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COVID has been tough on all relationships. Spending months cooped up together in the house has strained even the best of marriages, and it’s led to a heartbreaking realization for many all over the world: our dogs are nowhere near the angels we thought they were.
They’ve interrupted countless Zoom meetings and work calls with their barking at the postman, the Amazon delivery van, the doorbell, the cat across the street, the bird in the window, the fly in the house, the neighbors’ kids playing, the phone ringing and the tree branch swaying in the wind.
And oh, how they lick themselves, with a thoroughness and intensity matched only by our annoyance at the infernal sound it makes. The rest of the time, if they’re not snoring in the background as we try to work, it’s all “I want to go outside. I want a treat. Pet me, pet me, pay attention to ME!”
Just as with our spouses, spending more than a year confined at home with our dogs has taught us more than we’ll ever need to know about about the secret life of our pets, and boy, do we want the mystery back in that relationship.
Most veterinarians, trainers and dog walkers say they’ve seen an uptick in complaints about unexplained doggy doings, such as excessive barking, jumping up on people, chewing and licking. And almost universally, their response to those clients is basically, “Well, that’s what dogs do. You just didn’t know that before.”
In the early days of the the pandemic, College Station veterinarian Lori Teller got a call from a distressed client. Something’s wrong with my dog, he told her. He just sits and stares at me all day long. The two were talking via video, so when her client slowly turned his computer monitor, Teller could see the dog staring intently at him.
Was the pup hungry, the owner wanted to know, or was he secretly planning to murder him?
“I told him that, since he’d recently started working from home, the dog was probably just confused about why he was there, interrupting the dog’s own work day,” said Teller, an associate professor in the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine & Biomedical Sciences. “Once he thought about it that way, the dog’s behavior made sense.”
Dogs are also really protective of us and their homes.
“I heard from owners who complained their dogs were interrupting their Zoom calls by barking at the mailman, the Amazon delivery guy or anyone else who approached their house,” said Kenneth Martin, a board-certified veterinary behaviorist and dog trainer with Veterinary Behavior Consultations in Spicewood.
Martin explained to them that dogs bark to defend their territory and their dogs probably barked at perceived intruders all the time. “It was just that now the owners were home to hear them,” said Martin, whose practice is so busy, there’s a three- to four-month waiting list to see new clients.
Other times, these canine problems are, in fact, human-caused.
Another of Teller’s clients came to her because his dog suddenly didn’t want to go on walks. Turns out they’d already gone on so many walks that the poor pup was exhausted and had what a human athlete would call an overuse injury. No wonder he didn’t jump up all excited when he heard the leash jingling.
While many doggie problems require the help of a professional trainer, owners can correct some themselves. Take that most common complaint: the dog that always barks at night — as well as during the day.
Candi Robinson’s two Shelties Sochi and Lexi were so high-strung they barked at everything. They barked when someone sneezed, they barked if someone pulled a tissue out of the box too aggressively, they even barked if anyone sighed too loudly.
She tried several strategies without success, until she learned that a sharp “shush,” said as soon as they started barking, would startle them into silence. “Sometimes you have to do it twice, but it usually stops them in their tracks,” said Robinson, who lives in Fair Oaks Ranch with her husband Steve.
After months of being isolated with only a few humans for company, many dogs have lost their ability to socialize with strangers — both the two- and four-legged kind. Meladee Gomez said she’s seeing more dogs than usual are suddenly jumping up on strangers or becoming aggressive with other dogs.
“These dogs often didn’t exhibit these behaviors before the pandemic,” said Gomez, a senior trainer with Sit Means Sit Dog Training on Broadway near Wetmore Road. “For overexcited dogs that jump, I recommend waiting until the dog is calm before greeting the person, keeping them on a leash in the meantime, and rewarding proper greetings with treats.”
Introduce your dog to others slowly, perhaps by inviting people over who have dogs you know to be even tempered.
“Do it in a large outdoor space like a backyard and go slowly,” Gomez said.
In many cases, having someone working from home has been good for dogs. Veterinarian Olga Jaimez said she’s seen several animals with health conditions that were discovered sooner rather than later, from relatively minor issues like fleas and ticks to more serious, even potentially fatal ones.
“People are spending so much more time with their dogs, they’re more likely to notice these things,” said Jaimez, with 4 Paws Animal Hospital on Southwest Military Drive.
She told of one owner who noticed a lump on the dog that had suddenly gotten larger. It turned out to be a mast cell tumor, a type of cancer that’s very treatable if caught early. Another dog was diagnosed with diabetes when its owner brought it in because it was drinking a lot of water and urinating very frequently.
From the dogs’ perspective, having us working from home all the time has been a dream come true, and the impending reality of a normal return to work is going to be a harsh awakening. It will take time to adjust and to prep your dog to that ahead of time.
In the same way parents should begin putting their children to bed earlier each evening during the week before school starts, dog owners should slowly acclimate their pets to again being home alone for hours at a time.
One strategy is leave the dog alone for increasingly longer periods of time — 10 minutes one day, 15 minutes the next, etc. — over several days or even weeks. If you can’t leave the house, you can also put the dog in a room with the door closed.
The return to work may be particularly upsetting for the millions of dogs that were adopted during the pandemic. They have no memory of a time when their owners didn’t leave for work each morning.
For these dogs and other anxious dogs, try keeping the TV or radio on while you’re gone to keep them company. Other dogs, assuming they’re house trained, might do better in a kennel to prevent them from becoming destructive if they get too anxious. Dogs are den animals and also usually find the confines of a kennel comforting rather than confining.
Another strategy is to leave the dog with a food puzzle toy when you’re about to leave the house. A Kong-type chew toy stuffed with frozen peanut butter, for example, will keep them busy long enough for you to leave without them noticing.
“It’s like when you give a kid a hand-held game to keep them occupied during a long car ride,” said Rebecca Jouas, owner of Whimsical Tails Pet Sitting.
For dogs that are still too anxious, there are several supplements and drugs that can help to calm them. Products like Adaptilmimic the natural pheromone that mama dogs emit to calm their litters. They are available in sprays, plug-in diffusers and collars.
Other products, such as ProQuiet, contain ingredients such as L-tryptophan, chamomile and melatonin that can help ease separation anxiety. It may take several days for these products to work.
In more extreme cases, talk to your vet about pharmaceutical grade anti-anxiety and antidepressant drugs formulated for dogs.
[email protected] | Twitter: @RichardMarini
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