My Dog’s Love-Hate Relationship with Monsoon Season

By Emily Esterson, 7-27-06

	Caption: The calming during the storm

As I write this I'm watching a monster thunderstorm move over the farm, and I'm trying to keep my Golden Retriever from nosing my hand off the keyboard.

While the rest of the Rockies is baking, New Mexico is getting just about all the rain it missed from October to June, in a few short days. Every afternoon the clouds bubble up to the north and fill the valley. By 6:00 pm a full-on boomer complete with hair-raising lightening is in force. Forget fire season. It lasted for a month or two in February. We're in flood season, complete with people getting swept away in arroyos and flash floods and the dreaded "small stream advisory," whatever that means.

The dog alternately loves monsoon season, and loathes it. Golden Retrievers are natural water dogs, drawn to any kind of liquid, whether the skanky mid-summer Rio Grande or the puddle I made when I dumped and scrubbed the water trough. Oly (the Golden in question) has been known to curl himself up into the goats' trough, which is barely a foot in diameter (he's 90 lbs), especially on a hot day. Point him to a stream and he's in it. We have to take him on leash when we run the irrigation ditches, otherwise he's leaping and swimming in the irrigation canals. Imagine Oly's bliss, the morning after one of these two-hour-long downpours that our desert soil is ill-prepared to absorb. He makes straight for the nearest mud puddle and lays down in it. Big-ass doggie smile.

But Oly's also a big chicken. We often know the thunder's coming long before it does by the neurotic panting and pacing and demanding nature of our huge, wimpy dog. Last night (it stormed all night) he slept in the bed with me (never allowed), just so I could keep him from panting dog breath into my nose all night. When he got restless he jumped down and literally sat on my husband, on the couch where he was watching TV. Tonight he is sitting on my feet, cowering under the desk, in between barking, panting, running to the door, and flipping his nose under my wrist to get it to stop typing and pet him.

Oly is also epileptic. Not seriously so, just the occasional seizure now and then. Since epilepsy is correlated with the electrical impulses and the firing of neurons (pardon me, I'm no doctor), I've often wondered if the electrical current in the air during a storm sets off a mild form of neurological misfiring. I don't know if there are any studies, but if the monsoon keeps going like it is now, I may have to initiate one. In the meantime, anybody have a spare Xanax or the Cesar Milan's phone number?

I am a fan of the Dog Whisperer, and last evening during the worst of the thunder, when I was petting and cuddling and otherwise reassuring my neurotic pup, I realized that Cesar would most certaily scold me. I am (I thought) reinforcing Oly's neurosis. It's a classic co-dependent relationship. He gets scared, I comfort him. He likes being comforted (because retrievers are love sponges), so he continues to be scared, or at least act like he is. I bet if I let him outside, he'd head for the nearest puddle and forget all about the storm. Or maybe he'd have a seizure. I may never know, because I'm a sucker for a demanding dog, even if it is only seasonal.

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