A CHANGE OF PACE: A DOG STORY--MEETING MIRANDA

 After last week’s scolding, I think that a change of pace is in order.  I believe that most of you are almost as tired of reading (or discarding) my blogs on varieties of police force and legal community deficiencies in Las Cruces as I am of writing them.  At the risk of offending some, I am going to prune future distributions to those, public officials excepted, who I guess can accept the moral as well as the mellow of this and future dog stories.  If I guess wrongly, correct me, and accept my apologies.  All stories--some about cats, horses, and parakeets--I  take from my forthcoming book On the Same Team: Dog Owners Coaching Their Best Friends.

On March 6, 2015, Miranda and I met each other.  I was at the Animal Service Center of Mesilla Valley, the pound in Las Cruces, NM, to get a replacement license for another dog.  For a few years, I had had in the back of my mind a desire to get a female German Shepherd.  As on previous visits, while I waited for the staff to do the paperwork for the license, I went into the large-dog room with many pens to see if she was there.  She was not.  Instead, the dogs who were there either barked and whined for me to take them home or barked and growled for me to get away from their turf, with one exception.  One dog came to the front of her pen, sat, and looked at me with affectionate but appraising eyes which  unmistakably said, “you’ll do just fine.”  I looked at her and said, “I promise to try.”  While we waited on the additional paperwork, one member of the staff asked if she could take our picture; she told me that she could see something special between us.  I knelt on one knee with my arms holding Miranda snug against me; her tongue hung out—a sign of contentment—and her eyes had a different message: “I got my man.”  And I sometimes refer to her as my “girlfriend.”

 

It was love and bonding at first sight, but I checked my impulses against information in her jacket.  Miranda—I no longer recall her original name—was about a year-and-a-half old, weighed about 45 pounds, and labeled—wrongly, as I knew but kept silent—a Labrador/Shepherd mix.  She had been delivered to the pound by a middle-aged woman and her tween-age son two weeks earlier.  When I got her home, I accepted her age, knew that she was underweight, and rightly identified her breed.  At the pound, I recognized that she is a hound; at home, I identified her as an American Foxhound, a breed known in the horse-hound-hunt circles in Maryland and Virginia.  Breed characteristics are loving, sweet, gentle, energetic, and headstrong.  The word is that you do not give one of this breed a command; you make a request and hope for compliance.  Foxhounds are scenthounds (unlike Greyhounds and Whippets, who are sighthounds); when they fix on a smell, they disregard all else, commands or requests.  And, as my father would say, they can smell a small fart in a strong wind from a mile away.

From this information, I imagined Miranda’s life story to that date.  As a puppy, she was adorable and oh-mommy-please! irresistible.  Mommy was a divorcee and wanted a distraction for her son when she relocated from the Mid-Atlantic states.  Mommy went to work, sonny went to school, Miranda grew up and went to work on the apartment.  Thus, she was deposited at the pound.

Miranda was bonded to me—after all, she picked me out—and fit right into the pack at home.  To its credit, the pound had me fetch my other dogs, introduce them to her, and ensure compatibility, but I knew that all would be well.  That Friday evening and Saturday morning and evening, I walked her on a retractable leash with my off-leash dogs on the shorter loop around the floodplain and farm fields below my house.  For a moment on Sunday morning, I had her on leash until I realized that, though she did not know her new name, she would not run away off leash.  I was right and wrong.  When I unleashed her, she immediately raced off about 80 yards along the flood containment berm at the western edge of the floodplain.  There she stopped, turned to see where I was, and waited for me and the rest of the pack to continue the loop walk home.  To this day, she has her ways on walks.  Sometimes, she stays with me and the pack; sometimes, she goes off on jaunts.  Sometimes, if I sense her wanderlust, I call her to come with us; it is fifty-fifty whether she will.  Half the time, she comes along; half the time, she stops, makes it clear by look and body language that she knows what she is supposed to do but is not ready to go home, and goes off “mall shopping,” as I put it.  To save trouble for anyone who might catch her and call me, I put a tag on her collar which reads, “Let me be/Let me roam/Set me free/I’ll go home.”  She always does.

This story of Miranda and Michael has many messages and morals, but one message/moral should be clear above all others: our relationship of trust, respect, and love enables our arrangements.  I go easy on command and control, rely instead on coaching and, in her case, a bit of coaxing, and negotiate.  Within the limits of her headstrong nature, she seeks to please and comply .  We accommodate each other.  I would not change a thing about her, even if I could.