May 1, 2012

Own pit bulls at your own risk, or how to get me all riled up first thing in the morning

This morning someone sent me a link to this article: “Pit bulls: Own them at your own risk“. The byline of this charming piece is “The Maryland Court of Appeals declares what should have been obvious to all by now – these dogs are inherently dangerous.” Ugh.

I’m not a big letter-writer in general. I’ll get mad and complain loudly, but then I go home and, you know, walk my dog and try to get over it. But this, my friends, this will not stand. Some of the highlights of the article include:

  • Until they are banned outright, pit bulls should not be allowed in public, and their ownership should bear heavy, legal responsibility. I was pleased to read last week’s ruling by the Maryland Court of Appeals declaring them inherently dangerous.
  • “When an attack involves pit bulls, it is no longer necessary to prove that the particular pit bull or pit bulls are dangerous,” the court ruled last week.
  • The evidence shows clearly that such attacks are disproportionate to the number of pit bulls in society, that they inflict far more damage than other dogs, and that their attacks are associated with a higher risk of death. Pit bull jaws are three times stronger than those of a German Shepard.
  • Pit bulls are four-legged time bombs. You live with them, you live with risk — and, as it should be, you take on serious liability for the suffering of others.

And now I’m all kinds of riled up.

Well, I just sat down and spit out the following letter, which I’m sure could be a lot better if I were really taking the time to try to change someone’s mind. I’m sure there are things that I could have said better or argued more convincingly – but if you have thoughts, I encourage you to write to the author, too!

Dear Mr. Rodricks,

I am sure you will be hearing from many people in response to your article posted in the Baltimore Sun about pit bulls, and I would like to add a bit of my experience to the mix. I hope you can read this all the way through and reconsider your position on the “breed.”

First, I am curious about where you got the idea that “pit bull jaws are three times stronger than those of a German Shepard”. Of course, you can always find “answers” on the internet, but actual studies have been conducted (http://dogbitesinformationandstatistics.blogspot.com/2008/01/canine-bite-force.html) suggesting that pit bull jaw strength is similar to those of other dogs. Regardless, the danger from a biting dog is in the bite itself, regardless of the force. I was bitten by a goldendoodle while I was walking in the park, and I still have a mark two months later. Not a dog known to be “vicious,” but it’s still got quite a bite. I am impressed by the lack of citations and fact checking that was apparently done for this article.

But forget all of the “facts” that you mis-cited. I would like to tell you a little bit more about my experienced with “pit bulls”, which consists of several years working at an animal shelter. At the shelter where I work, we conduct temperament tests on all of the dogs before they are available for adoption. Many dogs fail the test because they were never properly socialized, or they weren’t appropriately handled, or they are terrified and aggress out of fear. We end up with a lot of pit bulls on the adoption floor. Do you know why? It is not because we get more pit bulls in the shelter; it is because pit bulls PASS THE TEST nearly all the time. These are friendly, well-adjusted, resilient dogs who love children.

I understand that you will probably not read this email and say, “Okay, I change my mind, I will run out and adopt a pit bull for all my friends with children!” That is not my point. I am hoping that you will read this and understand that your stance may be a little bit off; that you made some quick judgments; and that the other people trying to pass these anti-pit bull laws are operating from a similar place of fear, rather than from experience. I encourage you to go and meet some pit bulls. They are really wonderful dogs.

Who knows if this will make any sort of difference, but fingers crossed he’ll think a little harder next time about the pit bull in the costume.

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April 18, 2012

Pupdate: victory! (or at least a successive approximation)

Last update was marriage… so this update is dogs?

You guys, having two dogs is occasionally the best thing ever. It is also occasionally (read: often) the biggest stressor in our lives. Daphne is polite and lovely in the house, but a terror in public. Lenny is the sweetest to walk down the sidewalk (besides that she wants desperately to meet everyone), but in the house she is destructive and, you know, puppyish. Go figure.

the best in the house

Well, there’s been a ton of hullabaloo in our area about having dogs legally off-leash at a local reservation. The police have started really cracking down on off-leash dogs on the trails, and combined with our recent experiences with off-leash dogs at the parks, I have just been avoiding the whole scene.

But I desperately miss the woods, you guys. The highlight of my days used to be the long hikes with the dogs racing around me. Now my days often revolve around trying to figure out how to wear out an 11-month old pit bull on leash. Eek.

For the last month or so I have been working occasionally on Lenny’s leash manners. She’s nailed it in the living room; we moved to the yard. She mastered the yard, so we went to the driveway, and then the sidewalk in front of the house, and finally up and down our block. So obviously, the next step would be to take her into the woods where there are people, dogs, and wildlife running around, right?

