My Best Friends Have Hairy Legs (10 page)

When I finally got the courage to leave that marriage, it still took me a long time to reach a place where I felt totally confident in myself again. I had to learn to stop questioning myself and second guessing everyone else’s intentions. I had to learn to trust again. Unfortunately, just when I finally reached a point of trusting again, I trusted too much and Marc took advantage of that.

As much as I was hurting from Marc’s deceit, I knew that I needed to focus on getting Trooper to trust men again. While his other fears had diminished, it was crucial that he regain confidence in men again, and that was something I knew would take a lot of patience. He had already gotten used to the men who worked at the day care center that he and Tink went to occasionally. Now I needed to get him used just being able to walk down the street or be in the neighborhood without being afraid of unfamiliar men.

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HAPTER
9

Trust and Respect

Trust is something that is often first given freely and then when lost has to be earned. I knew that getting Trooper to trust men again was going to be a slow and patient process. “Going to school” and “getting a job” would boost his confidence. Positive reinforcement would help to calm his fears. But getting him to trust men again wasn’t going to be so easy.

Using the day care as a start, I asked that he be handled by as many different men as possible and not just the women that worked at the kennel. I wanted him to learn to trust different men in a familiar and friendly setting.

Next I started to introduce him to men who lived near me by throwing parties for my neighbors. I didn’t push him on anyone, but would let him reach his own comfort level for approaching someone. I started telling him in advance if there were going to be men in the house. I was getting some long overdue house repairs done and so each time would talk him through everything that was going to happen before the repairman would arrive. As much as possible I used the same repairman for all my work so that he could establish a consistent trust with them. Paul does excellent work, and over time Trooper began to trust him enough to be able to go up to him when he needed to go for a walk. Fortunately Paul is understanding and patient enough to stop his work and actually take him for a walk!

But as much as Trooper has come to trust Paul, he still has trouble trusting some of his helpers. They have done work for me off and on over the last few years, and each time Trooper sees one man in particular he will bark at him and not let him approach him. For whatever reasons, Trooper doesn’t trust him, and while I have not yet formed my own opinion of him, I do respect Trooper’s feelings and won’t force the issue with him.

Trust and respect. Two very key elements in any relationship. Trooper has come so far in his recovery from the abuse because he trusted me, he knows that I trust him, and he knows that I respect him enough to know his boundaries and to let him stay within his comfort zones. When we had been approached by any men in the past—familiar or unfamiliar—Trooper would bark and run or stand behind me if he was on the lead. Now he recognizes familiar men with a wagging tail and an eagerness to greet them. Unfamiliar men are greeted with defensive barking that warns them to stay back unless I tell him it is o.k. and introduce them. He continues to put himself between me and any man, and there are only a few neighbors and friends that he is relaxed enough around to be able to wander into another room to nap while we talk. When he does bark at anyone now—man or woman—I respect his instincts and keep distance between us. While I have never had to test the limits that are part of his “job” to protect me, the other pets and the house, there has been only one time when someone else was foolish enough to test him.

Not long after his training I took him one afternoon to the dog park. For a while we were the only ones in the park, and then a woman and her dog arrived. Her dog was semi-aggressive toward me and so I moved to put a bench between us. He soon lost interest and went to the far side of the park. His owner, however, did not follow him and Trooper began barking at her. For reasons I will never understand the woman began to taunt him, calling him names and lunging at him repeatedly. Trooper would bark, back off, and bark again, but each time she lunged at him I noticed that he was becoming more and more agitated and aggressive and the space between them was closing. Both of them were ignoring my request for her to stop and for him to sit and stay. I had never seen him so angry and so defensive and it was starting to scare me. He was baring his teeth and every hair on his body was standing up. I decided it was time for us to leave before he actually attacked her (although a part of me felt she deserved it) and after a very frustrating time when I came close to just decking the woman myself to keep her from continuing to taunt Trooper, I got him back on the leash and we left the park. I immediately complained to the park owners and it was a long time before I took him back. But as a result of that showdown, I have no doubt that he will do whatever he feels is necessary to protect me.

Recently a friend and former neighbor, Ashley, stopped by to visit when she was in town. She has two dogs, Ziggy, a dachshund, and Lily, a terrier mix she rescued in Italy. When she had been a neighbor they all often came over to visit so we sometimes had a house full of dogs with Tink, Trooper, Lily, Ziggy and Ripkin. After we talked for a while she asked me what I had done to Trooper. I was confused. She hadn’t seen him in almost two years, and so when she last saw him he was at the peak of his fears and insecurities. For me, the improvements in him were gradual and subtle. But when she saw him, she said it was like night and day. He seemed happier and relaxed. That was the best thing I could have heard.

