Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)

Is My Dog a Candidate For Paxil?

By Bob Wire, 2-20-10

	I thought you needed opposable thumbs to do that.

Separation anxiety. Abandonment issues. Obsessive-compulsive disorder. Auto-erotic fixation. Low self-esteem. Possible Napoleon complex. I tell you what, this family member needs some professional help in the worst way. But I’m not sure what kind of help I’m going to be able to afford. I mean, sure, I love him, but money is money. And he’s a dog.

Houdini, our 8-year-old Daschund/Rottweiler/Ferret cross, is getting more neurotic with age. He’s physically pretty healthy, maybe a touch overweight. I was noticing that just this morning as I gave him a plateful of garbage. He’s developed a small lump on his side, that’s either a harmless fat nodule, or an Indian Manitou spirit embedded in his flesh. I’ll ask his vet when I take him in for his annual check up next month. Like most dogs, he’s motivated solely by food and sleep. So to the untrained eye, he appears to be pretty normal.

His behavior, though, has gone from curious to annoying to almost alarming. It starts with his poor self-esteem. His self-image must be totally abysmal, because he refuses to be the alpha dog even when he’s alone in the house. He must think he’s not worthy. I’m home most of the day, and he sticks to me like a remora to a shark. If I start down the hallway and stop short to go back for something I’ve forgotten, he mirrors my movements exactly, barely avoiding getting stepped on. He has no concept of “a priori” existence and seems to be afraid that I won’t continue to be there from one moment to the next. He’s so insecure that I can eyeball him into any room. He breaks a staredown in less than a second and slinks through the nearest doorway.

I understand that his chronically submissive personality probably stems from abuse suffered when he was a puppy, but damn, boy, it’s been seven years! The only abuse I’ve ever doled out is not breaking his pizza bones in half.

He’s smart enough to know different words, just as we’re smart enough to have learned to interpret his different barks. There’s his “let me in now” bark, his “let me out, I see the neighbor dog” bark, and his “holy crap, I think I see a deer two miles away” bark. He’s smart, but not book smart. When I activate the garage door opener, he squeezes under the door as soon as he can fit, instead of waiting for one second for it to raise high enough for him to walk out of the garage with dignity.

When we go out for a walk through the neighborhood, he capers around me, refusing to run free. He waits for me to snap his leash on him so he can immediately start pulling against it, choking himself in the process. He has absolutely no concept of traffic. He’ll trot straight toward an oncoming vehicle as if they’re delivering a truckload of Liv-A-Snaps. He’s got the neck muscles of a full-grown pit bull, because of me constantly pulling on the leash to stop him short of some instant death situation.

During the walk, he jams his snout down holes in the dirt, rams his head deep into every shrub, and of course sniffs every surface to see if it’s worthy of a squirt of his piss. (It always is.) But when he comes across a pile of dog crap, he approaches it with the care of a bomb technician trying to defuse a C4 plastique device. He creeps up slowly on it with every fiber of his being focused into his nostrils. He gets his nose as close as he can without touching it, and sniffs relentlessly over every square centimeter of the pile, like he’s trying to memorize its genome code. Meanwhile, I stand at the other end of the leash, shaking my head because I have seen this same dog gnaw a wad of unknown gunk out of the gutter.

And then there’s the separation anxiety. He knows we live here. We’re here all the time. But sometimes we have to be somewhere else. We always come back. If we’re gone more than 18 hours, he’ll spend the night with a friend. But if I so much as go down to the roadway to get the mail, he’ll greet me thirty seconds later as if I’m returning from a two-year hitch in Afghanistan. We all like to be needed, but this is ridiculous. I’m almost afraid to drive across town because I’m afraid that I’ll come home to find him hanging from an overhead pipe in the basement, a rambling suicide note on the floor. That’s silly, of course. His neck is too strong.

PetMD.com Veterinarian Board actually recommend anti-depressants to supplement therapy for Houdini’s separation anxiety. And perhaps some doggie tranquilizer for when we’re traveling, or when he’s freaking out over 4th of July fireworks. Great. That’s all I need, a dog that takes more drugs than I do. Whatever. As long as he stays away from my whiskey.

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By Bob Wire, 2-20-10 | comments (15) | email story | print story