Don't Dump The Dog (5 page)

S
tinky, a stumpy little yellow pit bull, barks at rain, new art on the wall, his empty food bowl, piles of laundry, and birds. Sometimes he sits in the middle of the backyard and barks at air. One night, while loading the dishwasher after a dinner party, I dropped a fork on the floor and Stinky went nuts. When one of the guests asked with panic in his voice what the dog was barking at, all I could do was shrug and say, “A fork.”

Stinky is only one member of the pack that inhabits my house, and his barking usually sets the others off en masse. If I’m on the phone and, say, a large mosquito flies past the front window, I can’t even hear myself yell “I HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK” into the receiver, which is especially embarrassing if you’re being interviewed on a live radio talk show. One time I listened to a tape of one of these radio interviews, after it aired—but all that could be heard was a lot of barking and me screaming, “SHUT
UP
!”

The second Tuesday of every month is the worst. That’s when the city tests its weather sirens, and the dogs stand at the front window and howl like a pack of wolves in the Grand Tetons during a full moon. The second Tuesday of every month is the
only
time my neighbors venture near my house because they want to make sure “everything is all right.”

Several years ago, a reporter from a national magazine asked if she could interview me “in my own environment.” She suggested my house. I suggested an abandoned parking lot on the far south side.

At first, I thought Stinky in particular barked to get attention. See, dogs evolved from wolves, and while adult wolves don’t bark, wolf pups do. It’s the equivalent of a human baby crying to get his mother’s attention, because he doesn’t yet know how to communicate in any other way. So the wolf pup barks until he learns how to communicate in adult-wolf ways.

But over the millennia, humans have selectively bred wolves into mere shadows of their former selves, and the result—dogs—are really just adult wolves physically, and wolf pups emotionally. In other words, dogs are big babies looking for attention.

Stinky, for instance, would sit in the middle of the backyard and start this
woof-woof-woof
thing while his head turned slowly from side to side like he was sending out warnings to anything that
might
be in the general vicinity. My first “command” through the window was always a wellreasoned, “There’s nothing there, Stinky—hush,” which usually worked until I stepped away from the window and he’d start again.
Woof, woof, woof
. We’d go back and forth that way ...

... on and on, back and forth, until my inner hick lost control and was heard throughout the neighborhood bellowing, “FOR GOD’S SAKE, SHUUUT
UP
,” through the window. Usually in a bathrobe.

Here’s what was happening: Stinky barked to get my attention, and when I yelled at him, he just thought I was barking back. Mission accomplished. I was
rewarding
him for barking. The answer, then, was as simple as
not rewarding
him when he barked. I started inside the house. When he barked at anything that wasn’t a burglar, I pulled out a plastic water sprayer and gave him a little squirt. He hated it, and within several weeks, he managed to put two and two together.

If a person has one dog, the water sprayer works great. I, however, have an entire herd, and after a while I developed carpal tunnel from pulling the trigger so many times. That’s where a good, old-fashioned dog whistle comes in handy. If the crew starts barking, just blow the whistle, which hurts their ears and pulls their attention away from whatever they’re barking at. This is a good way to make them shut up when they’re outside too. The only problem with this method is that during dinner parties, with the dogs locked away in bedrooms, you sit at the table and blow continuously into a silent (to humans) whistle. If you don’t want your guests to see you blowing into a whistle, just place it in your napkin and pretend to wipe your mouth, blowing all the while. They will just think you are a messy eater with perfectly behaved dogs.

Many dogs—especially those like ours who were either feral or abused and thus tend to attach to only one person—bark when their person leaves the house. It’s the only way they know to call them back. There are a couple of easy solutions for this, though.

Quick Fix for Too Much Barking

• Get another dog to keep the first one company;
  
• Turn the TV or radio on, so they don’t feel so alone;
  
• Use a bark collar; or
  
• Ask your veterinarian about medications for separation anxiety.
  

The bark collar is probably the most practical solution, especially in multi-dog homes, because it works whether you’re home or not. I’m not talking about a shock collar here. Not only does it physically sting the dog, but if you have as many as I do, it knocks out whole sections of the national electricity grid when they go off in unison every time the dogs bark.

Instead, consider a citrus collar. Dogs hate the taste of citrus, and every time they bark, the collar ejects a spray of citronella onto their muzzles. I love this method for entertainment value alone, because you’ve got a pack of dogs at the window on the verge of warning you there’s a car driving by, and suddenly, at the very first
woof
, they go silent with puckered lips, their tongues darting in and out, giving each other quizzical looks as if to say, “Do you taste that too?” The citrus collar also saves you from buying air fresheners.

There are also ultrasonic collars that, much like a dog whistle, emit a high-pitched sound people can’t hear, and collars that vibrate every time they bark.

If you want to avoid the expense of bark collars, it’s easy to improvise. Get a tin can, put twenty pennies in it, and shake it every time the dog barks. Likewise, put lemon juice in a spray bottle (rather than water) and squirt it at his mouth when he woofs, and you’ll not only have a quiet dog but a good laugh as well. (You can also use it on your fish for dinner.)

Whatever you do, don’t talk, pet, or try to soothe your dog with your hands when he’s barking. This only tells him you love him for driving you crazy. Only reward him when he
doesn’t
bark at something he normally would, which I know is difficult when, like Stinky, your dog barks at drying paint, growing grass, and forks. Try it anyway.

