Feeling Very Bad

We went on our first walk of the year today.

For normal people with normal dogs, a walk is an event to celebrate; an occasion to be marked by joyous barking. For our family, we go on walks because that is what people with dogs do, and not because any of us particularly enjoy it. Mina hates her harness, Stanley is afraid of his collar, and Paco simply does not walk. And Chris and I have to walk so far apart that we might as well be on separate walks.

Chris is usually in front with Mina. Although she will stand frozen when we put her harness on her in the house, she becomes an entirely different animal once we get outside. Suddenly she is a speedwalker; legs moving rapidly and hips swinging from side to side. And if she sees a squirrel? Flo-Jo, baby.

Sometimes Chris lets her off-leash so she can chase a squirrel. She has never been able to catch one, but we prefer not to crush her dreams. Once she loses sight of the squirrel, she circles nearby trees and stares expectantly up into the branches until Chris convinces her that she has successfully made the squirrel disappear and can resume speedwalking.

Then we have Stanley, who keeps a consistent pace and distance exactly halfway between me and Chris when I’m holding his leash. Because Paco almost always trails behind me and will stop at the slightest tug on the leash, I end up falling more behind Chris as the walk continues, and Stanley walks further ahead of me in an effort to catch up with Chris.

Paco was so slow today that I had to give Stanley’s leash to Chris so that my arm wouldn’t be stretched out with Stan walking so far ahead of me. While Chris and the two dogs gradually lengthened the distance between us, I started talking smaller and smaller steps in an effort to avoid getting so far ahead of Paco that he would stop moving altogether.

“It’s more tiring to walk this slowly than at a regular pace,” I complained, during one of the few moments when we caught up with Chris because Mina and Stanley were busily marking every available blade of grass.

“Well, he doesn’t like walking,” Chris said. “He does this every time.”

“But he’s usually not this slow. I mean, this is REALLY slow. Do you think there’s something wrong with him?”

“There’s nothing wrong with him! He’s just lazy,” Chris said.

I kept worrying. One of Pedro’s symptoms when he first got sick was that he would sit down during walks and refuse to continue walking. We hadn’t known anything was wrong, and I had pulled him with the leash to get him to walk. Then I found out he was suffering muscle weakness, and then he was dead. Since then, I had refused to pull on any dog’s leash.

Paco had tested negative for Pedro’s disease, so I knew he wasn’t walking slowly because of the same problem, but maybe there was something else wrong with him. Maybe the diet he’d been on for two years had been too strict and now he was faint with hunger and unable to walk. Maybe the winter had weakened his legs. Maybe he had some kind of tapeworm.

We turned onto our street. If there are no dogs visible, we sometimes take Paco off his leash and run with him to our house. This is the only time during a walk when Paco gets ahead of the other dogs because he knows that he’s heading home.

“Try running with him,” Chris said.

I took Paco’s leash off and tried to get him to run, but he still slowed to a walk after a short attempt at running.

Once we were all gathered in front of our house, Chris and I checked the dogs for ticks.

“Take off his harness,” I said to Chris, as he looked over Paco. “It’ll be easier to check.”

Chris began to remove the harness, and then stopped suddenly.

“How did you do this, woman?” he bellowed.

“Do what?”

Chris showed me Paco’s harness. One loop of it was wrapped firmly and tightly around his leg. We couldn’t even pull it off easily because of how tight it was on. Every step must have pulled fiercely at his leg.

“You stuck the neck hole around his leg,” Chris said, working on the harness.

“So where did I stick his neck?” I wondered.

“No, I mean you stuck the neck AND the leg into the same hole.”

My first thought was horror, that I had subjected Paco to this pain and blamed him for his slowness. My second thought was pride — the DIET HAD WORKED! He was so thin now that his neck AND leg could fit into the neck hole!!!!!!!!!!!!

Of course, I felt so guilty that I gave him lots of treats once we made it into the house. Subconsciously, I may have been trying to fatten him up so that I wouldn’t make this mistake ever again.

Posted by: ssjane | April 9, 2008 | 5:25 pm
Posted in: Dogs