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My Sister’s Dog

Several months ago, my sister and her husband bought a puppy, an Irish terrier who is about the cutest little puppy in the history of time.

Click the image for a larger size

I mean, come on! How is that not cute?

They bought her from a farm in Oregon, and took her back to the big bad city of Seattle. And here’s where the big problem comes: they both work full-time, so they crate her, for almost the entire day, and all night, only letting her out for maybe 20 minutes while they’re on lunchbreaks, then all evening until they go to bed. Meanwhile, the puppy develops odd anxiety issues like a serious fear of humanity, cars, and rain. Granted, she wasn’t exposed to “city things” (like an overabundance of people and cars, and perhaps she lived in the three-mile stretch of Oregon where it doesn’t rain constantly), which is what they attribute the anxiety problems to, but…imagine if you were trapped in a darkened box most of the day and all night, with no way out escape?

I’m not a pet psychologist (or a human psychologist), but it just seems like basic logic that this would cause some angst and stress. My parents and I expressed our distaste for the crate, and in one of my sister’s trademark instances of goofy irony (and a trademark instance of her not reading carefully), she forwarded us a website that explains how crating animals is a good thing. And true, a bit of it is pro-crate, but near the bottom it says the following:

Never crate your pet longer than you know he can wait to eliminate, and definitely less than 4 hour intervals during the day.

…

1. The use of a dog crate is NOT RECOMMENDED for a dog regularly left alone all day, although some individual animals can tolerate it. If it is attempted:
   • The pet must be well exercised before and after crating.
   • The crate must be equipped with a heavy, non-tip dish of water.
   • Your pet should get lots of attention and complete freedom each night.
2. If you do not have time to take a puppy or dog outside to eliminate and exercise as recommended here, you should reconsider getting a dog as a pet. Crate or no crate, any dog consistently denied the attention and companionship it craves, may still find ways to express bored anxiety, and stress

So there you go: they leave her locked up for more than four hours at a time, the definitely don’t take her out for exercise in the morning and are, more than once a week, too lazy to take her out after work, so as this guide says they should have “reconsider[ed] getting a dog as a pet.” It even says right there that crating causes anxiety and stress!

But no, it wouldn’t be being locked up all day. Clearly she’s just having trouble adjusting to the city. Oh wait, that’s not even it — they took her to a puppy training course, and the instructor suggested after the third or fourth week (when the puppy showed no signs of improvement regarding the anxiety) that they put her on medication. My sister put her foot down about this.

Believe it or not, despite her hilarious self-absorbtion, Tracey usually seems reluctant about the crate. Sure, she sent the article defending it, but you can usually catch a hint of “I don’t think this is right” in her voice when she talks about it, to the extent that she decided to call it “the spaceship” to make it “fun” for the puppy (and to justify the cruelty to herself). However, she went along with it because she and I never had a dog as kids; Jack did, so she’s deferring to him in most cases. He thinks the crate is fine — they do the crate. He is gung-ho about the anti-anxiety pills — Tracey rebels.

While she never blamed the crate, she did talk him into letting the puppy out, to roam around the house at night. They figured if she can do that without consistently waking them up or getting into trouble, after a month or so they’d start letting her out during mornings, then all day — and she’d be free, at least within the confines of the house.

Still, on the recommendation of their training instructor, Tracey and Jack had a dog behaviorist come over, check out the environment, check out the dog, and see if she really needed medication. His inexpert diagnosis: she could have House favorite Addison’s disease. It’s rare in dogs, even rarer in puppies, but apparently the puppy came from “a litter of one” (I believe this is the slogan of the U.S. Army’s surprisingly successful canine unit), and this is a “special enough” circumstance for the behaviorist to suggest that Addison’s could be the culprit.

According to a 100% accurate website that was the #1 Google hit for “Addison’s disease in dogs,” here are the symptoms of Addison’s disease in dogs:

Most dogs with Addison’s disease initially have gastrointestinal disturbances like vomiting. Lethargy it also a common early sign. Poor appetite can occur as well. These are pretty vague signs and it is extremely easy to miss this disease. More severe signs occur when a dog with hypoadrenocorticism is stressed or when potassium levels get high enough to interfere with heart function. Dogs with this problem will sometimes suffer severe shock symptoms when stressed, which can lead to a rapid death. When potassium levels get high heart arrythmias occur or even heart stoppage which also is fatal. In some cases, especially secondary Addison’s disease, there are no detectable electrolyte changes.

Apparently their puppy has “two of the four main symptoms” (I’m not sure which two — it doesn’t say much about anxiety, though the “severe shock symptoms when stressed” is discouraging), so they took her to the vet for the first in a three-stage test: a blood test. The blood work came back “suspicious enough for the vet to proceed to step two.” So I think it’s good to check for Addison’s, since it’s a serious disease that could kill the puppy if it’s unchecked…

…but it seems pretty unrelated to the anxiety/stress. It says many of the symptoms worsen (or new symptoms appear) when the dog is stressed, but the disease doesn’t cause the stress. So let’s say they save the puppy’s life…what next? Will they stop the constant crating? It’s been about four months since my sister said “maybe in a month we’ll let her out during mornings,” and the last we heard — a couple of weeks ago — they had just bought a new crate because the dog was outgrowing the old one.

The thing about the dog that really bothers me is that it seems like they bought her for the wrong reasons. They treat her like a toy, not a living creature, and then they wonder why she has issues. They bought her because my sister’s nurturing instincts are kicking in, but (according to Jack) they aren’t ready to have kids. Solution? A dog. But they aren’t treating the dog in the same way they would treat a child. I’m not saying you would necessarily leave a baby to her own devices when you leave for work, but that’s exactly the issue: they’ve always said that they’ll have kids when they stop traveling and when my sister is ready to give up her job, because those are the sacrifices they need to raise a child. They aren’t willing to make similar sacrifices for the puppy, and while they don’t really have to in the sense that Tracey needs to quit her job, they could split the difference by dog-proofing their stupid house and letting her run wild. Or locking her in the big downstairs bathroom so she has more room to breathe. Why does she have to be locked in a crate that’s barely large enough to fit her and a water/food dish? Especially when they won’t acknowledge that maybe the crate is part of the problem?

I mentioned jokingly to my parents and to Lucy (who knows more about the puppy situation than anybody ever wanted to) that I should e-mail my sister and say if they let me live there for free and give me a fat per diem (that’s a fancy word for “allowance”), I’ll be a dogsitter. Even though I’m allergic. Supposedly Irish terriers are one of those hypoallergenic dogs, so it won’t be too bad as long as I’m not constantly fondling her. Which ruins all my fun.

Anyway, both my parents and Lucy actually jumped on that idea, thinking — in all seriousness — that it is a great idea for the benefit of the puppy, and that if I’m just there for a few months the dog will adjust to some semblance of normalcy and can put her traumatic childhood behind her. I’m not sure if I’ll actually do that, but now that I’m committed to blogging daily, I’ll keep both of my readers posted.

Posted by Stan on April 23, 2007 12:15 PM  | Permalink | Family: The Horror… | Digg It