Transcript
This is Bits & Peaces. I'm Dan Slone. Welcome to Dan's Tiki Bar.
I’m going to be telling stories about dogs today. I've told some stories about cats. Stories about dogs are typically more anecdotes than stories, but I'll tell a few today.
The first dog that Martha and I got was named Shylock. And Shylock, we brought to the farm right after we got the farm as a little puppy. We named him Shylock because I had grown up in a family that raised collies and they named all the collie puppies after Shakespearean characters, so Shylock was called Shy on our farm.
I decided to buy a collie that was black with a white mane instead of the usual Lassie-colored collies because I'd read that puppy mills have been turning out too many collies and they’d made their heads smaller and smaller to get that classic narrow skull of collies and that it impacted the collie’s intelligence over time. So, I had this idea that if I reached back to the original colors of the collies, I might skip the puppy farm where they were turning out the Lassie-looking dogs.
Well, that experiment failed. Shy was not smart. He was afraid of thresholds. We would have a fence line and a gate that he was supposed to walk through, and he was afraid to cross over the threshold. He was afraid to come from room to room because of the thresholds. He also had some impulse control challenges.
We got him some training and as part of the training, they work to make sure that he would respond to a command when he wasn’t supposed to eat something. So, the idea was they would hold a hot dog in front of him, and he was not allowed to eat the hot dog until they said go and he could not do this. If he looked at that hotdog, he would eat it. So what he did, he was a good dog, was he would not look at the hotdog, he'd look over here until you say go, but if you’d move the hot dog over here, he'd look over here. As long as he wasn't looking at the hotdog, he'd be okay. And then when you’d say go, he’d scarf down the hot dog. I taught him to play Frankenstein, and the idea in this game was I would stiffen my legs hold, my arms out, and I’d slowly walk toward him, and he’d do the same thing. He’d stiffened his legs and he’d walk toward me with this stare. We did it for about a year and then he forgot how to do it.
He was a good dog and he was good with children. My daughter Amanda would play with him when he was a young dog. She was a little girl and she’d just fall on him, just flop down on him and grab his fur and pull on his ears, and he never growled, never complained. He would just start licking her and he'd lick her and lick her and lick her until she'd start giggling and go away and leave him alone. She actually learned to walk holding onto his tail. As he’d walked by, she’d grab his tail and that would help pull her up and she’d learned to walk that way.
One of my favorite stories about Shy though occurred one winter. He was an adult and, I had decided, because it was this big snow and I grew up in Florida, I’d never walked around in a great big snow and just enjoyed the silence after the snowfall. It was a pretty day. It was a bright blue sky, fairly deep snow. So I decided to go out and I'm going to take my dog with me. I’m going to take my Collie and he's going to break the snow in front of me, and we're going to have a grand adventure.
So we start out, and it starts out exactly as I've described it. He’s in front of me, he's jumping through the snow, breaking it up. I'm walking along behind him and that goes for about maybe a hundred feet and then he decides he doesn't like being first. He doesn't like that problem with breaking up the snow so I have to go first, which is fine. I start along and he's following behind me and then apparently his feet got really cold, and he’d just lay down and he wouldn't walk anymore. He wouldn't walk back to the farmhouse. He wouldn't walk forward. He was just gonna lie there and apparently just die there in the snow. So I had to pick him up and carry him back to the farmhouse, which I did. Brought him back, put him down. When his feet warmed up, he was fine. I talked to Tim, our friend the veterinarian and Tim says, “Oh, yeah, that's what collies do. If they ever get hurt, they decide well, I'm done for, I'm dead. And they Just lie down and often they die because they're sure that this is the end of the world. So he got cold, and decided that was the end of him, and just laid down.”
We ended up getting another dog. Like many of the animals on the farm, this was a foundling. My wife was walking down the road that our farm was on and a little boy ran up to her and asked her if she would take this puppy. He said, “His name is Whiskers and he's part of a litter and my dad says he's going to shoot them all if they're not gone. And I love this puppy, and I want him to have a home and Martha took the puppy, Whiskers, and said, “Alright, well, but I can find homes for the other puppies. So don't let your dad shoot them. If they need to be found homes, I'll do it.” and she brings Whiskers home.
Whiskers was a mutt but very, very smart. And unfortunately, he was one of those dogs who would get bored. He was so smart he would get bored and Martha and I were working and away during the day. And probably the most memorable thing that Whiskers did was, one day while we were away, he peeled all of the wallpaper off of the kitchen and then ate the plaster beneath that.
