My Greatest Giftsby Jenny PavlovicI don’t participate in the sales, the super shopping, running around completely stressed, many of the things we’re ‘supposed’ to do during this holiday season. I think Christmas is supposed to be about love, and I don’t know how buying stuff for people became equated with love. It’s a misguided notion that helps drive the economy, but puts a lot of stress on people.

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Derailing the TrainBy Jenny PavlovicWell, I certainly didn’t see this coming. My oh-so-special dog Chase has been diagnosed with cancer. As cancer does, it came like a blow to the gut when least expected, and suddenly figuring out what to do about this fast-growing disease was our top priority. Chase had blood in his stools for a few months, but the vet couldn’t find anything wrong. Then one day in June she felt a lump and we scheduled a surgery to have it removed. Probably just a benign polyp, we thought. But on surgery day she discovered that the lump was growing and had ruptured. The histopathology report came back “colonic adenocarcinoma”… cancer.

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Coming Homeby Jenny PavlovicFor most of my adult life, I’ve come home at the end of a long work day to a house with energetic dogs. Their need to get out and play has kept me from becoming a couch potato. When I say that I have to get home to let the dogs out, it’s not a complaint. I look forward to it, because there’s not much that I enjoy more than getting out with the dogs. Knowing that they’ve been confined all day and need to get outside to run and play and take in all the smells of nature makes me think the couch can wait. I’m grateful for the gentle breezes, the smell of freshly mown grass, beautiful fields of daisies, majestic bald eagles, spectacular fireflies, amazing northern lights, and crisp clear stars that I have discovered once the dogs lured me outside.In June I was fortunate to return to Bimini to swim with wild dolphins. You may recall that last year I wrote about the spirit dogs of Bimini (http://www.8statekate.net/wordpress/?p=2632). These three dogs joined me on a walk down the road, reminding me of my three dogs back home. They were even the same colors as my guys, and walking with them felt very much like being on a walk with my three at home, just when I was missing them the most.

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The Little Girl Who Jumps Up and Downby Jenny Pavlovic (and Chase)There is nothing quite like the feeling of seeing a little girl jump up and down when your dog enters the library. Her joyful enthusiasm makes you smile. She read a story to your dog last month and wants to read to him again. She doesn’t have a dog at home. Your dog knows just how to be calm while she jumps, then snuggle in next to her on the quilt and give her his undivided attention while she reads a story to him. She’s just learning to read and gets frustrated easily by new words. She’s been teased and bullied on the playground at school. You want so much to build her confidence, to let her know how beautiful and smart and wonderful she is. That when we encounter something unfamiliar, like a new word, we can discover it like a treasure.

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Show Me the Way: Adventures in Tracking Trainingby Jenny PavlovicThe task was to teach each dog to touch a glove held in my hand, then to touch the glove on the floor, then to cross the room and touch the glove on the floor. The idea was to teach the dog to indicate when s/he had found the glove (or “article”) when out tracking in the great outdoors. In tracking practice or competition, another person would have left a track with articles (gloves, socks, bandannas, or similar) with their scent for the dog to find along the way. I would be following the dog on a long line, but in a test I wouldn’t know the locations of the articles, so the dog would have to sniff out each article and clearly indicate it to me without backtracking.

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On the Right Track: What Your Dog Nose by Jenny Pavlovic“The universe is full of magical things, patiently waiting for our wits to grow sharper.” ~ Eden PhilpottsHave you ever gotten down on the floor on all fours to view the world the way your dog sees it? While you might get a better idea of what your dog sees from that vantage point, your dog isn’t really looking as much as she is smelling, or “viewing” the world through her nose.

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by Jenny Pavlovic – Willis and I were in the backyard for his last potty stop, late at night. It was almost Halloween, and the moon was just about full. I heard a rustling in the leaves and saw a small rodent coming into the yard under the chain link fence on the south side. I turned and moved toward him, to steer him away from the house. Willis followed me and the rodent paused, then turned and went back out through the fence, shuffling it seemed, by the coarse rustling of leaves. Willis and I went back to our games so he could unwind a bit before bed time. A few minutes later, we were both paused by a loud rustling of leaves in the woods behind the yard. Was it a coyote? A dog? A deer? A mountain lion?

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article by Jenny Pavlovic Remember when Jeanne met Sam in Wisconsin near the orange moose (http://www.omegafields.com/blog/meant-to-be/)? In September, my cattle dog Bandit was traveling with me. On our way to visit family, we made a pit stop near the orange moose. I took Bandit out for a potty break, and then realized that he had not seen the moose before. I’d expected him to be distracted by the geese swimming in the pond by the parking lot, but he paid them no mind. As we approached the orange behemoth, Bandit stiffened, then crouched and emitted a low growl and a series of small “woofs”. His eyesight is not his best sense, and he had not caught the scent of this giant orange statue that demanded his attention. He just knew that it was a very large hoofed animal that must need to be herded.

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by Leigh Pyron – A few years back I received a call from a woman who was having some behavior problems with her year and a half old Yellow Lab named Keaton. Keaton had always been very mouthy as a puppy, but now as an adolescent he had started practicing another bad habit of nipping people and their clothing whenever he would greet them. In addition, he had started acting aggressively on the leash, barking, lunging and growling at other dogs.

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by Jenny Pavlovic – One day in August I arrived home to find a baby snake on the basement floor in front of my dog Chase’s kennel. Any snake sets off a visceral reaction that usually makes me scream and jump out of my shoes. Somehow, a snake is always a surprise. It must be a survival instinct for my heart rate to go up and the hair on the back of my neck to stand at attention.

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