Animals – Further Information

Following on from the comments on my post below about Animals vs. Sleep, I feel that I should explain a bit further.

No, Hound is most definitely not the master of the house. She knows her place, knows when she’s gone too far, and gets told off when she’s been naughty. The scratching at night isn’t done to prove who’s in charge, it’s her fixating on trying to get comfortable to go to sleep.

Psycho Cat, on the other hand, is a wilful piece of crap who is well known for not stopping scratching until he gets where he wants to be. He’s also well-known as a master of the Vindictive Shit®, where if he has been barred from the room he wants to get in to and long-term scratching has been unsuccessful, he’ll take a shit outside the door (or on some favoured item of furniture/clothing/technology – I’ve even had to clear cat shit off the camera bag before now) as revenge. As options go, I’d rather get up and let the little fucker in, rather than walk out in the morning into a pile of stinking cat turd. Go figure.

With Hound, there’s a lot of underlying stuff. At the start of December, the vet finally diagnosed her with a canine form of OCD, alongside her anxiety issues and general barminess. This diagnosis came about when he observed her method of “handling” stressful situations, which involves her standing with her head facing a corner, staring at the walls, and ignoring everything else that goes on around her. It’s the equivalent of “head in the sand”, also known as “Lalalalalalalala, I can’t hear you”. The vet’s never seen anything like it, but he feels certain enough about the diagnosis that he’s put it in her records (having been seeing her now for four years) and confirming to the pet insurance people that this is a defined condition, rather than a behavioural issue.

While apparently she’s always been a determined, focussed idiot (Herself tells the story of when she and the now-ex went to choose a dog, the garden they were all in had a large railway-sleeper border in the lawn. All the other pups went round the barrier, but Hound insisted on trying to get over it, and wouldn’t stop until she did so) the anxiety issues also come about because of mis-treatment by a vet while they were diagnosing her Megaoesophagus. I won’t go into details – but suffice it to say that if I’d been around at that time, they’d have been sued, and reported to the RSPCA / RCVS.

Couple that with the fact that (although I didn’t write about it here) back in November 2004, she had the next best thing to a total mental breakdown due to fireworks (and a badly handled situation) and that in early 2005 we seriously considered giving up on her, and taking her to the Dogs Trust or wherever, and you get an impression of how bad she could be.

Overall, while Hound does have her foibles, she’s generally well-trained, well-disciplined, and knows her place in the pack structure at home. And that place is not at the top, much as she’d like it to be. At the same time, she does have significant issues, and for the most part those are tolerated and understood – even when they make her into a total pain in the arse at the same time. Yes, we could have given her up – but at the same time, that’s running away from a situation, which is something neither Herself or I are overly good at. The additional knowledge that there’s no way that anyone else would take her on, let alone in her ideal situation (which would be to be on a farm somewhere, sleeping in a barn – that’s where a lot of the scratching behaviours come from, I suspect) means that we know we’re really the last-resort. She’d have no other valid alternatives except being put to sleep.

So yes, some of her obsessions are perhaps tolerated – but with eight years of experience with Hound, we know that there are some battles that just won’t be won. We’ve got through a lot with her – and she’s now three years past the usual life expectancy for a dog with Megaoesophagus – and the anxieties and obsessions are mainly tempered by the homeopathic pills she’s on twice-daily, there are some things that now just won’t be broken.