Okay, maybe not the best decision I ever made, and probably not something I would recommend to my clients. That’s a pretty big leap afterall.

But you know what? She nailed it. I loaded myself up with hot dogs and string cheese and we went for a half hour hike. She was on a loose leash the whole time, and by my side for probably 80% of it. We encountered a couple of (illegal, of course) off-leash dogs and I tried my best to avoid them. People probably thought it was because she’s a pit bull, but you know what? I’m the one following the rules, and your dog is the one who won’t come when you call it, so eat it.

I’m feeling hopefully again. We can go to the woods and have a good time, and if we can do that, then we can go anywhere! One step closer to a CGC.

I am so proud of us.

regal

Any victories with your beasts lately? Even little ones?

(I just tagged this post “the process”, which used to be designated for that whole wedding planning thing. Ah well, now it’s about dogs. Story of my life.)

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April 13, 2012

Marriage Improvement Project: an update

A few weeks ago, I promised Turtle something along the lines of: for every dog-based post I write, I will also write something nice about her. She said it doesn’t even have to be nice, she just likes to know what’s happening in her life.

Sadly, this means that I am not blogging as much as usual. My brain always – always! – has things to say about dogs (my dogs, your dogs, other people’s dogs, dog parks, etc.), but I’m not always feeling long-winded or quippy about our marriage. I’m certainly often enjoying our marriage and often working at our marriage, but “Hey dudes, my marriage is pretty good today,” or “Hi friends! My marriage needs a bit of work in the ___ department” don’t really make for an entertaining blog. Plus there’s that whole thing where I try not to write about the things we’re struggling with until we are done struggling with them.

yep, we're definitely married

But! I promised you all, you know, a month ago, that I would write about my marriage improvement project real soon. (Yes, Turtle, “real soon.” Don’t worry, I said it in a silly accent in my head; I know it’s bad grammar.) Here’s the background:

Television is sort of a weak spot. We both came at it from different perspectives: Turtle has found the television comforting and likes to have it on, often as background noise. In my experience, the TV is something you actively watch; you sit in front of it and it is all you pay attention to until you are done watching, and then you turn it off.

You might see how these approaches don’t exactly fit well together.

it's a battle (that is honestly not really relevant in settings like the one where this picture was taken)

Over the years, we have both adjusted our TV watching. She keeps it off when I’m at home; I have found some shows that I like on most nights. During the weekends while the TV is on a little bit more, I usually work in the study with the door closed. It works.

In the last couple of months, though, we noticed a few things happening: we used to start watching our shows at about 8, but the time was steadily creeping up as we got home from work tired and hungry. It was 7:30, then 7, then 6:30. Do you know what’s on at 6:30? Nothing. It’s pretty miserable. So we were eating our dinner in front of the TV, hardly talking, watching dumb shows from 6:30-10, and then going to sleep. The other part? We were arguing a lot. Nothing big, but a lot of little things. I’m not saying that television makes you argue, but I am saying that living together without taking the time to see each other and say nice things to each other and appreciate each other can take a toll on things, especially when one of you is also leaving out dirty dishes, not replacing an empty toilet paper roll, and insisting on owning two dogs. (Side note: some of those things were Turtle, some were me. I bet you can figure out what at least one of mine is.)

Well, for school one of my projects was to “replace a behavior” with another behavior. And what better to replace than television watching? Turtle agreed to participate in my project, and without getting all technical, here’s what we did: we tracked how much TV we were watching and also tracked the time we spent on any of four other activities, which were reading out loud together, going for a walk, eating at the table, or playing a game.

games! (we're grumpy in these pictures. oops.)

read!

eat!

hike!

After a week of tracking all of that, we spent a week where we had to earn our TV time. For every 15 minutes we spent on an activity, we got 15 minutes of TV. A pretty low-level trade! The following week we got to do whatever we wanted again. Here’s what happened:

Figure 1. Percentage of time spent watching TV and participating in other activities. Horizontal lines represent the mean percent for each activity in each condition.

The important things to note: First, television watching dropped to 0% in the treatment week! Zero! And other activities spiked. You guys? That week was so fun. Second, though television watching went up again following treatment withdrawal, it’s still lower than it was, and other activities remained higher than they were. (There are only 4 data points per week because we are not home that much, and on days when we weren’t home, everything was 0%, so we only counted days we were home.)

