For the love of dog

“Get yourself a dog” they said. “You will love it” they said. The truth is that I am still not sure why I was so resistant at the time. We had dogs as pets in our family growing up – as well as a menagerie of other animals. Both my parents had pet dogs growing up, so it was a normal part of family life. I was now living on my own, out of the family home and my resistance to a pet lasted all of two years until I found him. He stood amongst his sleeping pack and watched me as I moved closer to see him better. Still, I was resistant, and it took another three days before I went back with my sister and her kids to take another look. The pack was let loose, running away from us looking for some way to escape. This one, the one that had eyed me from three days earlier, came and sat at my nephew’s feet. Apparently, we chose each other. Decision made. He came to be named Charlie Boy and became the love of my life in an instant.

The first few months were tough though. He was two months old when I brought him home. There was a lot of advice that I took and failed at miserably. I didn’t know it at the time. I didn’t know that this advice fought my instincts with every step, and as a result, Charlie and I were really starting to rethink this arrangement of ours. I needed help, not the advice I had been receiving but independent, professional help. Enter the dog trainer. He was a one-on-one trainer, and he spent the whole day with us, playing, walking, chatting, and getting a feel of how things were panning out between Charlie and me. At the end of the day, the trainer sat me down and explained that I had chosen a dog with a dominant personality, a dog that instinctively was always going to take charge, it was his way. For us to “live a cohesive life together” the trainer said, we would have to establish a co-dominant relationship. In a flash, all the advice that I have been given about raising a dog played back in my head and I realised why my instincts rebelled against this advice. I may have lived with pets all my life; I didn’t however raise them. I played with them, hung out with them, and cuddled with them, but raising them was my parent’s job. My instincts were not one of rearing. I had not developed those yet. My instincts were, however, trying to tell me that I wanted to raise Charlie differently.

Turns out, those cheeky instincts were right and the advice I was given by family and friends, was not right for Charlie and me. In one moment, the trainer had invited me to take a new perspective with Charlie that would define my relationship with my pet and unbeknown to me at the time, would define my relationship with the world around me. He asked me one very important question, “what type of relationship do you want with Charlie? One of mutual respect or one born of dominating an animal which will eventually act out or have its spirit broken due to your need for total dominance.” Did the trainer realise he just asked me to define how I saw my place in the world? Indeed, did he realise he just defined the root cause of so many problems in this world? The answer of course was very simple for me. Mutual respect all the way.

So began a journey of love, laughter, sassiness, and total and unconditional love between me and Charlie. The trainer gave me some exercises to consider while Charlie and I figured out how we were going to do this together. Little did I know that a relationship through instinct and empathic communication was about to define who I was about to grow into.

Exercise 1: What are you willing to allow Charlie to do, and what is he absolutely, not allowed to do in the house? The advice I had been given up to this point was that Charlie should sleep outside. He shouldn’t be allowed on couches or anything else, he should always be on the floor. I can’t remember the rest because I believe I just stopped listening. I do that sometimes. Turns out, I was OK with Charlie sitting on the couch next to me. I was even happy when he chose a spot on the couch which we marked with his own special faux fur blanket – he was a very kinaesthetic dog and loved his textured fabrics as much as I did. We were definitely a match. So, Charlie had his spot on the couch. He was happy. I was even happy to have Charlie sleep on the bed with me. This was a big no-no apparently and it took a while for me to ignore the advice. He was not happy sleeping outside where he was constantly stimulated. I figured that I was in a house on my own, and he was a pack animal that liked to be with his family when he was asleep. I didn’t see the harm in it, and it brought so much comfort to me having him snoring beside me while I slept. Trust me when I say that his absence is noted every night now that he is no longer with us. Our sleep routine became so normal that he would remind me it was bedtime every night and grunt at me if I didn’t respond to the bedtime reminder. Sleeping on my bed, tick that box as a success. And thus, began the journey of Charlie and me learning how to live with each other as co-dominant partners. We expressed our emotions and figured out what each other needed and made decisions that were mutually acceptable, just as the trainer advised us to do.

Exercise 2: Learning how to read each other: Charlie would detect my moods when I wasn’t happy about something – he was very good at picking up on behavioural changes and always knew what I was thinking the moment I had that thought, such as when I was about to leave the house. He was good at picking up on visual and verbal cues and knew my routines better than I did. I also knew when Charlie was unhappy. He was either piling any of my shoes he could find in the middle of the living room with a smug look on his face, or he would sit and look at me with that very special surly expression of his and then grunt at me as he walked away. We both had our cues and they worked to establish a very harmonious relationship between us. He had stopped acting up the moment I relented on the sleeping arrangements, and I became a lot more relaxed and grateful that I had made the decision to bring him home with me.

Exercise 3: Bringing co-dominance out into the world: This relationship did not just stay between me and Charlie. It surprisingly extended out to my family, and we started to see changes in the way my family behaved around animals. My parent’s accepted Charlie into their home and accepted that he liked to stay inside with his family as he sat next to them on the couch. It became so normal in my parent’s home that if I ever dared visit without Charlie, I would be sent home to collect him so he could come and sit with my father while he watched TV. After my father passed away, my mother would wear my dad’s shirt (yep, Charlie was a mega-shedder) and Charlie would sit on my mum’s lap finding comfort in her presence and dad’s scent. It became a ritual with every visit. Charlie would patiently wait until my mother finished her chores and would herd her to collect my dad’s shirt and then herd her to sit in dad’s chair so he could jump up onto her lap to sit and dog for the evening. We all learned to use our instincts around him. For Charlie it was natural, for us it was a challenge, one that we rose to, and we all learned to live harmoniously together.

Who knew that when I invited Charlie into my home, he would teach me the greatest most valuable lesson. Communication was key in our relationship. Charlie already knew how to use his instincts to communicate and was my very wise teacher as I slowly learned the fine art of this myself. He would get mad at me sometimes when he didn’t get his way, he was very opinionated, yet he never held a grudge. He instead forced us both to come up with a different way. Either I relented (I was a sucker for those big brown eyes), or he realised I wasn’t giving in and made peace with that. After all, we were co-dominating, so he knew he wasn’t always going to get his way. He was OK with that because I did give in to demands from time to time, well OK, I gave in many times, and he knew there was give-and-take.

I also knew he made decisions. He didn’t always give me a hug when I asked for it. Sometimes he wanted the hug too, sometimes he gave me a hug because his instincts told him I really needed it, other times he didn’t want the contact and wasn’t up for a hug at that time. I also learned to be OK with that, his boundaries, his choice. Something I learned to become OK with in the human world as well. Understanding choices, mine, and those of others became something I really started to consciously work on.

It's been tough living without Charlie. I feel like my compass has lost its magnet and can’t decide up from down since he passed away. I catch myself wondering what Charlie would do if he was here. He passed away a year to the day of my dad’s burial – a bit of a double whammy at the time. He also left us with so many anecdotal stories and his shedded fur can still be found in our cars and random spots in all my family’s homes. Whenever I successfully navigate a potentially fiery situation a small part of me acknowledges Charlie’s contribution to that, and to this day I always ask myself how I want ‘this relationship’ to evolve and find a way to make that happen – of course the answer is communication and learning how communication manifests itself in that relationship. I’m not saying that situations don’t get rocky, I do know though, that I can work it out and hope that the mutual respect I was able to cultivate between me and Charlie Boy will resonate forever between me and this world.