Tina Makereti: Dog love
The dog has eaten a hole in the carpet. We’ve been in lockdown just over a week. The humans are doing OK. Stressed, sad, anxious, but mainly chin up.
People have started getting up and doing exercise and working towards goals. This is a good sign when the usual response to boredom or stress, for some of us, is sleeping most of the day and spending the rest of it in front of screens.
We’re making nutritious food. We’re getting out of the house, to walk our allotted block, with the dog. But she doesn’t know what’s up.
Everyone is home, all the time, and she doesn’t get to go to doggie daycare, where she ran all day with other dogs, and we don’t go in the living room anymore, where she used to have quality time (cuddling humans) on the one item of furniture she’s allowed on, because this side of the house is self-isolating from the other side of the house, so the international travel germs don’t get us all.
She now goes between our bedroom (where I work) and the garage (where my husband works), up and down the hallway, and occasionally outside, but not as much as she used to. When we got her four months ago, it was weeks before we heard her bark properly. Now, at night, she wanders restlessly from one irritation to the next, chewing, and pacing, and then when the frustration rises above her capacity to chill, she barks at us – a shrill, uncomfortable sound.
Barking for her is distress, or overexcitement, which are the same thing for dogs, according to some experts. Our last dog Nala barked for the pure joy of sound, a deep and loud woof that expressed all of her emotions – joy, excitement, courage, fear, happiness, contentedness.
She was a huntaway, and her bark was her honour. Piki does not have the breeding for barking. She’s a snuffler, a cuddler, her StaffyVizsla-Whippet genes priming her for play and affection above all things, a wiry ginger ball of neediness. She wants to be with us at all times but the more attention we give her the more anxious she becomes, and so we had carefully constructed a weekly timetable that gave her the exercise and independence she needs.
Now it’s just us and her, and sometimes that unnatural bark, pre or post-cursor to naughtiness, acting out, distress. She stares then, straight into our eyes, and her confusion is clear. What the hell is going on? She can’t say it in words, what she needs, but she’s unsettled by all the changes, by our behaviours and feelings, so many feelings, which are all as clear to her as the thousands of smells that she can detect and we can’t. Dogs are all sense, all feeling, body language, smell, sound. She knows exactly how we are, more than we do most likely, but what’s she supposed to do with all that? What does it mean to her small muscular body? Tension without release.
But she’s also like any dog, and having people at home all the time has its advantages. There’s always a desk to curl up beside, sometimes even a heater. Food prep has been moved to one of the home offices, to lessen the need to enter the shared kitchen. In one week she has learnt much more about the joys of human food and scavenging than she knew before too.