The Little Bear Dog Blog

I read a lovely book the other day ‘Give a dog a home’ by Graeme Sims. In it he talks about his 14 (yes, 14!) collies and how one, despite being adopted many years ago, still on occasion throws him a look that says ‘I knew it was too good to last.’ Now, I’m as soft as they come when it comes to animals, but do they really think like that? Don’t we envy dogs for their wonderful ability to live in the now?

I might have dismissed his interpretation, had it not been for Annie’s reaction yesterday. Still under vets orders for her cruciate ligament, she’s confined to lead walks only in the hope that the rest will avoid the need for surgery. The cold seems to aggravate it too and as temperatures hit the ‘seriously past funny’ point yesterday I popped her in the car during my lunch hour and drove her to the pet shop to buy her a coat.

Annie’s a wonderfully happy-go-lucky looking dog but she wears her anxiety as clearly as her delight and getting into the car without Little Bear was the first thing to furrow her brow. No Bear usually means she’s not going somewhere fun and if she could have placed a bet I suppose her money would have been on a trip to the vet.

Normally sprawled on the back seat, her worried little face filled my rear view mirror for the whole trip. Now we’re in the very lucky position of having three great pet shops within about a 2 mile radius, two of them independents too. Being a dog addict I already knew that they didn’t have the type of coat I wanted in the two we visit most often and so we headed to the third, which also happens to be a boarding and quarantine kennels.

Her face as I opened the car door was everything that Sims had described. Maybe it was the barking from the kennels all around us, the strange surroundings or the cacophony of stress hormones and smells I can only imagine were wafting through the air, but Annie was suddenly frozen to the back seat. Most tellingly, as I fiddled with her harness clip, a job normally made all the more fiddly by her enthusiasm to get wherever we’re going, there was no thumping tail no eagerness to get out. She crossed the car park low and slow – poor darling, despite my chipperness she obviously didn’t have a good vibe about this.

On opening the door to the pet shop it was as if a rather large Labrador sized penny suddenly dropped! Instantly transformed, she bounced like it was an Olympic sport (not great for her cruciate!) wagged up a storm and mouthed my hand excitedly. This was one relieved looking dog!

Our need to feel like ‘rescuers’ often makes us see things that maybe just aren’t there. How many owners of rescue dogs just can’t help but share their dogs sad story with all and sundry?  I’m sure if their dogs could talk a few would say something along with ‘Jeez, dad, will you let it go? I’ve so moved on now!’

We project emotions onto our dogs and imagine them entertaining feelings that in all honesty, I hope they don’t have the capacity to feel.  But it’s also easy to forget that it’s probably going to take months if not years for Annie to feel fully settled and relax in the knowledge that this is her forever home now and that we are people that she can trust.