Poop Matters

Quote of the day: “Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.”
—Auguste Rodin; sculptor

Our dearest Charlie has had some challenges with the adjustment to our home. Well, honestly, Biboti and I are being challenged too. Most notably with our decision to not use the dog crate. Boy, was that a mistake.

Technically, Charlie has been challenging our beliefs! Talk about life lessons – our dog is breaking down myths we’ve believed as true. Who would have thought a dog could be so influential?

You see, Charlie has been raised with having to live within in a crate when people leave the house and sometimes during the night when they go to bed. Being that he’s more than 2 years old, he’s quite accustomed to this routine. But on his first night in our home, he totally and completely freaked out when we went to put him in his crate for bedtime (I only did so because I figured it was best to stay with his routine for a while before I tried to wean him off the crate life). So, since then, we hadn’t been crating him.

Let me be even more honest. Biboti and I are/were completely against the “dog crating” concept. We just can’t possibly fathom how a “being,” such as a dog, would enjoy spending its free time in a cage! It feels cruel and insensitive, and even though he’s a dog, it feels inhumane. So when he had his meltdown on the first night, it gave us good reason to dismiss using it sooner than we had planned.

We began leaving him alone for an hour or so at a time. This worked pretty good when I was still on vacation, but when I went back to work and had to also go to the studio at night, this proved to be a disaster.

It first started with us coming home to find all the throw pillows from the family room couches on the floor, including the runner and candle on the coffee table. OK, OK, we thought. He’s just being a little rambunctious. Then, the bathroom accidents became more frequent and I starting finding soiled areas within the house that I didn’t see initially. Then, last Saturday morning, when I had gone back to bed after taking him out at his usual 6:00 a.m. wake-up time to do his business, he decided to water the hardwood flooring in my bedroom and then try to clean it up with some throw pillows from my bed! But the real icing on the cake was when I came home to find Biboti’s favorite pair of sunglasses with their arms ripped off and chewed up. Yikes!

After careful consideration and hours of contemplation, I told Biboti that I think the best thing to do is to crate him when we leave the house. I just couldn’t rationalize giving him any more time to adjust while he was beginning to terrorize the house. And Charlie isn’t a terror. He’s a lover, who goes mad when he’s free to roam the downstairs of Fellows Avenue. His behavior was escalating and I could see that he felt bad about it because he would hide under the table when I would see what he had done. So, he wasn’t feeling good about it and I wasn’t feeling good about. It seemed like the right thing to do.

Our first crating test was on Sunday when we went out to dinner for Mother’s Day. We were only gone for about two hours, but when we got home, he was sleeping peacefully in his bed in the crate. He hardly made a peep when we let him out. And, each day since then, he’s just as content when we get home. Before, when we would leave him out, “free,” it would take him nearly two hours to calm down and be his normal self. Now, it doesn’t appear that he’s changed at all in our departure. We have not been crating him at night, though. At least, not yet.

The moral of the story is: What I believe to be true and free for me is not the same for others, including animals.

This may seem silly, but Charlie has shown me that my sense of freedom isn’t his. He loves the confinement of the crate. It feels comfortable to him. Sure, it may be all he’s known and a mere product of his conditioning, but it just is. His reaction to being along and not contained showed he suffered great distress, which didn’t serve him or us.

It may seem odd that I’ve used this situation with my dog as teaching tool, but I can’t help but to do so. I guess that’s part of my quirky personality. It has most affected me by making me wonder how many beliefs I feel to be true that I will offer to my children to only find that they are not true for them at all. I can only hope that I am able to accept them, as I have done so with Charlie, without doing too much damage to my kids and our relationship in the interim.

And on another life-lesson note … a few posts back I mentioned how during The Columbia Girl reunion, we discussed our issues. Well, the discussion around me was my resistance to trends … the biggest being technology. However, circling back to the dog crating, my other challenge with it beyond the “freedom” piece was that it seems unnecessary. For generations people have owned dogs without using a crate. It irks me how suddenly we all need to crate our dogs as if our history was irrelevant. This is such an issue for me … whether it be trends, or progress, or modernization. I don’t know what the exact issue is, but it all comes back to the same thing.

Maybe that’s why I married an African man who was raised in the village, following the traditions of his ancestors, but spent his formative years in the city, learning the ways of modernization. He’s a balance of both. Just what I need.