To Have a Dog Like Jolene

Mister is trying out his new self-appointed position of Joy Police. Someone has got to put a stop to this chaos. This girl dog is relentless. It’s all the endless zooming and dawn bitey-face and tug whenever there is a loose end. Just when he thinks he might catch a nap, she climbs in too. But the bed is a tighter fit these days, so she circles twice and plops down on top of him. Rather than have a collapsed lung, Mister scooches over. 

I still have zero recall on either dog. As herding dogs, they are constantly underfoot, which means the first challenge is getting far enough away that I can call them back. This is much harder than you might suppose. So, Jolene and I continue to work on retrieving because it’s a distant relative of recall. Half of the time she is running toward me. It was going well. Jolene is flawless if you play by her rules. When she brings it back  — the ball, frisbee, or tug toy  — you have to let her kill it for a while at your feet. She shakes the life out of it for as long as she likes. You don’t grab it or say, drop. You just cheer her on. Eventually, she drops it because, obviously, she knows how the game continues.

Now and then, Mister will traipse along, because he would like to remind you he is a dog after all. But his heart isn’t in it. This week, every time I threw the fetch toy, Mister bolted after it. Not, gawd forbid, to retrieve it, but to glare at Jolene, daring her to take a step closer. The play stops here, he signaled, and Jolene obliges. She sits and turns her head away, but does not look reprimanded.

There is a glorious moment of success. Mister, the killjoy, puffs his significant chest. Mister, the Zen master, is kind in victory. Then Mister forgets what he was doing and wanders off. Jolene possesses the two greatest skills. She is both intelligent and patient. She picks up the abandoned fetch toy and brings it back to kill. Rinse and repeat.

Mister has taken to resting in places too small to share. He asks for a moment of sympathy. Shouldn’t an hour of zooming be enough? She just gets stronger. It wears on him that she’s always right. It wears on him that she’s quicker, and dare I say it, smarter. Gosh. What does that remind me of?

Mister would like you to know he has a very big heart. That he welcomed this puppy and has been her protector. Mister is not as old as he feels. It’s just that he’s exhausted. He’d like you to know it’s one thing to play with a puppy. They wear out really quickly. Playing with Jolene actually requires a modicum of athleticism. I have noticed the same.

And I’ve been expecting this. When you get a puppy like Jolene, a sharp instinct-bound dog, who you encourage to be confident, she’s also gonna end up with a voice. Some of us like this kind of dog. Her breeder, Sandy, and I talked about it before she came. We knew that Jolene would have a lively, or at least more dramatic, personality. She would transition from a cute puppy to a force of nature. Mister and Jolene would switch places as she matured. We didn’t think Mister would mind.

Here is the horse similarity: You will notice that I didn’t use words like dominant or alpha. Like horses, dogs do not have a dominance hierarchy. The idea that they battle for the top position has long since been debunked. If a horse pushes others around, it isn’t for herd ranking. We mistake the horse with the most anxiety as alpha. Animal behavior has so much more nuance than that. There might be food aggression or other resource guarding, but it is a fluid conversation, not a job title. Mister might take the best bed to nap on while Jolene owns all the toys. Dogs and horses have unique personalities. They form relationships based on trust, needs, and companionship. These two dogs, like the horses in the barn, appreciate one-on-one time with me. But they thrive on being with each other.

Mister was an only dog for a couple of months before Jolene came. He didn’t love it. It was a lot of pressure to herd a human as challenging as me. He felt a sense of relief more than anything else when Jolene took over. Mister wages peace. He has no ambition for public office, but Jolene is considering it. She says humans are too emotionally fragile for governing. 

When Mister has something that Jolene wants, she leans her elbow on my thigh as if it’s a bar. She lets me know Mister is not being fair. In other words, Jolene tattles on Mister. But she doesn’t pick a fight. We appreciate that about her. We don’t raise our voices here. 

So much of the way humans play confuses dogs. How do they tell the difference between play fighting and the real thing? We used to get in trouble for teasing dogs, and now it seems anything goes. If we tease them, it’s the dog’s problem. Same with horses and especially donkeys. If their anxiety drives them to compensate in ways inconvenient to us, they pay for our lack of understanding. Rather than trying to pre-correct and micromanage animals, I try to model peaceful conversations. I hope my dogs will self-soothe and negotiate their way onward. It takes both confidence and tolerance to be resilient enough to cope with the ordinary anxiety of life. 

When Jolene and I pack up to go to scentwork class or a social outing, Mister doesn’t beg for a leash, too. He sees us off and then goes to find the chewy he knows I left him. Have a good time, girls. When his leash comes out, he knows we might get a pup-cup from Starbucks. Against all common sense, they will share it, lick for lick.

Lately, I’ve taken over some of Mister’s tasks so he has more time to meditate. For the last half hour, I’ve been typing with one hand and playing tug with the other. Sometimes, he and I sneak off to the trailer alone. We eat treats and reminisce about our grand road-trip. Like the old days, we talk about his belly. Then we miss her too much and hurry back.

Knowing I would not be boarding horses again, I repurposed a few extra water tanks into planters. We have no lawn here on the high desert prairie, but we have some flowers. Jolene has commandeered the water tank/flower beds as lookout towers so she can keep tabs on me more easily. She hops up like a bug, clearing the top by a few inches, while Mister clambers up like a prehistoric reptile. His back is too long for this. We stopped agility classes for fear he’d injure his back. Now here he is, jumping even higher, and worse, jumping down, a few times a day. I ask him not to, telling him Jolene will keep him posted on my whereabouts. Mister isn’t burdened with false ego, but this is a matter of honor for a herding dog.

The icy wind has flipped the chairs and dried every bit of moisture in our prairie grass. We have fire warnings every day. It’s almost solstice, or as we call it, the first day of spring. Days will be longer now, and the light will return. Soon, green things will happen. The Dude Rancher has agreed to build the dogs a lookout tower that has Mister accessibility. I guess I’ll fence in the flower beds. Four-foot no-climb horse wire should do it. Wonderful. Lillies in lockdown.

…

Announcement: I’m giving a class in January called How to Write a Memoir if You’re Nobody. It’s open to anybody. Details here.

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