Bones Would Rain from the Sky: Deepening Our Relationships with Dogs (16 page)

clients discovered this when dealing with her dog's eating
problems. Bella was not a good eater, though her
owner, Beth, had tried over the years to provide
her dog with the very finest foods available. As she
learned more, Beth began to embrace the good sense behind
learning to prepare her own homemade dog food; with
full control over the individual ingredients and their

quality, she could be sure of providing her
beloved companion with the best possible diet. Using
one of the many balanced recipes available, Beth had
painstakingly assembled the ingredients and prepared the
food. But Bella didn't like this new food either.
As she had with all other foods, the dog ate only
enough to keep herself alive, though she gladly accepted
certain special treats. Watching Bella wolf
down a chicken sandwich that fell on the floor,
Beth was frustrated. Was this dog just playing games
with her? Thinking of the hours she had spent preparing the
best possible food, she felt angry and
rejected.
Ever try to feed an eighteen-month-old toddler a
food he didn't like? There's no particular
consideration on the child's part for the cost of the food, how
good it may be for him according to the nutritional experts,
how much effort was required to obtain and/or prepare
this magical elixir. If he doesn't like it, he
will screw up his face in the universal sign of
disgust and refuse to allow you to con him
(airplanes, trains and all) to swallow any more of
that yucky stuff. Your dog will be equally and brutally
honest. Spend all day preparing choice tidbits,
and your dog may sniff and turn away. No
apology, though some very kind dogs will
humor you a tad by taking the treat, wagging their tail
and then immediately spitting the food out or placing it
gently on the floor.
At first glance, I had noticed the dog's
appearance-Bella was hardly the picture of good
health. Her coat was dull and dry, and her ribs were
easily visible even from a distance. Clearly, this was
a dog with serious problems that Beth hoped I might
help unravel. I asked what she was feeding
Bella, and was quite surprised to discover she was using a
long- established and very reputable recipe, one that
I'd used with my own dogs with excellent
results. Seeing my surprise, Beth nodded in
rueful agreement. "I know! I thought I was doing
something good for her, but look at her. People have stopped
me on the street and scolded me for not feeding my
dog! They should know how hard I try to do what's
best for Bella."

I asked about the ingredients-raw beef, brown
rice, and a variety of vegetables-and Bella's
response to her food. "She just picks out a little
beef and the carrots and green beans, but that's about it."
Beth sighed. But before I could ask another question, she

went on, her voice filled with frustration
and a touch of bitterness. "Of course, Little Miss
Picky here is always right underfoot when I roast a
chicken. And in the mornings, she'll walk away from
her food bowl to sit begging for some of my oatmeal."
Now it all made sense. "She likes oatmeal?"
Beth nodded, adding, "I have some every morning, and
Bella knows it. She sits there begging and going through
all the tricks she knows just to get some. I know it's
spoiling her, but I give her some every now and then-at
least it's something in her tummy."
"Did you ever think of using other ingredients? Like
chicken instead of beef, oatmeal instead of brown
rice?" Beth shook her head, reminding me that the
recipe called for beef, not chicken. I assured
her that substitutions were fine, and sometimes very necessary. Not
all foods suit all dogs, just as people vary in the
diet that best suits them. I went on to explain that
in my experience, healthy dogs whose food agrees
with them are good eaters, enthusiastic and quick in their
approach to doing what canines do-gulping down their
meals without much chewing involved. (i've had some
clients very concerned about this normal dog behavior and
have had to reassure them that the design of a dog's
teeth offer good clues about how a dog should eat. The
impressive array of canine dental ware
is designed for grabbing and tearing, not carefully
chewing. The dog's powerful digestive system does
the brunt of the work, unlike our weaker stomachs that
prefer our food at least partially chewed.)
When a dog does not eat or eats very little, my first
thought is to take this as a very important communication.
With basic physiology similar to our own, I've
long suspected that dogs are as prone as we are
to food intolerances as well as true allergies
(different from an intolerance in that allergies involve
an immune-mediated response). There is no
physiological reason why dogs should not experience
these same physical sensations we experience after
eating food that doesn't agree with us: gassiness,
cramping, nausea, headaches, sour stomach. But
they cannot

