The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout (12 page)

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Authors: Jill Abramson

BOOK: The Puppy Diaries: Raising a Dog Named Scout
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Meanwhile, a number of dog owners had moved
beyond the arguments about which purchased foods are best. They passionately espoused cooking for their pups using some of the same foods—such as chicken, fish, sweet potatoes, and green vegetables—that humans eat. (For these owners, there are cookbooks full of dog-friendly recipes.) Scout even had a puppy friend named Newton, also a golden, who was fed only raw food. Henry and I were intrigued enough by the raw diet to give it a try with Scout, but when we purchased the recommended product—a tube of frozen brown matter that included beef lung in the list of ingredients—neither she nor we liked the looks of it.
In the end, the concoction that Scout found tastiest was one I designed myself, a special mixture of Pro Plan and California Natural, laced with a bit of meat and vegetables from our previous night’s dinner. Soon Scout was eating again, I was cooking again, and Henry wasn’t raising any objections. Everyone was happy.
 
 
Right after the new year, I had to go on a business trip to China, and Henry—who wanted to seize the opportunity to see the country for the first time—decided to come with me. This would be our first planned separation from Scout, and since we’d be away for a
full week, we were nervous about leaving her. Fortunately, Will and his girlfriend, Lindsey, offered to dogsit for Scout, in part because they were yearning to get a puppy of their own. I wondered whether they were really up to handling a puppy in full-bore adolescence, and naturally I worried that there might be some terrible mishap while we were away. During the workday, Will would be dropping Scout off at Biscuits and Bath; would he forget to pick her up in the evening? And if Lindsey, who was even smaller than I was, took Scout out for a walk, would Scout drag her into the gutter? I didn’t share my fears with Henry, knowing that he would immediately roll out the Buddy Smothered in the Snow story.
The trip went off without a hitch, and while we were in Asia Will sent us several e-mails saying that Scout was fine. I didn’t quite trust his cheery reports, though; I expected that upon our return we would hear a few horror stories. But after we walked in the door and basked in a deluge of kisses from Scout, Will and Lindsey assured me that Scout really had behaved extremely well.
The unexpected benefit of our time away was that it opened Will and Lindsey’s eyes to the considerable responsibilities of owning a dog. “Cold reality set in the first morning,” Will admitted. He worked in the music industry and was accustomed to staying up late
at night and sleeping late in the morning. Lindsey, meanwhile, left for work by 8:30 a.m. and didn’t have time to take Scout for a walk before heading out the door. But Scout had her habits and demands too, and at 6:00 each morning there she was, up and ready to play. During that long week with Scout, Will and Lindsey realized that at this point in their lives, their schedules were incompatible with dog ownership. “We don’t want a dog less,” Will told us, “but we better understand the limitations it puts on your life.” Henry and I were glad he and Lindsey learned this lesson now, since too many people buy or adopt a dog on impulse, only to find out later that they can’t care for their pet.
As for Scout, she seemed to have enjoyed her time with Will and Lindsey. While Henry and I unpacked, Lindsey proudly urged Scout to demonstrate some new tricks she had taught her, including how to stay in a down position and how to roll over. With Lindsey clicking away, Scout seemed thrilled to show off her newly acquired routines. No longer was she a wide-eyed new pup, but she was still wonderfully teachable and eager for new experiences.
Seeing our beautiful girl again after a week’s absence gave Henry and me new confidence that we would indeed get through Scout’s adolescence. We had survived Will’s adolescence, after all, and now he was
a loving and responsible adult. In the weeks and months ahead, we needed to reclaim the patience and grit that had made it possible for us to navigate our children’s adolescent years and help them reach their full potential. We owed that to ourselves—and, more important, we owed it to Scout.
 
