I'm reading a book called, "30 Days to a Well Mannered Dog" by Tamar Geller. It's an interesting book about canine and human behavior, although I think 30 days is kind of ambitious unless you are an expert dog-trainer or have nothing else to do for a month or have smarter dogs than mine. Anyway, she says that research shows dogs have the emotional maturity and reasoning skills of a human toddler. That's so funny, because my husband and I have always said that Bear acts a lot like our youngest grandson.
When you live with a dog you really get to see its personality. We had a rescued greyhound that was just like a teenager; sulky, demanding, and moody.
My husband and I had been talking about getting a watchdog and then I read an article in Reader's Digest about the dog racing industry that turned my stomach. Yes, I'm a sucker for dogs. We decided to kill two birds with one stone and rescue a retired racer.
When I told the foster about our reasons for wanting a dog, she gave me a look and told me not to expect too much watching from a greyhound. As it turns out, they almost never bark, something I appreciate much more now that I have a small, yappy dog and a big dog with a loud, booming bark.
As a breed, greyhounds are extremely intelligent and retired racers are amazingly forgiving to humans for the misery they've had to endure. They are also highly anxious and sensitive, both emotionally and physically. Some day, when I don't travel as much, I'd like another one.
We named ours Lucky because we were conceited enough to believe he was lucky to find a home with us.
When you get a retired racer, they are like a clean slate. They know nothing about living in a human home and can't even do basic dog things. Keep in mind most rescues are at least 2 years old and more successful racers can be as old as 3 or 4 before they are no longer considered useful, so these are not young dogs. It's really dismaying to take one home and realize they don't know even how to eat solid food. The dogs are kept muzzled most of the time and are fed a kind of gruel that they can slurp up without opening their mouths enough to bite. We had to soak his food in water for weeks before he learned how to chew.
When we first got him, I took him to my parents' house so they could meet him. My dad was eating a sandwhich when we arrived. He draped a slice of lunch meat over the dog's muzzle and Lucky just stood there, drooling, not realizing he could eat it.
Everything scared him at first: the t.v., the blow-dryer, the doorbell. He was very tall; I could pet his head without bending over. Most of his height was legs and he looked like he was on stilts. When someone would come to the door, including when my husband came home from work, he'd run and hide behind the dining room table. You could see his back over the table and his legs under it, but since he had his head hanging underneath and couldn't see us, he thought he was invisible to us as well. Some watch dog.
He didn't know how to navigate steps. I pulled my back out in the first few days because I was trying to take him to the basement with me and he fell through the railing. I had to hold 80 pounds of dangling, squirming weight with one arm while I held on to the railing and eased us down far enough that it was safe to let him drop. He never really did get the hang of stairs. He'd walk his front legs down as far as he could and then jump the rest of the way. In the basement that meant running into the wall each time but he seemed satisfied enough with the results.
The rescue warned us that greyhounds have blood vessels close to their very thin skin so they are very sensitive to hot and cold. I found out just how sensitive the first time I gave him a bath. I used warm, not hot, water. As I was rinsing the soap off of him, he started getting a glazed look in his eyes. Then his head started wobbling a bit and the next thing I knew, he'd fainted. I had to spray him with cold water to revive him. From then on I'd use water just warm enough to prevent my fingers from going numb and sometimes he'd get that look and I'd have to switch to cold water to bring him out of it.
Watching him after he took a bath was hilarious. Like many dogs, he'd get super excited when he got out of the tub and would run around the house shaking off the water. He wasn't very good at shaking, though. He'd start his shake in the front and by the time the shake got to his butt, his back legs would leave the floor and flail along with the rest of him. He looked brain damaged.
I never had to train this dog. He just picked up words from listening to me talk to him. "Sit" wasn't something we worked on because with their long legs and heavy fronts compared to their behinds, greyhounds aren't built to sit very well. It was interesting to learn about some of our own habits just by watching him respond to them. At night when we'd turn off the t.v., he'd run to the back door, knowing it was time to go out before bed.
Everyone who has ever lived with me knows that I do not get woken up well. Before I'm fully awake I'm kind of mean. Lucky learned this about me quickly. If he had to go outside at night, he'd whisper/whine in my husband's ear and then walk quietly out of the bedroom. Once he got to the hallway, though, he'd usually wake me up anyway from the sound of his toenails clicking on the hard wood while he did his happy dance. But he really did try to be considerate and let me sleep.
Once he felt comfortable, he was a very affectionate dog. He'd stand over my husband's legs while he sat in a chair, leaning the top of his head on my husband's chest. He seemed to think he was sitting on daddy's lap. He understood who "mommy", "daddy", and "Jason" were. He also knew what stuff belonged to whom.
Once time my husband decided to tease the dog by sitting Jason on his lap and patting him and saying "good, Jason, good Jason." While at the time it was cute and funny to watch the dog whine in distress and try to nudge Jason off of his dad's lap, Lucky got his revenge later on. That night, he found Jason's favorite book and tore out individual pages and scattered them around the living room. It took about 25 or so pages before he'd spent his anger.
