Winter

Molly was a short-haired dog with very little extra fat on her living for at least four months of the year in a cold, cold world.

Molly spent most of her first winter indoors, but, after the long slow process of finally getting her housetrained, she had to go outside, not just for purposes of elimination but for exercise, too.

What winter meant in our household, as I mentioned to Bruce one time, was months of struggling the dog into coats and boots. Molly hated these things, but not as much as she hated being wet and cold.

Molly's first set of boots - NeoPaws - that cost almost as much as people boots.

Molly sported over her sixteen years an untold number of dog coats, none of which really fit. They were always too big, too small - especially across the chest - too long or too short, even the ones that were made specially for her. There was no doubt that they kept her at least a bit warmer than she would have been naked, but naked was always Molly's favourite outfit.

Molly needed a lot of coats at one time. She as a low-slung dog in a dirty world and one walk was enough to make a coat unfit to wear until it had been washed. In 2009, I got her three lovely hand knit pure wool coats, not that she seemed all that thrilled to have them.

For a couple of years in her youth, we could actually get Molly to enjoy herself in the snow. By accident we discovered that she loved to fetch snowballs. And if snowballs weren't an option, she would happily chase after chunks of ice. I have a memory of seeing Molly in full coat and booties tearing over the frozen playing field of Jarvis Collegiate in hot pursuit of a flung ice shard. 

But that happy period didn't last too long. Boots were just too big a challenge. They would either not stay on her feet because they were not snug enough, or would be so snug that they hurt her. Snug or not, she couldn't stand having them on her feet. After many, many attempts to find the right kind of boot over several winters, we gave boots up as a lost cause. Molly didn't mind walking on clean snow, so we would carry her over the salt and slush of the sidewalks and deposit her where she could roam happily barefoot for the brief time to do her business and then we'd return to the great indoors.

Winter ran contrary to all the things Molly valued most: being naked, being warm, being dry. Every year as the weather turned cold I would carry around a small worry about the discomfort winter caused Molly. As she aged, the worry grew.

Wintertime, summer and fall, many humans concerned themselves with her well-being, not least of all her walkers.

Play

What began as a strategy to keep our young dog from destroying our home came to be a regular part of everyone's day. 

For many years, if we were doing something to amuse ourselves but not the dog (playing Civilization on the computer, say, or having a nap), Molly would nag at us -rather, nag at Bruce - until we relented, stopped what we were doing, and threw the ball for her. 

Or she would play with some other toy.

Or with some other person.

Even when Molly was well past the years where she might need to turn her unspent energy to trashing the place, Bruce played with her for about an hour every day after he came home from work. 

When we moved from our penthouse condo to a town house condo a few blocks south and east, a new dimension was added to the concept of play indoors. In the old place, we threw toys down the hall. In the new place, we threw a ball on the second floor landing, so Molly could fetch it and then push it down the stairs. She considered this to be enormous fun.

It was also a good game on the couch.

Outdoors, Molly loved tidying up parks by chasing squirrels up trees. On nice Sundays we would oblige her and go over to Queens Park or the Allan Gardens; we never let her off the leash in those parks, so Bruce would have to pelt after her like mad when she was in hot pursuit of a squirrel. 

Playing with the dog was the best of all the good parts of having her in our lives. Grown ups without children don't have many opportunities to enter that boundless but protected realm of pure play, where all effort is directed at simple enjoyment. There's no accomplishment; there are no consequences; it's just fun.

To read how Molly managed to play in winter, click here.

Vigilance

Molly and her crate

In the same category as "don't overfeed the dog" was "don't feed her from the table". The spoiled dachshunds I grew up with got more people food than they should have and too often they got it handed to them by people seated at a meal. So of course the family dogs begged at the table and whined and barked when they felt we weren't responding to their needs. 

I really didn't want my dog to do this. Molly never got a table scrap from our hands (which is not to say she never got a table scrap), but she put a few pieces together in her own mind about what we were doing up there and what it meant to her. She was never one to whine or bark or even obviously beg at the table, but she understood the rewards of constant vigilance and of the occasional foray onto the table itself.

We, on the other hand, had been confident enough in our training of the dog that while we knew not to leave things lying around on low surfaces, we thought things on the dining room table were safe. As a failsafe, we always pushed the chairs in under the table, thinking that not even Molly could jump that high. For more than three years, this method worked. 

