(60) Pouting N' Priming

Pouting Beeker
I think Beeker pouts. I don't know if this is possible or I am just anamorphizing but yesterday when I got ready to go to work he wasn't in his "regular" spot waiting for me to come out of the bathroom. Usually, when I get up in the morning Beeks is there to greet me and give me the best nose bumping or body lean a person could want. However yesterday I noticed that when I got up I did get the usual greeting but when I went into the bathroom, which is open to the bedroom,to get ready for work, Beeks moved to the sliding glass door on the other side of the room and turned to look outside instead of staying in near the bathroom area. Okay I wasn't crushed over this, it just seem significant in retrospect. When I later prepared to leave out the door, Beeks was no where to be seen. If I am not going to work, and am preparing to leave, Beeks is always right there trying to leave with me to go in the car and be my car buddy. Yesterday I had no buddy anywhere, he was not even in the room. Max was there in his usual spot, as door monitor until Brad arrives back home, but My Beeker, My precious, My Buddy was not even there to say good bye. By then I was crushed, but assumed that his absence was due to Brad's presence at home (an unusual occurrence). Later in the day when I returned, I got the usual welcome home greeting from both dogs, so I assumed that all was well. However, when I left to go to the local library book sale (I'm a sucker for used books at good prices)Beeker was again absent from my departure. When Brad and I got ready to leave last night for a dinner out, Max was at the door to bid us goodbye but Beeker was not there, we both noticed that Beeker was not trying to leave with us, not even in the kitchen or near the back door. What was going on with Beeks? He was in the bedroom just lying on his rug. The departing fanfare was quite noticeable.

Here's the question that I have been thinking about since then. Was Beeker pouting my departures? Does he "know" when I am going somewhere and won't be taking him? Can a dog pick up the subtle cues that mean, "We are going out for DQ, yea!" verses "She's taking a shower and getting ready for work, or out for the night, and she won't take me, Boo hoo!" So maybe this is a two part inquiry. 1.)Can Beeks tell the difference of two different kinds of departures and 2.) Does he really care, emotionally? Little children do care when their parents leave but it takes them a long time to differentiate the two kinds of leaving. I know this because of all the crying that goes on for such a long time when kids are around two. We call that separation anxiety. Dogs are really good at picking up very subtle cues. Dr. Grandin has suggested that the reason that dogs have become domesticated so strongly to humans is that over the long development of the domestication, dogs have been able to fine tune the ability to see very small changes and behaviors of humans that are so taken for granted by us. Early on in the dog-human relationship dogs would come around the fire where man (and woman) were sitting and some how dogs were able to "know" or pick up the cues when to run and when to stay to scrounge for left over food scraps. Long story short, dogs are really good at noticing small differences in behaviors. So... The fact that I usually get up and don't take a shower first thing in the morning before Beeks and I take a walkabout may mean that he knows that if I am taking a shower, I am going somewhere he won't be allowed to go. Or if I put my shoes on sitting in the bedroom as apposed to the kitchen, then we are going for a walk, and he's happy.
Now the second part of the question... Does he care? I don't know how to answer this part. I want to think he cares,but this might just be that I want him to care, that I am interpreting his behavior,of figuring out when he gets to go with and when he doesn't, with pouting.

Priming Max
Here's a curious thing to ponder. When I feed the dogs, Max always wants to be the first inside the door and he usually gets to his food first. But lately he just stops, looks at me, and waits. This has happened before. In fact it has happened with one of our other Newfie dogs in the past. At first we thought that the dogs (then non eating dogs) were not hungry or that there was some sort of eating hierarchy going on. Then we thought that the dogs were regulating their own weight. We noticed that they kept looking at us and then looking back at their food. For a while we thought we had fixed the problem by adding something tasty to their food, because when we did this we noticed there was not hesitation on his part to dig in and eat. However when we stopped putting something in his food he stopped eating again. You might think that we had spoiled him and that he was thinking that if he waited we would put something tasty in his bowl. We thought so too so we talked to our trainer and she suggested the probiotic enzyme that I wrote about on a previous post. This worked great.It was a powder in a capsule that we would open and sprinkle on his food. I could sprinkle it on his food before I let him inside to eat and he would eat without missing a beat. It is tasteless so it isn't that he saw me put something in his bowl or smelled a tasty extra treat. Now that we are out of the probiotic and having a difficult time replacing it, we are back to square one. Max is not eating, he looks at us like we are suppose to do something to his bowl. Here's the funny part. If I go to him and his bowl and hand feed him a small handful of his food and stand next to him, he eats it and then he will start to eat on his own from the bowl. Weird dogs! If I just stand there and tell him to eat, to "go on", "eat Max", he just looks at me. The dog needs priming!