 
Now nine months old, Scout was the whitest golden retriever we had ever encountered—as Henry’s sister put it, she was the color of a polar bear. Except for one precious soft spot on the top of her head, her coat was wiry. She was a bit stocky, too, with powerful legs and a solid middle. And her brown eyes and long lashes were still irresistible.
When Henry and I weighed her in January 2010, we were amazed to see that Scout tipped the scales at seventy pounds, ten pounds heavier than Donna Cutler had originally guessed she would weigh. She was close to her adult size, and when we took her for a winter outing to the farm in Connecticut or to the
funky run in Manhattan, it was hard to believe that she had once been so tiny that Donna’s nickname for her, Cindy Lou, invoked the smallest creature in Dr. Seuss’s Whoville.
But though Scout looked all grown up, she was still in the early stages of adolescence, and suddenly she was gripped by a fear that wouldn’t let go. She was scared of German shepherds—all German shepherds, even friends like Viggo.
Viggo, a large, one-year-old shepherd, belonged to our friend Lee Gibson, a warm woman with red hair who had become a big dog lover in her thirties. We often saw Lee and Viggo during our walks at the farm, and when Scout was a young pup she had happily played with Viggo. Now Scout responded very differently. On those winter mornings when Viggo didn’t make an appearance at the farm, Scout jumped out of our car and ran ahead of me to greet the other dogs in the Breakfast Club, throwing snow off her fur as she galloped. But if Lee and Viggo were there, Scout stuck by my side, almost cowering. Since Scout was nearly as big as Viggo, I could not figure out why she was suddenly afraid of him.
It wasn’t just Viggo. If a German shepherd entered the funky dog run in Tribeca, Scout would instantly become wary; instead of continuing to wrestle with her friends, she would lie underneath the bench where I was sitting. When I tossed a ball for her to retrieve, she would not run after it if a shepherd was nearby. Given the popularity of the breed—German shepherds are sturdy working dogs, famous for their work with police forces and as guide dogs for the blind—we ran into them pretty frequently. They were beautiful, intelligent, extremely loyal dogs.
Scout at nine months
(James Estrin)
I vividly remembered our first encounter with Lee and Viggo at the farm the previous summer. On a beautiful Sunday morning, I saw Lee working alone with Viggo in a field, teaching him how to retrieve and then relinquish his ball. Since I was trying to get Scout to master the same skill, Scout and I watched them for a while. Lee—who was clearly an expert trainer—used a clicker to mark those times when Viggo brought the ball back and dropped it at her feet.
After about half an hour, Lee introduced herself and suggested that we let the dogs play together. As Viggo and Scout happily chased each other around the field, Lee explained that Viggo would not always be hers. He had been placed with her when he was just eight weeks old, she told me, and for the first year of Viggo’s life she would be training him to be a guide dog for the blind. In early 2009, she had volunteered at a nonprofit organization called Fidelco, which had matched her with Viggo. The organization, based in Bloomfield, Connecticut, has been training guide
dogs for the blind since the 1960s, and at the time Lee volunteered, Fidelco had more than a hundred dogs in foster homes around Connecticut.
There were ten puppies in Viggo’s Fidelco litter, all of whom were given names that began with
V
. Fidelco’s standards are extremely demanding: not all of the puppies who begin the program ultimately graduate and are matched with a blind person. If Viggo got through the first stage of training, which would end soon after he was fifteen months old, he would return to Fidelco for intensive training. Then, if he passed the final hurdles, he would be placed with a blind person. If Viggo flunked out at any stage of his training, Lee would be given the option to keep him.
Fidelco’s rules are strict and Lee added some of her own. She gave Viggo several hours of exercise a day, fed him a special raw diet, and kept him in a crate most of the time he was inside her house. Once a week, Lee and Viggo were required to attend a group class with the other pups in the
V
class. Besides exercise, the most important thing for Viggo to learn was proper socialization with people and other dogs. The farm, with its pack of playful dogs, was a perfect testing ground.
Not long after Lee and I first met, Lee noticed that Viggo would occasionally bully Scout. Lee knew Viggo’s every move; she also knew that German shepherds
as a breed are protective. Early on she had perceived that Viggo was
dog reactive
, a term she used to describe his intense reaction to unfamiliar dogs. If Viggo saw a dog he didn’t know in the distance, his hackles (the hair on the back of his neck) would rise and his ears would prick up. As Lee knew well, these are signs of watchfulness and possible aggression—or, as she put it, “a display to create a barrier.”
Viggo’s response to strange dogs—Scout included—was hardly unusual, especially for an adolescent male. But Scout was too young to read Viggo’s body language, and she did not always respect his barrier. She treated Viggo like everyone else, dog and human, rushing to greet him too impulsively. When she did, Viggo would indicate his displeasure by thrusting himself into Scout’s physical space and staring her down. This hostile behavior wasn’t at all difficult for Scout to interpret, and long before I did, Lee saw that Viggo’s bullying scared Scout quite badly.
Lee worried about Viggo’s aggressiveness because he had to be consistently calm and focused in order to be accepted into formal guide-dog training. Viggo could not pull on his leash, as Scout routinely did, whenever anything of interest—a squirrel or a blowing leaf—appeared in his field of vision. After all, a sudden pull could potentially be calamitous for a blind
person. Viggo also couldn’t act up around new people or around new dogs. Lee knew that, by nature, Viggo was both protective and sweet-tempered, which is why she worried when he suddenly became uncharacteristically aggressive.
Lee was especially bothered, she told me later, by an incident at the farm that had happened before we met her. Viggo had run over to a gentle Lab, stolen the stick in its mouth, and then nipped the Lab. That experience made Lee particularly vigilant when Viggo encountered other dogs. Often, she preferred to walk him alone, on the leash, at a state park a few miles away. But Viggo needed to be almost perfectly socialized if he was going to succeed as a guide dog, so Lee continued to bring him to the farm and monitor his behavior around Scout and the other dogs.
I didn’t understand that Viggo was bullying Scout until weeks after their first antagonistic encounters first began occurring. Even then, it took me a while longer to associate Scout’s discomfort around all German shepherds with Viggo. I, like Scout, was only just beginning to learn the skill of interpreting dogs’ social cues. Because Buddy had spent most of his time alone, patrolling our yard, I had missed out on the chance to learn about dog manners and socialization. Now, raising Scout and witnessing her behavior
in various social situations—including Marian’s backyard, the farm, Biscuits and Bath, and the funky dog run—I was learning a lot about how dogs interact.
Meanwhile, Scout’s fear of German shepherds continued to grow. In the city, she insisted on performing a thorough inspection of a dog park before entering it. She would stand for a minute or two at the fence enclosing the run, casing the joint to make sure that no shepherds lurked inside. If one appeared with its owner while we were inside the run, she would stop playing and come lie down under my legs. On the outside, she was Scout, a beautiful, nearly full-grown dog. On the inside, though, she was sometimes still Cindy Lou, a born worrier and the littlest resident of Whoville.
 
