Do I really hate my life and everyone in it, or is it just PFS?

  

Puppy Fatigue Syndrome (PFS)

 another look back: nostalgia on anti-depressants

 

I’ve been instructing clients for years regarding the care of their new kittens and puppies. I’ve fine tuned my casual chat, surfeit with expectations and worries that come with adopting a young pet. There are wormers and vaccinations, diet and obedience. I speak at length about paper training vs back garden pottying, biting and chewing issues.  There is a general theme of consistency, trundled out with gentle care.  I encourage using recommendations from medical texts, followed up with soothing words from guide books that compare their soft little creatures to babies. They’ll grow out of it, I say; be patient, and most importantly, persevere.

It was only by some preternatural instinct that I addressed new pet owners like this: with calm words and marshmallow-soft expressions.  It was like giving advice to a new mother who hadn’t slept for weeks, and had suddenly found she’d been filling the bassinet a little higher with each un-slept night, even though I was myself childless.  They were hollow platitudes of the inexperienced and uninitiated.  Because until I’ve nursed a colicky baby til my nipples fall off or waded through the gurgling brooks of puppy diarrhoea in my living room, stepping between mangled remotes and eviscerated sofas, I am essentially just wind.  I’m a hypocrite and no more than voyeur to the madness.  It’s only when, on a dark 3am walk to the toilet, I've personally felt something unfamiliar squirt between my toes can I speak with a modicum of wisdom.  Accent this with no sleep and you see the darker side of yourself creep to the surface. And you think, Alf White my friend, you can kiss my ass!

***

For the first few evenings, Fionn lulled us into a false sense of security and slept through the night. There were accidents in his kennel, but he was mostly quiet until morning. Less than a week in, he began feeling a stronger need for pack support and the high pitched shrieking began.  That was day three.

At bedtime he muttered for a few minutes. It was a low hum that built into a quiet requiem of whines and developed into that crooning death howl that no floor/wall or pillow can muffle. We live in a block of apartments with neighbours on either side of very thin walls and don’t envy the idea of eviction. We tried all the remedies we’d ever recommended - the hot water bottle, the ticking clock, the soft music – but nothing pacified him. In the end Katie slept downstairs.  She took Fionn out whenever he cried, and played with him for awhile. The next day I came from the shower and saw my wife perched at the edge of our bed staring blankly ahead, swollen purple crescents under her eyes. She looked up and told me that Fionn had wanted to play the whole time. She hadn’t gotten more than twenty minutes sleep all night.

“This is going to be the worst day ever,” she said, her hands stuck halfway down her face.  She sighed, only her red-rimmed eyes peeking out, and burst into tears.

The next night I started sleeping downstairs with Fionn. I laid a mattress of blankets, pulled up my sleeping bag and camped by his kennel. I kept a finger in the cage and touched his back. He’d get a little restless, make a few turns and maybe squeak a bit, but he’d feel my hand and lay back down. He settled eventually, and we both slept – if not comfortably – without too much fuss.  And yet, it wasn’t ideal.

***

The truth is, we link these little creatures with the baby image because that's the most understandable comparison I can make. Learned people will claim this is anthropomorphic silliness (and I do my share), but the fact remains that this is a recently hatched beast - a small new voice that's been pulled from what he knows and dumped into an evening of isolation. He's a pack animal, used to the warm soft bodies of family. How can it be unreasonable to offer a gradual transition to this period? Would he learn faster if we just let him cry a few nights - realizing we were there in the morning and everything was really okay? Likely. But I just can't do it. I'm a vet - which makes the logic of training palatable - but I'm also a new dad (anthropomorphically speaking) and so ridiculously protective of this new addition to the family.

Unfortunately, this is a recipe for (temporary) exhaustion and a part of the responsibility I've unwittingly agreed to. It means finding the patience hidden deep below my sleep organ (which was new to me). Just like anything else, it all gets better. And after a relatively short transition – nights not weeks – he was sleeping through the night, curled up in the plush bed of his kennel. Fionn was sleeping like a baby. And so were we.

Eau de Kaka

  

Don’t let Fionn off his lead,’ Katie says, holding our dog at arms length.  ‘Get the door. Hurry.’

‘Hey, not so close,’ I say, dodging his jumps – confident that Katie’s giving him more lead for my benefit.  ‘Get out, I’m not touching him! He stinks!’
‘Okay,’ she says smiling.  ‘Just open the door and I’ll run him up to the bathroom.’

At the top of the stairs our little yellow dog is in full panic. Fionn hates baths. Baths are not a part of his routine, so baths are very very bad. The tub itself is a porcelain blue malevolence - it’s where 45% of accidents happen in the home. Baths will kill him as surely as that deflated pink balloon he saw yesterday, listing with malicious intent in a hedge off the footpath.

