Last week I attended a conference out of town (it was put on by the Shelter Playgroup Alliance, very cool stuff). For several reasons, I brought Boone, the latest addition to our family (my husband is fine with taking care of our adult dogs, but he’s a little inattentive for the constant supervision required for destruction prevention by a five-month-old puppy, and also, because my go-to puppy-sitting friend attended the conference, too!). Boone handled himself like a champ and benefitted from a lot of terrific socialization opportunities from a very educated, dog-friendly group of people.

Here’s the one thing that stopped my heart for a minute: Receiving a text from a friend that said, “Doing ok? Fire.”

You’d have to be living under a rock to be unaware of the fact that the entire Western U.S. is experiencing a years-long drought, which has been contributing to longer and ever-more destructive wildland fires. Historically, the so-called “fire season” in California has been considered to be about July through October. But it seems to start earlier every year and last longer; the devastating Camp Fire of 2018 (located in my county) started on November 8! This is the fire that seared onto my brain the need for pet owners to prepare for emergencies (I wrote about my experiences helping evacuated animals here, here, and here.)

When I’m home, I monitor various new sources for any alerts about fires in my county, not only so that I can respond appropriately to a fire in our immediate area, but also so I can respond quickly to serve as a volunteer for the emergency animal response organization in our area (the North Valley Animal Disaster Group [NVADG]). I follow Cal Fire and several of its local sub-accounts on Twitter, starting with the one that serves my area, Cal Fire Butte Unit. There is also a Facebook page, Butte Wx Spotter, that quickly posts any sort of fire, flood, or another environment-based disaster in my area.

But when I’m at a conference, I don’t look at my phone nearly as often, so I didn’t see any of these pages lighting up with news about a fire that started less than 12 miles from my home. Ack! Twelve miles is nothing in a strong wind-driven fire. 2020’s North Complex fire traveled more than 20 miles in a few hours, prompting our evacuation at 11 pm.

Fortunately, because I do follow all of those sources, I was able to quickly ascertain that while the fire was relatively close to my home, Cal Fire responded quickly and forcefully enough to squash it within a few hours.

The event has put me on full alert for the rest of the summer – and hit me over the head with a reminder that I had not prepared a “go bag” that would have been accessible to my husband had he needed to evacuate from our property with our two adult dogs. I know from past experience, both as a person who has had to evacuate from our property in the middle of the night due to a fast-moving fire, and as someone who volunteers with NVADG  caring for pets who were evacuated from other fires, that having a go-bag ready to grab at a moment’s notice can make a huge difference to one’s peace of mind in case of an evacuation. For example, if my husband had to evacuate with our dogs, but left Otto’s pain medications behind, our poor old guy would be in serious discomfort until we could get refills. If we had to board the dogs somewhere because our house burned down, or show proof of vaccination to stay in a shelter, and didn’t have the dogs’ vaccination records, we’d be stuck (especially if, as in the case of the Camp fire, many veterinary and doctor offices burned down, too, leaving people with NO health records at all!).

If I was home, I could have put the 2022 version of the go bag together in a few minutes – but explaining to my husband where everything was would have been ridiculously complicated. Lesson learned. Now that I’m safely home, I’ve put that together and showed my husband where it’s located.

What should be in your dog’s “go bag”? At a bare minimum, it should contain at least a few days’ supply of any medications he takes or might need in a high-stress situation, and copies of his vaccination records. If your dog becomes anxious in cars or in new situations, and you have a prescription for a sedative medication, I’d keep some of that medication in the go bag as well. You can also include extra collars, leashes, ID tags, and bowls, and perhaps a few cans of food (less perishable than dry food). The go bag is a great place to store your pet-first-aid kit and your dog’s muzzle if he’s a bite-risk in chaotic situations and you’ve already habituated him to wearing one.

Fires are the biggest threat in my part of the country, but floods and tornadoes are reasons for quick evacuations elsewhere. Consider this my annual reminder to GET READY!

