Michael Baugh CDBC
Life with our dogs can be confusing sometimes. Life can be confusing. It’s true. The world is crazy. Our dog seems crazy. Maybe I’m going crazy. He’s growling. I’m yelling. We just want the bad stuff to stop. But where do we begin?
I suggest we begin with wonder. We know sometimes our dog is at his best. There are places in which he is neither troubled nor troublesome. We know those times and places. Let’s find them. Be still. Be with our dog. Just be.
Let’s start right here, in wonder of all that our dog is. Author Richard Rohr refers to wonder as “standing in awe before something.” Can we really do that with our dog? Be right there for a moment, a short while, aware and in awe.
Our dog thinks. But what exactly? Let the question roll over you. Rohr also writes about wondering as “standing in the question itself.” We will never know our dog’s thoughts. But we can wonder. That alone could keep me here, contemplating not what my dog is thinking, but that he is.
Our dog feels. Researcher Jaak Panksepp opened that door for us, uncovering the emotional lives of animals. We can watch our dog, whatever he is doing right now, and we can settle in with the truth that he has feelings. We can imagine those feeling, because we are emotional creatures too. Our dogs seek things that feel good and avoid things that feel bad. We can relate. We empathize.
Our dog moves. He is a living being in motion here with us, right now, at this time, in this place. He makes choices and puts those choices in motion (or in stillness). It happens in this space with us fully present. Aware. In Awe.
Charlie sniffs the late-season wild grass. He smells I don’t know what. He is living. Thinking. Feeling. His ball is on the ground just behind him, a choice for playing a moment ago and perhaps in the moment ahead. But now, in this moment, Charlie is present in the sun and the sound of the wind and the moving leaves and the dappling of light. What is that scent? What moves him to this stillness?
Begin with wonder every day, every new start. We engage with dogs in ways not open to us with most other animals. We can learn to communicate with them. Spend a moment with that idea. It is wonderful, this connection we have, this chance to learn how they interact with us, the chance to teach them our words and phrases. Can we see the cooperation, the mutual learning? Who cares that I am human, and he is a dog?
Where else to begin now that we know, now that we notice? There is only wonder. They come to us, our dogs, and ask us: Play? Rest? Touch? Eat? They comfort us and turn to us for comfort when they are afraid, or anxious, or sad. They turn to us. Us.
And they are a wonder, these animals who live with us and think their private thoughts. Their feelings, like ours, must run amok at times. Their actions seem to run in kind, amok, but much differently than ours. They are fully dogs. No wonder, really, we get confused. And no wonder they get confused, too, I guess. It’s hard.
But connected we stay, committed. Life in this human world is crazy enough for us humans. What a mess it must seem to our dogs. It’s a good thing we’re here to see them through it. It’s a good they are here to see us through it.
Charlie is resting now, almost asleep, the wild grass and the breeze and the flicker of sunlight forgotten. He will dream, eyes flitting under half-closed lids. He always does. Perhaps he will bark hushed barks and run slow twitches of his feet. We won’t see what he sees, smell what he smells. No one can go with him. We can only watch and wonder. That word again. And awe. That one too.
Michael Baugh teaches dog training in Sedona Arizona and Houston Texas. He specializes in aggressive dog training.