Martha and I moved from the farm and moved into Suburbia, and we ended up getting another couple of foundlings, Molly, and Maggie. Molly and Maggie were a kind of poodle mixes. They were small dogs, and they barked a lot. And one of the ordinances in our county said that, if you had three or more dogs, you had to get a kennel license. And I didn't want to get a kennel license. So whenever anybody would ask us what kind of dogs those were, we would answer, “They're not dogs. They're barking weasels.” And, you know, if they were dogs, we’d have to get a license, but fortunately, they were barking weasels, and we didn't need to have a license for them.
It wasn't too long after we'd had them that we ended up getting Kona. Kona was a golden retriever puppy and we named him Kona because we’d just got back from Hawaii. And when he was there and Molly and Maggie were there, we were still kind of normal people. We were people with dogs, but we weren't dog people yet.
Molly and Maggie, though, passed away pretty quickly. Through some unfortunate accidents, they passed away, and all of a sudden Kona was by himself, and we didn't think that was good. Dogs are pretty much pack animals, and he needed a pack, and so we crossed this line. We allowed him to come on into the rest of the house. He wasn't kept in the sunroom at night.
We let him come in the rest of the house and just live with us, and he decided that his pack was people and that he was pretty much a people too. And he was a great dog. He was great fun. He got to be about a hundred pounds and part of what he did was if the cats were fighting, we had a bunch of cats, he’d go and break it up. He wouldn't tolerate that behavior and he’d do it gently without hurting anybody, but he’d definitely break up a cat fight. If Martha or I were sad or angry, he would come and comfort us. He'd be right there until we’d calm down, or were able to recover. And if we were happy, he'd come to play and he was just full of joy, full of happiness. He was a great dog to have around.
I was in a meeting once in a nonprofit, and one of the people who was really important in the nonprofit proposed that we should have a dog on the board. I immediately nominated Kona and it passed. So Kona served on the board of a nonprofit for several years and his avatar, at least the picture of Kona and Kona’s voice broke up several fights along the way, sort of keeping to his character.
After Kona was probably middle-aged, we were joined by another dog. And again, that dog was a foundling. This time, my youngest daughter Joss brought this beagle puppy home.
Her room was downstairs. She brought this beagle puppy into her room, and she had this notion that she would be able to raise this beagle puppy without us knowing it was there. It took about a day and a half before her bigger sister convinced her that this idea wasn't really going to work out and that we would figure out there was a puppy living in our house, and so she should go ahead and introduce the dog to us. So she brought in this poor little dog, just a puppy and it worms and it had some skin condition. I didn't really want a beagle in the house. I'd had a bad experience with a beagle when I was young. I was responsible for it and it barked all the time and it got into lots of trouble. I really didn't want beagle in the house. So I said, “Well, let's find a home for it.” And indeed one of our neighbors said that she would take the beagle.
But she left for Japan for a couple of weeks, and we needed to go ahead and get this beagle healthy. So, we did, and as I expected that process of getting the beagle healthy in our house meant that we bonded with her, and she became a family member. She and Kona got along great, and we named her Bella because we’d just gotten back from Italy. Bella was wonderful, actually. She sold me on beagles as house pets. She had a great sense of humor.
When she was little, she would play with Kona. She was fearless in doing it. I mean, he towered over her, a hundred pounds of golden retriever. And this little beagle puppy, she would play tug-of-war with him and he was very gentle with it. And he would lean back and pick her up off the ground so that she was dangling at the end of the rope that they were playing with and he'd slowly spin her back and forth. Just swinging her back and forth over there and then lower back to the ground. She held on the whole time. She loved this game. She thought it was great.
If anybody ever told you that dogs don't have a sense of humor, that animals don't have a sense of humor,you really do need to avoid that person because they don't know what they're talking about. Dogs have a wonderful sense of humor, as do cats as I pointed out in some of my previous stories, but Bella loved to shove one of her toys under a shelf or a chair or something and then just bay. “Oh my goodness. My toy is beyond my reach just bay and bay and bay until you came over and got her toy for and gave it back to her. And then she would watch you as you walked away and when you got a certain distance, she'd shove it back under there and start begging again. She just thought this was a great game. She was a great source of amusement and fun and comfort. She too was a family member for her very long life.
And I've read that, in the old days, people would get pets, particularly dogs, for their children, and there were several reasons for them, but part of it was for the socialization that would give the children. It would give them responsibilities. They'd be responsible for another living creature, but particularly with the dogs, that the dogs would teach them loyalty. They teach them love, because dogs give an amazingly unconditional love, and they would teach them play. And these lessons were particularly important for little boys growing up, but all children learned from the animals that they had contact with. Over the years, we found that our cats had tons of personality. But in the end, our joy and our comfort came and our companionship came from our dogs.
Thank you for joining me. And I'll see you next time here on Bits & Peaces. Bye!
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