By helping Trooper … I’ve been helped as well. In the process of both of us learning to trust again, we have opened our hearts to love again.

The funny thing about love is that you can’t have love without heartbreak. Otherwise, how would you know love when it arrived? Without the rain, we cannot have rainbows. The same is with love. Without sadness, we cannot know joy, and all too often we forget that the unconditional love and joy our pets bring us sometimes comes with a responsibility to accept sadness.

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HAPTER
10

Love

This will be—is—and was a hard chapter to write. You’ve probably picked up on the past tense reference I’ve used when talking about Tink, so you already know how it ends. Unfortunately, the tense changes were recent. When I started writing this book, she was still running to greet me every day when I came home from work, or bossing me around when she thought I had spent too much time on the computer. She was still squeaking with excitement as we drove to day care, coming home exhausted to snore at my feet or on my lap as we all crowded onto the sofa to watch TV. The pain of losing her is still fresh. An open wound. Both Trooper and I miss her terribly. When she passed I had to put this aside for a few weeks because I had just started to write this chapter… with a happier ending in mind.

But it is a chapter that I have to write because Tink was—and is—a huge part of Trooper’s story. And mine. She was a part of our healing and if we hadn’t known her sweet face and happy tail we would have missed out on so much. The unconditional love she gave to both of us was so much more than what most of us probably ever experience. So go grab a box of Kleenex—I’ve already got two boxes here—and I’ll tell you about the strongest and bravest pug I’ve ever met.

While I was working so hard to restore Trooper’s confidence, I was also doing everything I could to try to ease Tink’s pain and health issues. When she was about a year old, I noticed that she was urinating more often and that it was orange tinged or bloody and so took her to the vet. She had a bladder infection, what would turn out to be the first of many. Antibiotics cured the infection, but then she started passing bladder stones when she urinated—sometimes as large as the nail on my little finger—and always without even a cry of pain. Analysis of the stones showed that they were Struvite Uroliths and an x-ray showed that her bladder was almost completely full of them, requiring surgical removal in March, a year after I had gotten her. Her recovery took about two months before she really acted like herself again, and she was put on a prescription diet after the surgery to discourage formation of new ones, but that unfortunately was not successful. By December she was again passing stones and had a bladder infection. X-rays again showed that her bladder was completely full of stones and another surgery was done, this time with a longer recovery. A blood test revealed that she had liver shunts and her blood was not being fully detoxified which was contributing to the stone formation. It was a condition that did not have a high surgical recommendation because of how extensive the surgery could be with limited positive outcome. They wouldn’t know what they were looking at as far as repairs until they actually got in there, and there may not be any possible fixes depending on whether or not her shunts were congenital or had formed later. Most puppies born with congenital liver shunts didn’t live long, and she was now over two years old. At that time I made the decision not to subject her to another surgery and started to look at alternatives.

I gave her only distilled water to drink to avoid the minerals and chemicals in tap water. She stayed on a low protein prescription diet until she started to put on more weight from the high carbohydrates and so I started researching organic foods, trying everything I could to reduce her weight gain, but still try to help avoid stone formation. The vet told me that when her blood reached toxic levels, she would begin to have seizures, dementia and would become emaciated. I figured that her extra weight gave her a little bit of an edge to give me more time to find a way to help her. I started taking her to day care more often to give her more exercise and avoid the couch potato pug bottom we were both starting to have. At day care I learned that she stayed active all day, running and defending “the hill” with one of her rat pack buddies. She would come home exhausted, often falling asleep in the car, and would snore loudly until I woke her when we got home or took her up to bed.

As she got older, she got slower. Arthritis was developing in her hips and spine, and she also had severe dysplasia in one hip. When she began to limp on a front leg, x-rays showed arthritis in her elbow and shadows that could possibly indicate developing tumors.

But in spite of all the pain she must have been feeling from the persistent bladder stones, frequent bladder infections and arthritis she never whined or cried, and never slowed down. I started to have to limit how often she went to day care, taking her only once or twice a week with a few days between just so that her joints could rest and her limping would be less pronounced. She would be furious when Trooper and I left without her and I could hear her angry barks as the garage door closed behind us. When we returned at the end of the day, however, all was forgiven and we were showered with pug snot and kisses.