The importance of acceptance

Today marks the first anniversary of having to take my old boy, Red, on that final journey. Although I wrote a tribute post for him a few days later, it is only really now that I truly feel ready to talk about him. I would never have thought that losing him could be quite as bad as it was - we have lost dogs before, after all, and they were much loved family members as well. The thing with Red was that in many ways he really was the dog of a lifetime. He was responsible for starting to teach me the concept of acceptance, and gave me the first stepping stone to being able to live with Finn.

The challenges of living with Finn are well known to anyone who has read my articles in the past. Red was also challenging at times, but in very different ways. He was bought to be a working sheepdog, living on the farm with us (that lasted about as long as he remained in the field the first time we tried to introduce him to working sheep!) We never deliberately socialised him although he encountered other dogs and people on the farm and on the footpath that ran through the farm. When the agricultural show season started, he came round the shows with us and our pedigree showing flock. We could take him anywhere, let anyone say hello, and he loved it all. Other dogs he could largely take or leave but was never phased by them, despite the fact that some dogs seemed to hate him on sight. He had several nasty encounters with other dogs over the years in public places, fortunately never badly injured, and never suffering any ongoing emotional trauma.

This is not to say that he was an easy dog, by any means. We could take him anywhere, and he proved truly excellent as a steady dog to introduce to people that were scared of dogs. At home, he could be a whole lot more complicated.

He was such a cutie!

To start with, he was easy. As a young puppy, we could happily do anything necessary. Then, when he was a few months old, he developed an intermittent vomiting problem. Our vets were utterly mystified, blood tests didn't show any problems, he wasn't showing any other symptoms at all. This went on for a couple of months, with a liquid medicine needing to be given to him 4 times a day. He soon stopped touching any food with it on, so it had to be syringed down. That's where the problem started. He needed the meds for his stomach but hated the process of giving them. (Eventually he solved the problem for us by bringing up an entire ear tag that he had somehow swallowed - I have NO idea how! 😲)

From that point on, he hated any handling. No matter how much we tried to make it a pleasant experience, give him nice treats to reward having things like grooming done, he was just not having it. In the end we came to a compromise. He would remain still while we did what had to be done (we used to trim tangles out of his coat so that as little brushing as possible was required) but would grumble the entire time, and then give a massive woof in our faces when done, before fetching a toy and only then accepting any treats we had for him. Not ideal, and certainly not in any of the recommended texts or methods for handling dogs. But it worked for us. Obviously, we try to work with as little stress as possible with our dogs - the ideal is having a dog that is calm and relaxed for the husbandry task required. This was not possible with Red and so we reached a compromise that we could both agree on. He remained still until I'd finished and then he expressed himself in the way he chose.

It usually involved noise

That is how Red introduced me to the concept of accepting my dogs for who they are. Not wanting to be handled was Red's quirk.

Finn's quirks are rather more numerous and far louder in their expression than Red's but I accept him for the dog he is. We work on improving the things we can improve - his feelings around being out in public and seeing people he doesn't know, his fear of anything new, his tendency to want to kill the tv if he sees an animal on it (it used to be any person in close, or people in period dress). He is never going to be a 'normal' dog. I am never going to be able to just load him up in the car and take him wherever I want to go without having to plan in advance and have contingency plans.

You know what? I'm good with that. I'm typing this around his head as he's snoring on my hip. He's complicated, complex, challenging, he can be utterly full on at times. But he's my boy, and as long as he's happy and content, my little world right here is just fine. Because of the lessons Red started teaching me, I can be good with how things are. It's Red's legacy, just one of the very many reasons he will never be forgotten.

This is a common position while writing and researching 😆

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