to the level of my household so that when five deep-brown pairs of eyes ask, “what’s that you’re eating? It looks good. Care to share it? Please?”, they can carry on eating without feeling like Bad Caregivers. (The señor and I get much lower-level blandishing by virtue of the fact we don’t eat meat. Elsewhere, when the chicken comes out, the Norwich Terriers will dance for it.)
The second part of the challenge is coping with the way each of the dogs follows you round like a little dog. This is one of my favourite things about them (and quite therapeutic to come home to from a sometimes-antagonistic workplace), but for people who are used to doing their everyday household tasks without a lively entourage, it’s a challenge. I feel particularly guilty about the dogs’ impact on harvestmother’s daily knitting and sewing. Let us just say that they impair it.
[click to continue…]
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