Up in the bathroom the door is barricaded and there is no escape – for any of us. There is a palpable sense of alarm. Fionn’s high stepping hurriedly over the tiles with the grace and calm of a thoroughbred in a room full of clear plastic bags. Katie turns on the taps and Fionn, in his heightened anxiety, jumps into the tub. Katie and Fionn stand and stare at one another. No one expected that.

The reality is, Fionn would hop into the tub because baths have become a routine. It’s actually a daily (sometimes twice daily) event. The pattern has not been popular at either end of the scrub brush. There is a common variable, though. It all corresponds to the day he discovered fox poo.

It all seemed to kick off while Katie and Fionn were together setting up house in D -. I kept Brigh with me in the South for two months while Katie took the boy North to settle in. On their new walks along the golf course, Katie began to detect a budding interest in rabbits and squirrels. Never one to notice them before – they criss-crossed his path with little occasion made - he’d now become obsessed with the chase. It was hard for Katie to get concerned; he was no where near catching one. His downfall was a glaring conspicuity – a notably pristine presence to put any small woodland herbivore off. In fact, I expect Fionn himself realised what he truly needed was a decent bit of camouflage.

Since then, fox poo has been the primary colour in Fionn’s make-up bag (though he will occasionally accessorize with lesser animal faeces). In a flash, he makes for the woods, scrabbles around in the brush and rockets out looking like Rambo – a long brown smear down the sides of his face, across his eyes with skids down his neck. It’s obvious when he’s caught a scent – his limbs vibrate; both ears prick up, while simultaneously he’s struck deaf. He’s not the best listener anyway, but when there’s fox poop nearby his mind is buzzing with the news. That single synapse in his skull is firing like mad - both neurons crackling off like fireworks. And once found, no amount of hollering will discourage him from the game.

If there’s any pride to be had for our dog in this, it’s his attention to detail. He has, with remarkable alacrity, developed a series of moves that serves to maximize the crap to Fionn ratio. It starts with a collapsing right forelimb that drops the side of his head several inches behind the offending muck. Now, with his back legs pin-wheeling forward, he propels his entire face and shoulder on. This single deft action serves to apply both downward pressure into the mess and a skidding effect that mashes and grinds the material all the way to bare skin. At a defined point when the shoulder slides past, the right hind collapses and Fionn effectively swims the rest of his body (side-stroke) across. It’s engineering poetry, really. Once the entire manoeuvre has been successfully completed, the sequence is repeated no less than thirteen times – in all directions, both sides - until there is no evidence of the fox having relieved itself in the vicinity whatsoever. If he’s played his cards right, every other fox, squirrel and badger within a five mile radius will be following us, strung along with the misapprehension that our dog is actually the woodland’s public loo.

With his war paint applied Fionn races wildly around, crashing and twirling through the woods in hyperactive glee. Whether he’s trying to scare up more wildlife or simply celebrating his stench is unclear. What is clear is that no amount of airing will dampen that smell. It’s smeared deep into his coat and we will all be heading for the tub room once more. It’s enough to make you cry. Of course, you might if you felt safe that’s all there was.

How is it that, no matter what you do, something horrible must happen to make you appreciate what you had? When things are grim, a dark sliver of perspective enters your world to illuminate how things could be far worse. Our dogs and cat are relatively healthy and neither Katie nor I suffer from chronic nose bleeds or clinical depression. Still, it seems strange that we never truly considered our prior good fortune until Fionn comes upon a dead rabbit – putrefied and rancid. It’s by far the most mouth wateringly rank odour I’ve ever had the misfortune to smell, and his face is covered. Fionn himself appears to be actually smiling, staring at me - both eyes black with rotten bunny insides - looking quite a lot like a panting Zorro. And I look at my dog and smile back. I choose to find this series of events ‘lucky’ for fear that tomorrow Fionn will stumble upon something worse - the decaying carcass of a fox maybe; the flesh of its ribs torn loose, its belly ripped open with putrid offal spilled out on the ground. It will be festering in a puddle of its own waste, having necessarily crapped itself to death.

As I walk my dog back to the car, a car that will invariably be travelling with every window down, I have to consider the attraction. Certainly there are other animal droppings that would be less offensive to tart himself up. Why couldn’t our little yellow dog find joy crawling across the nicer smelling horse apples or cow pats? Or even sheep or rabbit pellets. Of course, these aren’t carnivores so there’s no scent of incompletely digested meat. The odour pales for the comparison. And I think that it would be ridiculous for Fionn to roll around in cow or sheep poo anyway. It wouldn’t make any sense. That poop’s for eating.