tell us this in words-though, as Bella did, they can and
do report faithfully in their actions.
Far more attuned to their bodies than we to curs,
dogs can quickly become aware which foods do not suit
them. Nature arms even the simplest creatures
with a good memory for avoiding foods that have made them
sick. (we have this mechanism as well, but often

disregard what our bodies tell us.) As
a baby, I repeatedly refused to drink from a
bottle, and sometimes went so far as to hurl the
bottle away from me. The pediatrician suggested
I was spoiled and that perhaps my mother was doing something
wrong. After wading through the Sea of First-Time Parent
Guilt, my mother knew that something must be causing this
behavior since I would drink water or diluted
juice from a bottle. She began to piece things
together, and the truth was eventually discovered -I had a
nasty response to cow's milk, the basis of the
formula I was being given. Given goat's milk,
I happily drank my bottle and became a
picture-perfect baby. (i outgrew that, but still
hate milk.)
Unlike an animal that hunts for its food,
dogs have no control over what is put on their
plates. Our dogs are unable to gracefully
decline and say, "Thanks-you do make a
delicious
gizzard
soup, but gizzards repeat on me
something fierce." Worse still, their food often
arrives as a blend of many ingredients, and they can't
pick out the good from the bad. The whole food
therefore has to be suitable or not. All they can do is
eat what they must to stay alive, and hope that the
next meal might be something more agreeable. Beth
confirmed that Bella's behavior fit the profile
of a dog trying to communicate a problem with her
food. The dog was always hopeful and bright-eyed when
her meal was being prepared, but her enthusiasm quickly
dimmed when the bowl was placed before her. "She just
sniffs, and then looks up at me. Sometimes she
eats a little, and sometimes she just walks away. She
eats just enough to stay alive."
What Bella was saying in the clearest way she
knew how was, "I don't like this." Bella's
bluntly honest communication held no acknowledgment
of Beth's efforts, just the dog's truth.
Interpreted through a human's need for acceptance and
appreciation, Beth could not clearly hear what
Bella kept saying. Trapped in her own
emotional response to the dog's rejection of the
food she had worked so hard to prepare, Beth couldn't
see that Bella had also clearly told her, "I do
like oatmeal, and I do like chicken." This is

understandable-after all, even a well-trained
doctor who ought to have taken my babyhood behavior
as important information found it easier to blame my
upbringing for my bottle-related antics than
closely examine my behavior for important
clues. But sadder was Beth's question as she considered
my advice to replace the beef and rice with chicken
and oatmeal: "If I do, isn't that just letting her
get her way?"
Countless training books and countless trainers urge the
dog owner to not let dogs "get away with"
misbehavior but forget to mention that behavior is a
pure form of communication. If a behavior exists
that an owner finds upsetting, there's a problem that
needs to be investigated and resolved. The dog has
a reason for acting as he does, and it's not always
because, given an inch, he wants to take a mile.
I found it quite sad that Beth had so thoroughly
swallowed the battle cry of dog training
com8Don't let him get away with that!"-that she felt
it would be somehow surrendering to Bella's demands
to feed her chicken and oatmeal. By switching the
ingredients to eliminate the things Bella consistently
avoided eating and to include the equally nutritious
and more agreeable foods, the only thing the dog would be
"getting away with" was not being hungry most
of the time.
Once Beth realized that Bella was not rejecting
her or her well-meant offer of delicious food,
she was able to see how clearly Bella had been
trying to communicate. When I assured her that she
had been on the right track, and that her intentions were
laudable, Beth cheered up. She brightened further when
I explained that she and Bella already knew what the
solution might be; all she had to do was give it a
try. I also reminded her that in a world filled with
rigid recipes, she wasn't going to find too much
advice on listening to the dog's body as an
important piece of creating the ideal diet for that
dog. (this is not the same as the old Bill
Cosby routine where a father listens to his children and
agrees to serve them chocolate cake for
breakfast.) She agreed to try substituting chicken
and oatmeal.
A couple of months later, I got a call from
Beth to report on Bella's progress. The
dog was eating eagerly, had put on quite a bit of
much needed weight, and her coat was thick and shiny.
After telling me about