For more information on emergency preparedness, see:

https://www.nvadg.org/how-to-be-ready-to-evacuate-with-pets/
https://www.readyforwildfire.org/prepare-for-wildfire/go-evacuation-guide/animal-evacuation/
https://www.aspcapro.org/resource/travel-bag-download-pet-evacuations-plus-disaster-shareables
https://www.americanhumane.org/blog/this-june-prepare-for-your-pets/

The news that I’m keeping my former foster puppy is leaking out. I loved him from the get-go, when I agreed to foster him for my local shelter, back at the beginning of March. The reason I didn’t just immediately decide to keep him was that I wanted to give my senior dog, Otto, extra consideration. No old dog should have to spend his or her last days being harassed by a rambunctious puppy – or perhaps a slightly disrespectful one.

But as it turns out, though 14 ½-year-old Otto doesn’t particularly like Boone (the new puppy’s name), he doesn’t seem to mind him, either. He mostly ignores most other dogs, just as he did with Woody, my six-year old dog, when he was a puppy. The difference is, Boone has another playmate: Woody! As much as Otto ignores Boone, Boone ignores Otto, and focuses all his love and mischievousness on the younger dog.

The one time Boone and Otto are ever proximate is when I work with Boone on good-manners behaviors. As soon as Otto sees someone getting treats for sits, downs, or stays, he comes a-running to get in on the fun. When he was younger, he’d be the first to hit the floor on the “sit” and “down” cues, like the smarty-pants kid, jumping out of his chair to raise his whole arm, frantic to let the teacher know he knows all the answers to all the questions the teacher asks the class. Today, he crashes our “classes” to demand treats – but often doesn’t even bother hitting the sits or downs! He’s playing the “senile old man” card a lot – and, because of his arthritis, I let him get away with it, most of the time. As long as he waits his turn and doesn’t interrupt the pup’s learning, he “earns” many treats for just being his usual handsome self.

As this spring warms into summer, Otto spends most of the day in his shady sandbox, which we keep nice and damp for him. He’s been insisting on spending a lot of his nights out there, too. I’m not crazy about him being out all night – especially since we have coyotes and even mountain lions in our neck of the edge-of-town woods, but if I’m to get any sleep whatsoever myself, I have to give in and let him go outdoors. Otherwise, starting uncannily close to 2 a.m. every night, he will pace and pant and escalate into whining and even barking, insisting to go outside. If I let him out and make him come right back inside after relieving his bladder, I will get maybe an hour’s peace before he starts with the pacing and panting all over again. This is torture for me; I start feeling crazy with lack of sleep myself! So I give in, and he gets to stay outside – usually until around five a.m., when he’ll bark to be let back in.

I do have an outdoor pen that I could lock Otto in. He’d be outdoors, but protected from any potential predators. But no; that’s not his jam. I’ve tried it, and he just barks in protest. He knows how to accept being locked in the pen and wouldn’t dream of barking rudely during the day, but at night, he’s a different and fairly unreasonable old dog. He wants to be out patrolling the property (or surveilling from the sandbox). He’s going to make us all miserable if he doesn’t get what he wants at night. So he gets it, as scary as this is for me.

Boone and Woody sleep right through all of this letting Otto in and out. Thank goodness! If we had one more insomniac in the house, I don’t know what I’d do.

During much of the day, Boone shadows Woody, his idol. He sleeps with Woody (often, on Woody), and takes his cues about what to do when they see people passing our house from Woody (run to the fence, barking, and then run back to me, wherever I am, for treats!). He brings toys to Woody, inviting play, and when Woody isn’t interested in playing tug or chase games, he’ll kill time by laying on or near the big dog and chewing very gently on Woody’s ears! It’s the weirdest thing! Woody lets him do it; these days, his ears are almost always a little crunchy with dried Boone saliva.

Boone does spend a little time on his own, exploring our property. He likes to play with a toy I’ve hung from the bottom of my grandson’s tree swing; he’ll grab the toy and run with it as far as the rope will go, and then turn and tug furiously, lifting his front feet off the ground, then dropping it and watching it swing away from him, chasing it, and starting all over again.

He also plays this game with the tree on our front lawn. My husband doesn’t like the willow-like hanging branches, so we allow him to go ahead and do a little trimming.