In the end, a person really can’t get too upset about barking. There are so many people out there, from politicians to spouses, whom you’d love to squirt with lemon juice or place inside a shock collar, that a little barking from the dog shouldn’t seem so annoying. I think it is because we spend all day listening to the rants of others, and by the time we get home, we feel we can finally scream SHUT UP and not worry about being arrested. In my house, I only reprimand nuisance barking. If the doorbell rings, I tell my crew, “Go on, let it out,” because I wish so much that I could.

Quick Fix-2

I
will confess to two things at this point (and only because Dr. Gupta says that I should):

1. I’m not sympathetic enough with people who haven’t read as many self-help books as I have and thus can’t handle the eating of turds, and,
   
2. despite the number of self-help books I’ve read, the thought of eating turds makes me want to hurl.
   

I admit, it
is
pretty disgusting. I saw one of my own dogs, Ichiban, do it once—ran up to another dog pooping in the yard like he was the ice cream man offering free treats—and I couldn’t even look at him for an entire week.

At first, I did my usual: drank a little wine, went into denial, and pretended it never happened. Everything was fine for a while, but then early one morning, as I stood at the kitchen window sipping hot Brazilian Robusta, watching the dogs play in the backyard and, in general, feeling that all might indeed be right with the world, Ichiban did it again—he wolfed down poop as it came hot out of the other dog’s butt, and my rare moment of tranquility (along with a mouthful of Brazilian Robusta) splattered against the wall.

One of my biggest phobias (of which, admittedly, I have several) is of germs. It’s a generic kind of fear—germs in general scare me—and I avoid public bathrooms, escalator handrails, handshaking, and all-you-can-eat buffets. I flush
my own
toilet with my foot. During the course of my lifetime, I have visited the emergency room with symptoms of the plague, botulism, bird flu, tuberculosis, West Nile, malaria, and anthrax poisoning.

I nearly had a nervous breakdown once when some friends, playing a practical joke, left a message on my voice mail from the “Federal Department of Infectious Diseases and Emergency Sanitation,” saying they had “reason to believe” I’d come into contact with someone who carried streptocophal, an extremely rare and potentially lethal disease, and that a special “contamination vehicle” had already been dispatched to my residence to take me to a nearby air force base where I’d be “administered special tests” which included an anal probe. I fainted on the spot.

Needless to say, giving Ichiban mints wasn’t an acceptable solution for me.

When I mentioned the situation to Dr. Gupta during one of our sessions, he leaned back in his chair and nodded his head slowly as he always does when a more-interesting issue than my phobias comes up.

“Coprophagia,” he said.

“Is that some sort of ancient war cry?”

“It’s a Greek term,” he said, “from
copros
, which means feces, and
phagein
, which means eat.”

“Sounds like a war cry to me.”

“It’s not all that unusual in some species, and in rare cases, even human beings engage ... ”

I plugged my fingers in my ears and hummed. I couldn’t afford more therapy.

It turns out The Condition (which is what I’ll call it from here on out because I can’t pronounce or spell the technical term) is not so rare in dogs. Some theories suggest boredom, stress, parasites, or digestive deficiencies as the cause, but in most cases, The Condition starts when the dog is young and then becomes sheer habit.

Sometimes it begins with a puppy or dog who simply likes to pick up objects and carry them around. During cold weather, for example, a puppy might find a frozen turd on the ground and think he’s discovered a great toy; then, as he carries it around in his mouth, it starts to melt and ... you know ... resemble food.

Snow is another factor. There is nothing more exciting to a young dog than sniffing out something that smells like food under a dusting of snow, and their hunter-gatherer instinct loves every second of it. So be diligent when the weather changes so this doesn’t start to become a habit.

Other first steps include the following:

• Visit a veterinarian for a health check to make sure there are no signs of parasites.
  
• Make sure you are feeding your pet a nutritional dog food.
  
• Pick up the stools so the dog does not have access.
  

The most important factor when you first notice The Condition in your dog is to take immediate steps to prevent it from happening again. Behavior modification techniques are your best hope. For example, always take your dog out on a leash at first. Whenever she starts drooling over a found turd, use a corrective sound (like your mom used to make when you were drinking from the milk carton), like the direction
leave it
, and then give an alternative command such as
come
,
sit
, or any direction that will take the dog’s attention away from her snack.

In addition to behavior modification, the following also works:

• In many cases, there are particles of undigested food in feces, which might be what’s bringing her to the table. Add enzyme supplements such as meat tenderizer or papaya extract (a natural enzyme available in health food stores) to her food to increase digestion.
  
• Add two to four tablespoons of canned pumpkin to her food each day, because while it’s acceptable when it goes down, it’s distasteful when it comes back out.
  
• There are products such as Forbid and Excel available from pet supply stores and veterinarians that discourage The Condition. Apply the product directly to the turds. Apparently, it tastes horrible.
  
• Finally, try Randy’s Tequila Lime Turd Spray, which when used on poop acts as a deterrent, but when sprayed on grilled fish (swordfish or halibut are best) acts as marinade. Whatever you do, don’t label it TURD SPRAY like I did and then use it while preparing dinner in front of guests.
  

In the end, poop doesn’t have to be the enemy. You may just have to learn to deal with it: Look the other way, don’t accept a wet kiss from the culprit for twelve hours, or, use the marinade. Come on—we’ve all woken up next to someone whose breath smells as if they have The Condition. Give your dog a break here, and me too.