He did the same to me. If I did something to upset him, like leave the house without him, I'd come home to find (unused) tampons scattered all over the living room. Each would have just a couple of puncture marks, so I knew he'd spent his evening walking from the master bath to the living room with just one at a time, biting down on it just for added benefit.
He had some major anxiety issues. Any time he was confronted with a new situation or change to his routine, he'd shed. And I don't mean a few hairs would fall off of his body. Years ago there was a commercial for a vacuum cleaner that showed a cat standing on a carpet and then you'd see a kind of explosion of hair and then a naked cat standing in the middle of a hair pile. With Lucky, it was kind of like that.
He'd also chew at his back until he had a huge, oozing sore, which was gross and scary at the same time. He'd lick off any ointment we'd put on it and we couldn't bandage it. I forget now how we solved the problem. He probably just found another way to work off his neurosis.
Many racers are trained on live "bait", aka other small animals. A rabbit could run right under Lucky's nose without him reacting in any way, but if he saw a cat or small, fluffy dog watch out. One year we took a trip to Okinawa and left Lucky and our other two dogs with some customers who operated an unofficial kennel. They would have 20 or more dogs staying loose at their house (which was amazingly clean with no dog odor. I wish I knew how they did it). I brought a crate to keep him away from any small, fluffy dogs that might be there, but when I arrived, I saw a cat walking around. As it turned out, they had five.
"Ummm, I didn't know you had cats," I said.
"The cats will be fine. They know how to stay away from the dogs," they answered.
Unfortunately, this was not the case. One day while they were taking Lucky out, one of the cats decided to come out and watch. Lucky snatched it and reportedly shook it in an incredibly vicious manner, killing it. We had two other dogs there at the time as well, a pair of rott-shepherd mixes who were big but still not even a year old yet. The female saw the murder and apparently thought, "so that's what those things are for!" and killed another one. A third ran away, traumatized by the death of the other two.
I found all of this out when I called home to see how things were going. Luckily, the sitters had my parents' number because they were going to take them all to the pound if no one picked them up. While I understood that they were upset by the loss of their pets, I was a bit affronted by this because it wasn't like I could just leave Japan to fix the problem.
I still find it unfair that they blamed me for this situation. In my eyes, they accepted responsibility for the care of their own and other people's animals for compensation and should have taken into account that dogs and cats are natural enemies.
Of course, when I point this out to them, I was told that it is a learned behavior for dogs to want to kill cats.
I disagree.
Every dog I have ever had, including those I've raised from puppyhood, have wanted to kick some serious cat ass. And I have never once grabbed a cat by the throat, throttled it in front of my dog, and said, "Watch this! Kill! Maim! Destroy!"
When you adopt a racer, the rescue checks to make sure you have a fenced yard. Greyhounds don't spend a lot of time running; mostly they spend their day sleeping. The problem is that if they do get loose and run, say to chase a squirrel or something, they go so fast and so far that by the time they stop, they are lost. Lucky got loose a couple of times. We'd find him when he finally got hungry and tried to go into someone's house. When we'd get him home, he'd act pissed at us for a couple of days, presumably for not finding him faster.
At one point he started messing in the house while we were gone so we put him in a crate. Unfortunately, racing dogs aren't let out of their sleeping areas when they have to eliminate so it didn't bother him to lay in his own excrement.
All these behaviors came to a head when we moved. The private school my son was attending was less than nurturing and the public school in the area was out of the question, so I started house-shopping. I spent months looking at houses in the school district we wanted and probably looked at 30 or more. Compromises needed to be made. My husband didn't get his garage and Lucky didn't get his fenced yard. And since we'd just poured all of our disposable income into buying the house, we didn't have extra money to put a fence around over an acre of property.
Lucky did not take well to his new home. He started having diarrhea every time we left the house. It got to the point where he'd hear the car and just get in the bathtub. We couldn't tie him outside because he knew how to slip out of his halter, plus he couldn't take the heat or the cold and Cincinnati has only about two weeks of that perfect spring and autumn weather.
The only back door to the house went through the white-carpeted living room, so I'd take the dogs out through the front. Lucky ran past me more than once and nearly into the traffic on the busy road in front. I was frustrated and worried for his safety and made a decision I regret to this day. We decided to find him a new home.
I found someone who worked for the vet who had a small farm and had rescued several greyhounds. It seemed like the perfect solution, until a week later when we got a call to pick him up at the vet where he was being sewn up after a fight with the other dogs.
I called the rescue where we got him and explained the problems and that we couldn't keep him any longer. They were less than sympathetic. Basically they told us we shouldn't have moved, which was pretty unreasonable of them but now I wish we'd tried longer. Where was the Dog Whisperer when we needed him?
I'll never forget the day we gave him up. We agreed to meet the volunteer in a parking lot. Lucky was so excited to be going bye-bye. He did his happy dance all over the place. He got out of the van and happily sniffed around the parking lot. Then he saw the man come up to us and his tail immediately went between his legs and his head drooped. He knew.
I cried all the way home and I'm crying as I write this. He was around 2 when we got him, he lived at our old house for at least 3 or 4 years and it's been 13 years since we moved. Greyhounds live a long time, but I'm pretty sure he's passed on by now.
I hope some day I see him at that rainbow bridge so I can tell him I'm sorry.
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