And I don’t have data for this one, but anecdotally, things are staying that way. We are watching way less TV – maybe just once or twice a week? We are cooking together more and playing games and playing with the dogs and going to bed earlier. We are getting more sleep and really just enjoying each other a lot more. Things are really, really good right now.

So here’s what I learned:

  1. Television is no good. It can be fun, but (obviously) in moderation. Also it’s easy to let it get out of control! Tread carefully, my friends.
  2. Behavior analysis can fix anything! It is magical! (This may be a slight exaggeration, but I am damn happy with my career choice these days. Or at least my education choice, since I am fairly career-less.)
  3. My wife is amazing for participating and for being amazing.
  4. I really love making graphs. What else can I measure?

In conclusion? Marriage improvement project = success! If you’re interested in something like this, or in this project specifically, I can send you the whole APA-formatted, citation-filled, researched-supported paper. Happy Friday! May your relationships go forth and prosper (either metaphorically or literally, whichever you prefer).

(Turtle is dissatisfied that this is about our marriage rather than about her. “I only want blogs where I am the star! Why did you make me want to be famous? Stop writing what I’m saying!” I tell you, folks, things are always exciting here. “You’re not going to put your graphic on the internet, are you? Do you want to lose readers?” I’m hoping you guys are the type who will appreciate my graph.)

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April 10, 2012

My Doggelganger & the pain and suffering she brings on us all

Before we got Lenny, someone sent me a link to the Doggelganger.

Using the Doggelganger, you upload a picture of your face and they use highly scientific software to determine your exact canine match out of a pool of homeless dogs. I was pleased to see that my match was a cute staffordshire mix.

my doggelganger

Fastforward several months later. We adopted little Lenny – can you believe how tiny & scrawny she is in this picture? I can’t believe how little she was!

When we first got her, I immediately emailed Two Pitties in the City to ask what we needed to prepare for with a pit bull. What answers did we need to come up with in response to questions about her? Should I admit she’s a pit bull? They had a great post with some of their suggestions.

Honestly, we didn’t really run into any problems with Lenny for months. She loves everyone, and runs up to dogs and people wagging her whole body. She is just thrilled to be alive. The only thing she seems not to like is a dog down the street that barks occasionally, and Lenny barks back.

how can you resist such an adorable pup?

Well, this past week, everything changed. Lenny, I guess, has grown into a real, live, nearly-adult pit bull. She’s still small, a little larger than a big cocker spaniel, but she’s got more of an adult dog head and body than before. She’s nearing 11 months, so I guess we’re right on schedule.

The thing is, I have been preparing myself for comments. Things like, “Is that a pit bull?” or “Keep your dog away!” What I was not prepared for were the people who simply react with disgust or even downright aggression.

To keep a long story relatively short, last week the dogs and I were out hiking in the woods near where I work. Dogs are allowed off-leash there, and we haven’t had any issues with other dogs or people there before. It’s a great place to go because afterwards, my otherwise-rambunctious dogs look like this:

totally not posed. note the empty bed behind them. they are in love!

Anyway, Lenny sees a dog around the corner and goes flying over to meet it. The dog snaps at her, and Daph is immediately all, “OH, you want some of THIS!” Scary looking but totally not serious canine tussle ensues. I get control of both my dogs, and the man grabs Len’s collar and holds her up in the air a la Cesar M*lan. The Dog Wh*sperer must have some impressive PR people because I have seen him do this on his show and cannot find a single image of it on Google search. I suppose we should be grateful for that.

I look at him and say, “I have her.” He does not let go, just stares me in the eye while holding her off the ground by her collar. Finally he lets go.

To review: friendly pit puppy runs up to his dog. His dog snarls, so my hound dog jumps in and very mild fighting ensues. Man grabs the single friendly dog in the situation and hangs her. Seriously?!

Two days later, we are at a different park – because hello PTSD! – where dogs are allowed off-leash. We go there less since I got bit by a Goldendoodle a couple of months ago.

this is from literally 2 months ago and I still have a mark on my leg.

So Lenny and I go to the woods, leaving Daphne at home, since she’s clearly going to leap to Lenny’s defense and I don’t need more of that. Well, three border collies come running up and pounce on Lenny. She tries to run away, gets caught, rolls over and shows her belly, and tries to run away again. I catch her and chase the dogs away. The woman apologizes, and I explained that this was the second time this had happened in a matter of days, and Lenny was behaving appropriate. She then proceeded to explain to me that, no, Lenny was not being appropriate, and that’s why her dog was forced to flip my dog, and that my dog should probably never be exposed to other dogs again, since she’ll now be “iffy” for the rest of her life.