Here’s a video of Boone playing with the trees.

I make Boone spend a little time in the outdoor pen during the day. It’s where he gets to enjoy chewing on pizzles, licking toys stuffed with canned food and frozen or Lickimats slathered with peanut butter. He’s doing great with these short (maybe an hour-long), daily confinement/alone-time practice sessions.

It’s definitely harder to give each one of my three dogs individual attention, and I think maybe it’s Woody who is getting the short end of the stick. Because Boone adores him so much, he is forced to babysit, and while he clearly enjoys having someone to play with sometimes, at other times, he looks sort of glum. I imagine he’s saying, “When is this twerp leaving?” When that happens, I call my friend Leonora, to see if Woody can visit her and her little dog Samson, and enjoy some spoiling time free from puppy spit.

It seems to be working out.

I follow three or four local “lost and found pet” groups on Facebook. These are places where people in the community can post photos of dogs they’ve lost or found, and where neighbors can come together in the comments to offer suggestions to both distraught owners of lost dogs or overwhelmed dog finders. These sites can be invaluable for reuniting pets and owners, as members tend to be the kind of people who pay attention and remember any stray or needy animals they’ve seen.

When I have found a stray dog, it’s helpful to already belong to these groups, so I can quickly submit a “found dog” post. Usually, nonmembers of these groups can’t post to them; generally, you have to wait for a moderator to approve of your membership in the group before you can post – and sometimes it takes a moderator a day or more to respond to your request to join the group! As an already-approved member of these groups, I’ve had responses that helped locate the owners of the dog or dogs I found within an hour!

That’s the good news. The bad news is that these groups can also be a place where people with animal-related problems blame others in the community for those problems, look for other people to solve their problems for them, and bash anyone in the helping professions who fail to help. Animal control officers who fail to materialize immediately, shelters that are overcrowded, and veterinarians who fail to go to any lengths to save the lives of injured stray animals often get singled out for shaming and blaming. I try hard not to read those posts – and have to try even harder, sometimes, to not to respond to them!

Well, I failed utterly the other day. Here was the post that caught my eye:

The post reads:

“I felt compelled to write this post and share something sad that happened this afternoon on XXXXX Road. My neighbor called me to say he found a chocolate lab in front of his house that had been hit by a car. I immediately rushed over and the owner was there. The dog was seriously injured but still alert. Both the front and back legs were broken. They had already called several places without success. No one was willing to come out and euthanize her (XXX).

“Most disturbing too (stet) me was discovering the XXXXXXX Veterinary Hospital (my neighbor had been taking their animals too (stet) for the past 30 years  (not even a minute up the street) had refused to help. I decided to call the hospital myself hoping that a second house on their street would convince them of the urgency. This poor baby had been out there suffering for over an hour at this point. I was told everyone was with clients and they would call me back. I let them know this animal was a patient of theirs and in immediate need and I was certain their clients would be willing to wait 10 minutes if they knew it meant the end to an animals (stet) misery. Unfortunately this did not help. The animal had to be lifted into the back of a truck by the neighbors (stet) son. More pain and unnecessary suffering.

“The lack of care for the animals entrusted to them in their own community is appalling and unacceptable. I refuse to take my sweet girls XXXX and XXXX their (stet) in the future. 

“My heart breaks for XXXXXX and her parents”

Within hours, there were more than 100 comments from people who were promising to never bring business to the named vet clinic and, what’s more, stating that they would be leaving the vet clinic a bad review.

I don’t know the veterinarian at that clinic personally, but I have a friend who takes all of her pets there – and my friend has encouraged me to bring my dogs there if my vets are ever unavailable, because even though this clinic is farther away than the clinics I currently patronize, my friend finds that the vet and support staff there to be uniquely kind and competent, and the wait times not bad. Through my friend (and a quick review of the clinic’s website to be certain), I’m aware that this clinic has one doctor working there. And now there are hundreds of people in our community being told that this doctor is heartless and inhumane, because she didn’t leave her patients on a moment’s notice in order to run down the street and euthanize a dog on the side of the road. Argh!

