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Tangible Moments
This morning on our morning walk, Nico caught a mole. He played with it for a bit while I asked Benny to sit beside me. Then Nico started working his way over towards us with it, and finally flipped the mole to Benny. Benny played with it for a while, and then we all walked away, leaving the mole for the resident owl to snack on.
I told my friend Molly, and she said, "That's pretty fantastic -- nothing says "brother" like sharing a fresh kill."
Indeed: I took it as a good sign. Benny is now visibly bigger than Nico, heavier, taller. While still puppy-like in his mannerisms he is fast becoming lithe, supple and strong. The play in the yard has changed. Benny holds his own now no matter how hard Nico pushes, and Nico seems as a result to hold back a little. What matters is that they do continue to enjoy each other's company. Benny shows no sign of seriously challenging Nico; Nico seems to be stepping back from the domineering role he was beginning to demonstrate a month or so ago as Benny began to turn from a puppy into a dog. Benny still has many stages to go through, and Nico will have to adapt to them before we can say we have arrived at the kind of ease we are hoping for. But this morning's "gift" is certainly an encouraging sign!
I am learning so much about canine relationships on this journey. Malamutes are pack dogs and they do speak their own language with each other. I spend a great deal of time just watching Nico and Benny play in the yard, partly because we are not quite ready to leave them alone unsupervised, but mostly just because it is fascinating to see the give and take, the coming and going between them, and how it changes week to week, even day to day as Benny grows and matures.
There are times also when we have to intervene; much of the learning is about when to get involved, and when to leave them be. It seemed to help for us to stop the play when Nico got into a certain zone of intensity; it certainly mattered that we separate them when Benny squealed and Nico wouldn't let him get away. That has happened only three times, and each time we were able to see that Benny was getting tired, had slipped down in the mud, or showed some other sign of weakness. But this has not happened lately, for Benny no longer gets tired, is more co-ordinated even when the footing is bad, and I think is well on his way to convincing Nico that weakness, his anyway, is not going to be a factor for long.
We're not sure how far Nico would have gone if we had of just left it to him to continue with Benny after each of these moments. We do know that my correction meant something to him. Each time these things happened I pulled Nico off while Rick took Benny away. I spoke to Nico in a deep dark voice, made him lie down for me, and then turned my back and walked away. The following couple of days he was allowed no interaction with Benny. This was hard because Benny could care less that Nico took him down. He remained and remains absolutely fearless, always crying out in protest when he Is not taken back in the yard with Nico, even within seconds of these incidents.
Nico on the other hand, having had another earful from me of "The Puppy is Mine", would not even look at Benny in his kennel until I gave him permission. I would do this after a day or so by calling him over to sit beside the kennel with me. He seemed to genuinely understand that he had done something wrong. I think it took three of these incidents for him to understand what exactly it was!
Which leads me to wonder, what exactly was it? If Benny's not scared, then is it an attack? Where would it have gone from there if we'd just let them be? In the past I've had Malamutes who would fight, then stop and get on with things as if nothing had happened. But it always involved grown dogs, not a puppy and an older dog. Is Nico just putting Benny in his place? Is intervention helpful, or a hindrance in the all-important establishment and maintenance of pack hierarchy?
At the same time, the head of the pack has to be the people. If a behavior is unacceptable to the people, then the dogs have to know it. Malamute rescue is largely populated by dogs whose owners failed to stay on top in this way and then complained that their dog was unmanageable. Malamutes are independently minded creatures who sense in a flash any weakness that might allow them to take charge. It is their nature to seek status, and they are not sentimental about who they take it from when the opportunity presents itself. So it was important to me that Nico understand, even where another dog is concerned, that certain behaviors are acceptable, and others are not, that we make the rules, not him.
On the other hand, if the boys are going to share the yard and enjoy unstructured play together, they have to be able to establish and enforce their own boundaries with each other. It is difficult to say in terms of that process what might be the implications of the incidents where we intervened. What is not difficult to see is that as Benny has become taller, heavier and stronger, Nico is behaving differently. Today Nico actually fell down under Benny, and it was not a planned fall. Nico did not seem to mind at all. He just got up, came over and licked my face, and then went back to play. When Nico went down, Benny immediately leaped back, made a play bow wriggling those great big Mickey Mouse ears of his, and then ran off, his usual invitation to Nico to give chase. These to me are all good signs.
I have learned so much from both of these dogs watching them go through this process. They have reminded me time and again that raising your voice in times of crisis is a mistake: it only encourages and exacerbates aggression. Even when they are chewing on each other's necks, a favourite game of theirs that always stops my heart, if I put my hand on Nico's back and start talking to him in a low voice, he listens. Usually both dogs will stop what they are doing when I do that. Shouting on the other hand gets Nico very excited and leads to trouble. I have learned that if Nico thinks I am upset or threatened, he feels he has to rush in and do something. In those moments it really is about me taking charge, so he doesn't think he has to and doing it quietly, so he doesn't think I am scared. At the same time I have learned that there are times to step back, and allow both Nico and Benny to communicate with each other about what matters to them. This morning I could have dragged Nico off the mole, fearing that however small, here might be a bone of contention. Instead I watched and waited, and both boys rewarded me with magic.
These dogs have very different characters; Benny is rock steady as a well-bred Malamute who has never been mistreated or known neglect can be. Nico, whose origins are unknown to us is highly sensitive, sometimes insecure, but always mindful of where I am and what I might want of him. His fundamental nature was probably severely compromised by his early history of abuse. But his willingness to do what he has to in order to be a contributing part of a pack, a family, more than compensates. That he cares is abundantly clear every time we ask him to do it our way. A most important element of our strategy with Nico when things went bad in the play yard involved upping his house time, his time with me. If I was going to ask Nico to do it my way with regard to "My Puppy" I needed him to feel very confident that he was also, and always would be "My Dog."
The result was an escalation of his concern for what we were asking of him, rather than a retreat into loneliness, fear and possibly further aggression. Nico's desire to get it right for us is very much a function of the relationship we have developed in the three years since he came here. There is nothing more touching than to watch the way he looks at me to make sure he is getting it right even in the unstructured context of free play with a high energy puppy.
The cardinals are back: we have just enough snow on the ground that that bright vermilion flash in the cedars is unmistakable against the white background of the hill behind. The Blue Jays are congregating around the feeder, driving off the squirrels, and in between those assaults the more hesitant cardinals swoop in and steal mouthsful of seeds. Nature has its way of balancing energies. I feel more and more confident that as Benny matures, he and Nico will find their way. It is my task to learn when to get involved and when not. But dogs are very forgiving and smart. Even it I get it wrong, I suspect they will get it right, if we let them. At the end of the day, if we respect them for what they are, and arrange things so they can be just that, they always reward us with their happiness, their genuine delight in just being alive, in just being dog. Does it get any better?
