As I’ve mentioned here before, the dog is partial to a bark. No, “partial” is the wrong word. This is more in the mental territory of secret online gambling or drinking gin out of a coffee cup. It’s compulsive.
Please don’t tweet me to tell me what we’re doing wrong. We’ve tried an interminably long list of strategies. Even the dog behavioural person said she’s nuts (“It’s the breed,” she said, but I know what she meant). She suggested something with a clicker and then stopped answering our calls.
And the barks are irritating on a physical level. A mixture between a shriek and a cough, they are at a frequency that skewers the inside of the ear. They explode out of her, with no warning, sometimes singly, sometimes in combinations.
Yet we’ve got used to it. Sort of. When she barks at noises. When people appear, she becomes frantic.
She’s never bitten anyone, or even threatened to. Visitors get a lot of tail wagging, and often she’ll pee on their shoes. But the barking is relentless. When Herself gets window cleaners to do the outside of the house, the dog goes berserk and remains so until they leave. It’s like she’s having a nervous breakdown. She gets so agitated, I half expect her to keel over, her paws clutched to her chest.
Garden tumble
We’re getting exterior insulation work done that will take about a month. That’s a month of constant, hysterical 9-5 barking. And she can keep that up. No problem.
We got a preview of this when the man came to do the survey. She leapt out of Herself’s arms at the Outsulation Man, missed, and tumbled down the stairs of the decking. The Outsulation Man was very understanding about the whole thing. He has a dog too. Just not a crazy one.
Afterwards, we noticed that she was limping: she’d clearly hurt herself. And the following morning, she wasn’t just limping, she was, by her standards, acting weird. She wouldn’t go into the garden for her allocated barking time. She whined a bit, but hardly made any noise.
Circumstances meant it fell to me to bring her to the vet. As we waited, she wouldn’t leave my lap. She snuggled under my arms, trembling incessantly. She kept peering into my face, as if pleading with me to make her feel normal again, to explain why her world had suddenly become a strange and fearful place. And it struck me what a distinctly vulnerable creature she is.
I rarely have such moments with the dog. I’m usually telling her to shut up.
Invisible phantoms
But it was only a moment: the emotional ferment she seemed to be experiencing was actually down to a pain in her hip. Once she got some painkillers, it was like it never happened. She got back to barking and running around the garden after invisible phantoms.
In advance of the outsulation, I’ve been replacing the decking boards, partly for aesthetic reasons, but mostly because some of the boards had become brittle and potentially dangerous. Every time I pulled an old one up, new smells would erupt and she’d scuttle over to have a sniff. She was so engrossed, she didn’t even notice when one of the old boards collapsed underneath me, crashing me into the joists underneath.
The impact shaved a large slice of skin from my left knee and caused it to swell to twice its size. It was exquisitely painful, but I could still walk, so our in-house physician was able to diagnose it as a bone bruise.
I spent the next 24 hours popping anti-inflammatories with a bag of frozen marrowfats taped to my leg. Both the dog and I now sported decking-related injuries. And this should be the bit when I tell you that, after our bonding experience, the dog sensed this, and tried to comfort me. But no. The dog didn’t give a damn.