Bella's new enthusiasm for her food, Beth
went on: "You know, it's funny. When I realized
Bella was always telling me the truth, I finally
figured out it was my job to figure out what she was
telling me. And it's not just about oatmeal and chicken.
In training class one day, I asked her to pick
up her dumbbell. She trotted out, started to pick
it up, and then just dropped it. I was surprised:
She knows how to do this-she's done it for years. She just
stood there and stared at me. At first I got
angry. My trainer was telling me to go make her
pick it up but then I remembered how Bella used
to stare at me at mealtimes. It dawned on me that
maybe she was trying to tell me something, so I
didn't do anything. I just stood there, staring right
back at her, and thought about the whole thing. I
wondered why she might drop a dumbbell right after
picking it up. So I walked over to look at her
more closely."
Beth's voice broke a little, and I could hear her
take a deep breath before she continued. "When I
looked in her mouth, I was so glad I believed her
and that I hadn't yelled at her or tried to make
her pick it up. Somehow, she had broken off one of
her teeth, and the nerve was exposed. Picking
up that dumbbell must have hurt like hell. We got
the tooth fixed, and she went back into training and did
great. Now, every time Bella needs to tell me
something, she stops and stares at me, and I know she's
telling me something important. It's made our
whole relationship better-I really trust my dog
now."
A gift of light
Accepting the dog's gift of complete honesty is not
easy. It requires that we understand our own feelings
and that we can make the distinction between what we project
onto our dogs and what movie is actually showing
at their theater. Learning to accept an animal's
honesty is very literally an act of trust, one
sometimes made difficult by our human experiences.
This has been a difficult process for me-my
experience in life has not been one where trust is
unfailingly honored, and I've not always been
trustworthy. Without question, my experience with the human
capacity for deceit influenced my relationships with
animals. If trust and honesty are not a part of
everyday life, an atmosphere of suspicion develops.
Though we may not be fully

aware of it, though we may think that we step
outside of it in our relationships with anifhals,
distrust begins to color all in ways we did not
intend, a deadly gas creeping through the cracks of
our self-knowledge.
Very early on in my career, when I was eighteen, I
was bitten by a young dog. She was an impulse buy
from a pet store by people who did not understand exactly how
much was involved in raising a very active and determined
puppy. Faced with no leadership and plenty of
energy, the dog had quickly learned that she could shape the
world to her liking with a well-timed show of teeth and a
fierce growl. Puffed up with pride and armed with what
was appallingly inadequate knowledge, I viewed her
behavior as a deliberate defiance of my
"authority." (does anyone have less authority
than someone who even thinks in those terms?] In
retrospect, I can see that my lack of honesty with
myself was the driving force; I was not yet able to admit
to myself how little I really knew about dogs and dog
training. I was also emotionally suspicious, having not
yet matured enough to resolve some deeply affecting
experiences that had taught me how untrustworthy some
people could be. As a result, I was not able to fully
trust animals as well, though I was unaware at
the time that my "authoritarian" response
to the dog was a clear sign of my own fearful
distrust. Just as I triumphantly managed
to squash the "defiant" dog into a rough resemblance
of the desired down position, she told me
precisely what she thought of my stupidity and
rudeness: She sank her teeth deep into my wrist.
I don't remember precisely what my
response was, but I do remember bleeding
copiously in the client's bathroom and trying
to explain to the very upset family what had happened.
I've apologized many times in my mind to that dog for
concluding the disaster by labeling her stubborn, dominant
and difficult. She was the only honest one in that
whole scenario.
I replayed that fiasco many times in my head-it was
a horrible situation that I did not want to repeat.
I did not mind the bite, and I value the scars as
tangible reminders that I am capable of great
stupidity. What I could not shake was the look in the
dog's eyes. Over and over, she warned me,
absolutely honest in her communications; but faced with
someone who would not hear her, she clearly felt she
had no other choice but to bite me in order
to communicate with me. I also remembered