On the clock for 15 years…

Copper, our busy senior Malinois, was not an easy puppy.  Few Malinois are.  If you’re a first-time puppy owner and for some reason think that it’s a good idea to get a Malinois, go and get yourself checked in.  Few people are qualified to take on this kind of level of responsibility.  I have LITERALLY been on the clock for over 15 years.  15 years of training, 15 years of preventing boredom and the inevitable destruction that follows the boredom.  Every Day.  Don’t get me wrong, he has an off switch and as he’s gotten older we’ve been able to relax our guard little by little, but still, at the age of 15 years old, he has the capacity to get bored and get ‘into stuff’.

At a little over a year and a half, we started competing.  He had shown that he was starting to understand complex concepts in locations that were unfamiliar to him – he had learned to generalize. 

At about three and a half years old, I was finally at a stage where I genuinely liked him.  Don’t get me wrong, I have loved him since the moment he fell asleep in my arms at the tender age of 4 weeks at the breeder’s house but liking him is a different matter.  At three and a half I was able to let my guard down a bit and really trust him to not make crap decisions constantly. 

Photo by Pupart

Somewhere at about eight years old he really wowed me.  This boy had come into his own and we seemed to have this near telepathic connection.  We seemed to know instinctively what we each needed.  It’s not that we didn’t have plenty of miscommunication in the ring, but the emotional support that we each required was crystal clear. I understood him and he understood me, and there was this connection that I can’t explain except that it was akin to finishing each other’s sentences.

At ten years old I sat him down and asked why he couldn’t have been this dog for the past ten years.  He explained to me: “I was cookie dough. I wasn’t not done baking. I wasn’t finished becoming whoever the hell it is I was gonna turn out to be.”.  I asked him why he was quoting Buffy?  He told me to throw the damn ball.

Photo by Caprise Adams Photography

At 12 years old, I could start to see the body was telling him he wasn’t four anymore.  His mind called BS on his body and he kept on pushing.  His mortality starting weighing on my mind as I had already seen some of his peers pass away.  He injured his iliopsoas and I was grateful that I’d already retired him from agility and obedience.  My planning for his future seemed almost prescient, as that injury is generally considered career ending.  I was just grateful that I’d started his nose work journey a couple of years earlier.

He’s 15 years old now and he’s probably the last man standing.  He is still completely capable of getting ‘into stuff’ and I am still ‘On the Clock’.  If you leave a plastic bottle at dog height, it had better be empty because he will steal it and use it as a toy. If you leave a bag on the couch, he will rummage around in it until he finds a suitable toy (aka something that is clearly NOT a toy). If his ball ends up under the entertainment center, he will annoy the crap out of you until you rescue it and then he will immediately punt it back under the entertainment center.  He will still chase a groundhog/rabbit/squirrel out of the yard.  He will still bark at cars/bikes/trucks and other offensive vehicles on his roadway.  However, he can still find the 8ft hide or the deep inaccessible one, or the hide that’s 4ft from another hide.  He can still jump on the bed, leap into the car and other crazy Malinois crap that his Vet and Chiropractor cringe over.

He’s 15 years old and I wouldn’t give up a single one of the grey hairs he caused for the world.

 

We still have time, but maybe not enough.

You’d think that one of the hardest parts of dog sports is the crushing failures.  When you set out to do something, then promptly crash and burn because you didn’t know enough, or didn’t think through ALL of the possible ramifications, or the variables required for training a behavior.

That’s not it.  It’s seeing your dogs’ peers grow old and pass away. 

Photo by Angel Sallade Pet Photography

Maybe it’s because many Malinois have the beginnings of a white soul patch by the time they hit a year.  Maybe it’s because I’ve seen him almost every day of his 11.5 years…But I don’t look at Copper and think of him as ‘old’. 

The guy still leaps in the air, chases the rabbits (he caught one last year, his first!). I only just retired him from Agility this spring – He was going to kill himself not slowing down for the dog-walk.  He had achieved FIVE Agility Championships.

Copper enters agility retirement after completing his NATCH3 and VNATCH2 (Bernie Doyle Judge)

 

I retired him from Obedience about that time too, but not because he couldn’t do it (though, I’ll admit, at his final trial we used an Exercise Modification to drop the jump height down). 

Copper entering Obedience Retirement after completing his Championship under Sharon Jonas

 

Obedience was always my ‘bag’, and who can blame him since I introduced heeling with old school pop-jerk methods – I shaped every behavior after that with R+!  So, when he got his Obedience Championship, I told him that he never had to ‘Heel’ again.  He’d still love to do it though,  but sadly Obedience requires heeling in ALL the classes.  Maybe one day they’ll come out with a ‘tricks’ only class, that has everything bar heeling.  Until that day…

I know that several of his old Rally buddies have passed away.  Dogs that got us into the sport, which we ended competing neck-to-neck against.  Rally was our first love, our gateway drug to dog sports.   His Obedience career spanned 9 years and overlapped with a lot of his Rally buddies, but some were Obedience only.  When you compete regularly, with the same crowd, sometimes one of the regulars stops coming to a trial, and you can’t help but wonder.

Mary and Herc inspired me to do more. We finished our RAE at the same trial under Donna Darland.

I judge too, so I travel around the Midwest for competitions.  It might be 6 months between seeing dogs and that’s when the aging hits you.  You’ll notice that there’s more grey and maybe they aren’t throwing themselves into it as much as they did six months ago.  Other things will stand out too, the lumps and bumps that most dogs get as they grow older.  Copper even has some too.

This morning I found out that one of his Agility buddies passed away.  In class these two would regularly ramp each other up, so we kept a close watch to avoid an ‘event’ where a bad decision might be made – Agility can be very exciting and can be difficult in a group class.  When you have a herding dog, they generally like organization, and the chaos of other dogs running around, having fun, can sometimes be too much.  We had excellent instructors who knew the issue, were careful and encouraged using R+ methods to work on keeping them calm.  I discovered Control Unleashed which helped me a LOT! 

I’ve been looking after this dog too.  Over the past year, when her mom was out of town, I’d walk her and watch her give the squirrels and bunnies an extra look.  She was fun, sweet and full of character.

It just hits you though.  At any moment you could lose them. 

You also think about your dogs’ litter mates.  To my knowledge, Coppers are all still trundling around the USA, though I know that one of them has ill-health.  I do know that Copper has lost at least one half-brother to cancer – the big ‘C’ that everyone hates in every species.  Copper’s daddy was prolific and pretty popular in his day – A regular stud!  I take comfort knowing that his Mom lived to 15 and his aunt lived to 16.  I remember seeing them when they were about his age and they were pretty spry too. 

All I can say is that every day is special.  Treasure them.  Give them that extra sniff walk they’ve been begging for.

 

Dedicated to Dede

 

“My heart has joined the Thousand, for my friend stopped running today.”

― Richard Adams, Watership Down