What?!

stupid mean people make Lenny sad

The thing about it is that I don’t think anyone would have said or done these things to Daphne. Maybe part of the reason for that is that Daphne would never allow a strange man to grab her collar, where Lenny’s all, “Hi strange man! You seem nice! I love having all of my feet off the ground! Let’s be best friends!” But I suspect that it’s more because she is growing into her pittieness. She’s not a wiggly puppy anymore; she’s a wiggly dog.

Also last week, I was out running with her and we stopped at a stoplight. There was a huge guy standing next to me, and he made eye contact with Len. She immediately started wagging, and he took a step away. “You should be careful with that dog,” he said gruffly. “She might be dangerous.” I laughed and then the light changed… and then I realized he wasn’t kidding. He looked totally nervous. He was terrified of my 40-pound wiggly puppy.

My solution to all of this? There are a few things:

  1. No more off-leash work anywhere but our yard. This takes out the issue of people misinterpreting or grabbing at my dog altogether. I’m sad to not be able to go play in the woods, but we’re going running and hopefully she’ll have a stellar recall in the next couple months and we can return to dog-friendly spaces.
  2. Cute tricks! She already has some basics: “sit”, “down”, and a stellar “stay”. We are improving her army crawl (adorable!) and teaching her to wave in response to “say hi!”
  3. Increasing cuteness: it’s getting warm so no more hoodies, but hopefully we’ll have a few bows for her soon!
  4. Visibility & training: we are working every day on loose leash walking and Lenny is going everywhere with me. The more people who see a friendly, well-behaved pittie, the better!

I’m not at all regretting the decision to adopt a pit bull; in fact, I’m proud that we got such a good one who is turning into such a great spokesdog! But I do have to admit that some days it takes a lot out of me to have people yell that I am a bad person or tell me that my dog is vicious simply because of what she looks like.

Have you had to deal with these kinds of responses? What would you do? If you are nervous about dogs, what would help? Any words of wisdom or thoughts about how I’m not the worst dog owner ever would be greatly appreciated.

Note: there are some good articles and videos on “dominance” in dogs and using the “alpha roll” technique here and here. Check them out! I love the comparison of Cesar M*lan’s dog grooming tehcnique and Sophia Yin’s. Short version: 1. Dogs do not roll each other, they offer their bellies and that’s it. 2. Dominance training sucks. Aaaand done.

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April 6, 2012

Four years ago today…

So, a little over 4 years ago, I got this message:

One of many that went back and forth about whether or not my adorable and sassy coworker was going to attend roller derby prom with me. Lo and behold, she did agree to go to prom, but before that could even happen we ended up falling for each other. Hard.

She spent a lot of time looking at this facebook picture of me:

And I spent a lot of time looking at this facebook picture of her:

she is so pretty!

Then, four years ago today, we went to a fancy work event in which my roller derby team pushed me around in my wheelchair. Afterwards, I stood around offering to help Turtle breakdown the event. Look at me in this picture, you guys. Do I really look like I am capable of carrying anything or helping to move heavy boxes? It was a thinly veiled ruse.

Our Starbucks date lasted about 6 hours, full of flirting and actually finishing the Sunday NYTimes crossword (sexy, sexy date, I say!). But it wasn’t over then! No, then we went out for dinner. And THEN as we left, I did not kiss her, despite apparently the perfect situation. Instead, I ran away, quickly, on crutches. I know, awkward. But don’t you worry! All went uphill from there.

We rented cars and went on random weekend adventures:

first ever picture of us together

We went to prom. It was really really fun, and we only stayed for about an hour. Getting ready was the best part! I snuck into Harvard Sq by bicycle and bought her the boutonniere – she had never been to her prom and I wanted to make it special for her! I’m realizing now how similar it looks to her wreath from our wedding, which I also bought sneakily in Harvard Square.

We rented another car and went to a folk festival and almost died but didn’t. And even though we had only been dating for three months, we survived living out of a car together and still liked each other very, very much, thank you. Also, we almost got struck by lightning! And there was a tornado!  

Since then, of course, we’ve acquired animals, moved in, lost and gotten jobs, made some big life changes, and done that whole marriage thing.

one of the days I proposed and she said no. I think she got food on my face and is wiping it off. We're classy like that.

Being married to her is the best ever.

Happy anniversary to the best partner I ever had. Here’s to many, many more ups and downs and in betweens – I’ll take them all as long as we’re doing it together. I love you!

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