Love for my greyhounds, or any greyhound come to think of it, does not exclude the other end of the spectrum - annoyance, agitation, or down right anger when my dogs exhibit insufficient cooperation. We wrestle with the angst of our feelings when our sweet dogs show tendencies we do not like. Love reveals itself as not a constant, but rather a sliding scale of ups and downs, and sometimes, our dogs, just like children, test its veracity.
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| Resting in the Keys |
The love I feel for my dogs is full blown. I adore them. However, when my boy, Kiowa, jumped on my expensive leather couch and nested using his sharp nails on the soft and supple leather, I have to say my love wavered. Or when my girl, Emma, peed on the rug for the fifth time after she came to live with us, I confess sending her back might have been on the table (only kidding, not really). I expose this mixture of feelings due to the roller coaster effect that our unstable emotions play in all of our relationships.
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| What are we doing? I'm ready! |
Through the years, my dogs have tested the waters to see just how far I would let them swim. After adopting our first greyhound, Cayman, and having no experience with dogs since childhood, I didn't realize that crating was the best way to approach confining a newly adopted dog. I showed my inexperience by allowing her unrestricted space. She must have peed umpteen times on one certain area of the rug. I remember sitting on the floor next to her, crying, and explaining that this was inappropriate behavior. “I don’t pee inside when I want to annoy you, do I?” RIGHT! We bought a crate soon after, and she was fine. However, when my husband one day, approached his tomato garden and found a rump, two rear legs, and a tail projecting out of the soft, brown earth, he questioned his loving feelings.
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| Where are we going today? |
The importance of experiencing our dogs as fallible creatures teaches us that it is OK to be annoyed with them. The real dog falls short of the perfection molded into a statue or painting of a greyhound. Our dogs make bad decisions just as people do. The job of showing them how to behave falls to us. We cannot blame them for our lack of guidance.
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| In Key West |
If a dog exposes behaviors that you feel he should have already mastered, your job escalates to one of detective. What appears as an act of defiance (I don’t know if a dog can feel defiant), could be triggered by a health issue. A vet visit, then, tops the list as an instrument of your love. Our dogs want to please us. They show us through their behavior the depth and scope of their love. If that behavior resists the norm, then we must detect the reason for it.
To new adopters, if your dog has issues, guide him in simple ways to the preferred behavior. Ask for help from your adoption group if you’re stumped. They want to support you in any way they can. And most of all, never give up on your greyhound. Most greyhounds have fixable issues, and some have none at all. Be guided by the people who know greyhounds.
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| What? |
View your emotions as a timeline. We move forward in the love for our dogs, then something occurs, and we move back a bit (not much). As time goes by, our love continues in forward movement with small backward slides along the way. These small annoyances just balance things out. I love my greyhounds, and their flaws just make life interesting.
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| An Exhausting Day |
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