 
All dogs live with some measure of fear, and because puppies are inexperienced in the ways of the canine world, they tend to be especially susceptible to a range of anxieties. In this way, too, they are not unlike children.
Anxiety, whether in dogs or humans, is complicated and interesting, and perhaps because I grew up among a collection of lovable neurotics in New York City, I have long been fascinated by my family’s various
phobias. My sister Jane, for instance, developed a deep-seated fear of the Babar books when she was a little girl. Where previously the books had been her favorite read-aloud stories, Jane suddenly became fearful of the illustrations of a minor character, the wizened and white-haired Old Lady. Although our mother explained that the Old Lady was a good character who often came to Babar’s rescue, my sister was nonetheless petrified of her prune face and long black coat. But since she couldn’t bear the thought of putting the books away altogether, Jane instructed Mom to continue reading about Babar’s adventures but skip the pages involving the Old Lady. Not only did this on-the-fly editing prove to be a successful workaround; it also may have planted the seed of a future career, since Jane ultimately became a successful children’s book author and editor.
But Jane was hardly alone, and I had my own battles with fear when I was a girl. In the third grade, I was mercilessly bullied by a clique of alpha girls in my class. Although only nine years old, they hatched a sophisticated plan for torturing me. Pretending to be twice their age, they called Saks Fifth Avenue and an expensive butcher shop in Manhattan with instructions to deliver a number of items—including fancy clothing and several pounds of extremely costly cuts of meat—to my family’s apartment. When my mother
started receiving packages addressed to me that she hadn’t ordered, she knew something was wrong. And when a succession of little girls phoned our house, asked for me, and then collapsed into giggles before hanging up, she quickly figured out that some of my classmates were playing a mean practical joke at my expense.
It didn’t help that the miscreants were ultimately identified, because suddenly I did not want to go to school. I also developed an irrational fear that I was going to be “left back,” or not promoted to the next grade, which had happened to a classmate the year before. The mean girls were making me feel like a loser, both socially and intellectually, and though they soon moved to another target, I couldn’t keep my eyes off them during recess and lunch, terrified that they might strike again.
Years later, my own children battled phobias of their own. When Will was in first grade, he had trouble adjusting to a new school in Virginia. Though Will and I were close, he wasn’t able to admit to me that he was very anxious about this change. Each morning, when I walked Cornelia and Will to the bus stop, Will seemed eager to go to school. But once there he refused to take off his jean jacket. While the other pupils removed their coats and put them in their cubbies, Will insisted on wearing his jacket throughout the
day. His teacher Mrs. Larson knew a lot about children and wisely interpreted this as a sign that Will wasn’t happy and wanted to be prepared in case he decided to make a sudden getaway.
That September, when I came to her classroom for the ritual parent-teacher meeting, Mrs. Larson mentioned her concern about Will’s refusal to take off his jacket. This did not sound like my boy, who had always been so easygoing. After several nights of casual chatting right before he would nod off in bed, I gently broached the topic of his jacket. Out tumbled all his worries: Did the kids in his new class like him? Would he ever have friends to eat with in the lunchroom? Were his sneakers cool enough? I reassured Will that it was normal to feel scared in a new school and that he would make lots of friends, just as he always had. (I also silently reassured myself that when winter arrived his heavier parka would be too warm to wear inside.) Sure enough, Will’s fears gradually eased, and a few weeks later Mrs. Larson gave me a call to say that his jacket had come off and his troubles seemed to be over.
 
 
In all of these cases, time and a little cleverness were the best antidotes, and so it was with Scout’s shepherd
phobia. At the funky run, plenty of dogs of other breeds raced to greet Scout when she appeared in the morning. Often she was so busy running or wrestling with one dog or another that she didn’t notice when a German shepherd visited the park.
One day, a ten-year-old shepherd named Daisy entered the funky run and soon joined the fray. A few minutes later, she bowed before Scout, inviting her to play. I expected Scout to run in my direction and try to hide, but this time she didn’t. The two dogs wrestled, and when Daisy pinned Scout to the ground, Scout made her mock-ferocious wolfie face. They continued playing happily for the next ten minutes, until it was time for us to go.

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