Social media can do so much good, especially when it’s bringing people together to accomplish something for those in need. Why do so many people insist on using it for negativity?

I’ve taught both of my grown-up dogs several positions where they will be rewarded for holding still while I – or, importantly, a stranger such as a vet or vet tech – examines them. They both will lay flat and hold still, or stand and do a “chin rest” (where they press their chin in my hand) and hold still. But the desired behavior is not just “remaining still no matter what”; the “cooperative care” piece of this behavior is a sort of deal: they hold still so that I (or someone else) can touch and examine them, but if they lift their heads, the touching and/or exam must stop immediately. It’s the “deal” you make with them, and what I  – like most people who teach this behavior – have found, is that once they learn that they have control over the procedure – they can stop the exam at any moment by lifting their head – they feel more confident about going along with it.

We explained and showed you how to teach cooperative care behaviors in “Cooperative Care: Giving Your Dog Choice and Control” (WDJ February 2021).

However, I’ve been remiss in working with Boone, the name we’ve finally given to the “foster puppy” who has been here since early March. (I guess this is also an adoption announcement!) Something I’ve observed about him since he’s been here: He hates people looking at his teeth!

Checking a puppy’s teeth before he’s 6 months old is the best way to estimate his age, as the “puppy teeth” all start falling out when the pup is around 4 months old, are usually all gone by about 5 months, and have all newly erupted incisors (the little front teeth), canines (the “fangs”), and premolars (the ones just behind the canines) by about 7 months. (The molars generally take a little longer to erupt, but this varies a lot by the size of the dog.)

Ever since was brought into my local shelter as a “stray,” people have been lifting his lips and trying to figure out his age. He was a lot larger and bigger-boned than the litter of 11 puppies that were brought into the shelter on the same day; the staff judged him to be about 8 weeks old, just based on size, but his demeanor and lack of coordination made him seem much younger. To try to get a better read on his age, shelter staff members (and I!) kept trying to look at his teeth – and he’d struggle every time! And every time, I’d say, “Oy! I have to work on that behavior!”

Now I’m paying the price for having not yet taken the time to work on it.

Yesterday, while wrestling and playing tug-of-war with Boone and Woody on our trampoline (a favorite place for this), I heard Boone screech when he and Woody’s mouths bumped as they jostled for the same toy. The next time in the game when he came to sit in my lap, I tried to gently put my hands on Boone’s muzzle, so I could try to see if he had something wrong – a wood splinter or plastic chunk stuck in his teeth, or a foxtail jammed in his gums, perhaps. He could even have a snake bite or something else really serious hiding under that adorable beard! But as I went to lift his lips, he screeched again and dodged away from me. Uh oh; something definitely wrong going on in there. Now I have to look, and we have no agreement or understanding about how this is going to get done.

This is one of those times when it would be easy to permanently damage my relationship with the pup, or advance his reluctance to have his mouth examined into full-scale aggressive resistance.

Instead, I spent more than an hour, in five-minute sessions over the course of the evening and well into the night, working with Boone to teach him a chin rest (that went very quickly – he got it almost immediately) and to hold that chin rest while I touched his upper lip. That made him a little frustrated, because he is very food-motivated, but he also does not want to tolerate any pressure on his upper lips at all.

As we practiced, I was able to determine that he didn’t have any obvious bite marks or wounds on the outside of his face, and given his ability to take treats and chew his dinner kibble, I surmised that he didn’t have anything seriously wrong with his mouth. I suspected – from our previous estimates of his age – that he lost one of those canines; it might have even been torn out during his raucous games of tug with Woody. So I didn’t push for a more complete exam.

But this morning, we went back to the drawing board, and after another half-dozen, several-minute sessions, I was finally able to get Boone to stay still and allow me to lift his upper lip enough to confirm my suspicion: He has a (relatively) big gaping hole where his top left canine used to be. The other canines are all still firmly in place, so he likely lost that one a little prematurely, leaving the gum very sensitive.

I’m glad that’s all it is – but I’m definitely going to commit to daily sessions of the cooperative care “Bucket Game” from here on out. I don’t want the next medical crisis to precipitate a behavioral one.