But that all changed one fateful night when we had a friend over for drinks and snacks before going out to dinner. In the rush of details before leaving, I absent-mindedly left two small bowls on the coffee table with some roasted red pepper dip and some hummus in them.

When we returned from our night out, I saw the small bowls and remarked to myself how very, very clean they were. Of course the dog had gotten on the coffee table and scarfed up the leftovers.

As was so often the case with our understanding of the dog, we underestimated the meaning of Molly's having broken the table top barrier. It seemed like a one-time event for us. We would just make sure not to leave anything on the coffee table again. 

For Molly, it was the opening of a frontier....

For the first three years we had Molly, I worked at home and she slept with us, so we had not used her crate for anything but transporting her when we travelled by car. The events arising in the aftermath of the evening we had our friend over were in some measure the reason why we started to crate her.

Not long after the evening out with our friend, I came home one day at lunch time to give Molly her walk. There was evidence everywhere in the form of little pools of dog barf on the carpet that Molly had indeed gotten onto the dining room table and had eaten about a half a pound of butter.

I came home a few days later at lunch time and found little patches of chewed clean hairless carpet on the spots where Molly had barfed. Clearly the clean up had not gotten all the butter. Just as clearly the dog could not be trusted on her own. So we started putting her in her crate when we weren't at home.

When we were at home, and eating at the table or preparing food in the kitchen, Molly remained vigilant for the opportunities gravity brought her as crumbs fell like rain from the dining room table, or chopped vegetables and other goodies dropped from the kitchen counter.  

We never left anything on the dining room table again. But that didn't mean the dog gave up trying for another sweet bonanza she knew she'd scored at least twice before. Once in a while, I'd come out of one of the bedrooms in our condo when the dog and I were home and see the cloth on the dining room table rucked up at one end, the kind of thing you'd see after a dog had launched itself to the floor from the table top.

Molly keeps a vigilant eye on the lower corner cabinet where we stored her biscuits.

When Molly wasn't obsessing about food, she was happy to play, which you can read about here.

  





  

Grooming

I knew from my experience as a kid with our dachshunds that dogs need their nails trimmed and their teeth brushed. I also learned from that experience that, if you don't start early, you'll never get the dog to go along with your plans.

I started trimming Molly's nails as soon as we got her. She hated it right away. But she knew from the very first time that if she suffered through it she would get a treat. Every time I grabbed her, flipped her over and put her four paws in the air, she would resign herself to her fate and relax on my lap. Once she sensed I was done, she reanimated, flipped over practically in mid-air, leapt to the floor and made a bee-line for the cupboard where we kept the dog biscuits.

Brushing Molly's teeth was Bruce's job and he performed this duty every day of the dog's life - even the morning we put her down. Molly would also be flipped on her back for this procedure. Then Bruce would move a small brush loaded with chicken-flavoured dog toothpaste around in Molly's mouth. The trick was to get the dog's teeth brushed before she'd eaten all the toothpaste. 

Bruce was never certain that this accomplished anything, but, in all of Molly's long life, she lost only one tooth (a lower front incisor just fell out one day) and she never had any teeth extracted.

Then of course there were baths. Dogs in theory don't need baths. For example, the beautiful wolf in the shot below is quite dirty, but has her dignity and perhaps even her health intact.

Photo Credit: Mukul Soman, Your Shot, National Geographic

The received wisdom when I was a kid was that bathing disrupted the natural balance of a dog's skin. However, dogs - especially our dog, who sat on our furniture and slept in our bed - need a bath every once in a while. And dog cleaning technology has progressed by leaps and bounds. Products on the market today are so mild you can use them every day if you like - and if your dog likes.  

Molly did not like baths, even when there was a treat waiting for her. But Bruce - who most often was the one to give the dog her bath - noted that as she aged, Molly came to appreciate the hot water and wouldn't fight like a tiger to get out.

Molly fighting to get out of the tub.

Molly fighting to get out of the sink.

The only other grooming issue with the dog was her hair. Smooth coat JRTs don't need to have their coat cut or plucked. But, all owners of smooth-coated JRTs need a powerful vacuum cleaner. I used to say that Molly shed her own weight in dog hair once every two weeks. As far as I'm concerned that was the honest truth. For sixteen years our home, our floors, our furniture, our towels, our clothes and our guests were covered in a diaphanous coat of dog hair. 

I don't believe for an instant that Molly appreciated any of our efforts to keep her clean; I'm even more certain that she disagreed with other policies in place to keep her healthy, as you can read here.