Heidi is my Heart--AND a Therapy Dog

A LOT has happened since I tried my hand at blog writing several years ago. Heidi, our now FOUR year old German Shorthaired Pointer--is going nowhere. She is my heart. She's been certified as a Therapy Dog since March of 2009. We visit the hospital, Hospice, some nursing homes--do the Reading to Rover thing at the Library, make appearances at things like Special Olympics, the Make a Wish Foundation's Walk, the Alzheimer's Walk. She's very popular--she's a pretty dog.

I think sometimes that she's successful as a Therapy Dog BECAUSE she is a beautiful specimen. She came from field trial champions out of Ohio. I've often thought that the original owner's story to the Buckhead Humane Society that he'd had a heart attack may have been a little off. Probably this dog GAVE him the heart attack. I mean--WHY would you take on a Pointer puppy when you're in your seventies. These dogs are a LOT of work.

Our routine since 2008 is pretty established. EVERY morning--365 days a year--we wake up between 6:30 and 7:00 a.m. and somebody takes Heidi down to the creek for her morning run. After nine months, once he realized the dog was probably NOT going anywhere (and he began to like her) my husband started helping me with these duties. In the early days I was also helped by my next-door-neighbor's kindness--while OUR property is only an acre, HER property is more like five-eight acres--and she has a HUGE fenced in back yard. She allowed me to exercise Heidi there in the early days--which really helped. Every afternoon between 4 and 5 p.m. Heidi gets a SECOND walk to the creek. These days we have permission from all the neighbors to our right of our house to let her run, off-leash. from OUR HOUSE to the creek area--four properties away--which allows her even MORE freedom. EXERCISE is essential to this dog's happiness--and even with these two walks--it's really not enough. She was bred to run all day and she COULD run all day. Occasionally I arrange to visit a friend with a farm--usually a minimum 30-50 minute drive--and allow Heidi to run for several hours. She just gets stronger as the time passes. She also looks happier during those times than she does any other time. I worry that she suffers depression because she is not allowed to truly "HUNT." She does get to chase whatever she can find down at the creek each day.

What I call the creek is actually a small rainwater drainage ditch that runs behind the properties one street over--part of the city water maintenance system--with an access point located about four properties away from ours. Our neighborhood is the oldest subdivision in our town--and truth be known--back in the day a lot of this area was wetlands--but that was a time period when people thought it a good idea to just fill those swamps in and make them useable. We bought the last available (buildable) lot in this area twenty-two years ago to build our house. Some of the neighborhood's older residents still refer to us as "the NEW house." OUR property has long leaf pines growing on it, so it's not particularly low--but the house across the street cater-cornered from us had cypress trees in their front yard. The whole neighborhood is in a 100 year flood plain. And we've had a few minor floods in the neighborhood (but never on our property)--usually when the rainfall was too much for the creek because branch debris blocked up the pipes where it flows under the road. The creek is our salvation as far as exercising the dog is concerned. It's several acres of somewhat swampy area that goes out of the neighborhood to meet up with a much larger drainage ditch which in turn parallels a powerline right-of-way. Woods are on the other side of the right-of-way--and beyond that is the By-Pass. The Highway could be a real threat, but we decided to risk it some time back. Heidi needs to run--and fortunately she, as they say, "HUNTS CLOSE" in that she usually doesn't get farther than 50-100 yards away from us. If I ever get tired of waiting on her I just begin to walk out of the area and usually within a minute she is at my side. In spite of a year of dog training I can't say she really comes when I call. Not right away, anyway. Eventually. She's pretty stubborn. that One day she flushed an armadillo--I had no idea they could run so fast. Another time she disappeared into the woods and didn't come out, didn't come out--and I called and called. Finally, she burst out of the woods across the Right-of-way about fifty yards up and came tearing down towards me--right behind her a teen-aged deer. Heidi must have been playing with him in the woods. He pursued Heidi to the edge of the ditch, but when Heidi bounded across to my side and turned back to him as if to say, "Come On!" the deer saw me and froze. A few moments later he turned and bounded away.

First Impressions--new German Shorthaired Pointer

The first time I saw Heidi she was taking a dump in the middle of our backyard. We had heard our daughter's car door slam, signalling her arrival from Atlanta with "the dog." I went outside and was greeted by the sight noted above. Dogs look so weird when they are pooping anyway, that funny crouching position and the silly look on the face--although I admit I'd just as soon not have to try to pass the same test, so in all fairness...

Heidi's stomach was upset, and she was leaving a nasty oozing pile in our grass. She was VERY different from our previous dog, the Golden Retriever/Malamute mix. He had been a stocky, long-haired yellow dog with dark brown eyes. This dog was rail thin, had a dark brown head that made it difficult to see her features, and a mottled body that my daughter informed me was called 'Tick.' "She's liver and tick, Mom. She's beautiful," Lizzie told me repeatedly.

My husband's reaction to the dog differed from our daughter's. "She looks like she's possessed," he said.

I helped Lizzie unload the rhinoceros-sized dog crate and we set it up front and center in the den, to the side of the television set but still blocking several doors on the large entertainment system piece that takes up most of the north wall of our den. Lizzie had been given a bag of Pedigree dog food at the Humane Society, but she had informed me over the phone that ALL the people who owned dogs at her workplace fed their dogs something called Nutro. I had gone out to buy this Nutro from the local farm supply store (also the best DOG supply store in OUR little town. Whatever she was eating, it soon became evident that Heidi had GAS. Her silent but deadly emmissions were daunting and frequent.

Lizzie wanted the dog to sleep with her in her bed. I was determined to enforce the same no getting on ANY furniture rule we had used with our old dog. The weekend was filled with taking Heidi for walks during which she PULLED with the strength of an OX and throwing balls to her with the recently purchased "Chuck It." Heidi would CHASE a ball, but she wasn't very interested in bringing it back to the thrower, preferring instead to engage in her own chewing/attack game with it until something else distracted her--usually within seconds. "She needs to be trained, Mom," I was told. I could tell who would have to do the training. I had already engaged in my usual practice whenever I adopt a new hobby. I had been watching every episode of the Dog Whisperer I could find and had ordered several books and DVDs from Amazon. The next step would be to READ these books and apparently spend MUCH of my day working out a training schedule.

One plus was that the dog liked her crate. I had purchased a new bed for our other dog right before he died, but he had never liked it and therefore never used it. When I had packed up his dishes, collars, and leashes, I had bagged the bed as well and stored it away. This bed fit Heidi's crate like it was made for it, and after sleeping on a beach towel for a week, Heidi sacked out on the stuffed padded dog cushion with a look of total bliss.

Never answer your cell phone at a wine tasting--your daughter might give you a dog

It was after five on a Thursday, and we were with friends at a local wine tasting when my cell phone rang. It was our daughter, calling from Atlanta. "Mom, there's a purebred German Shorthaired Pointer at the Humane Society. Do you want her? She's beautiful." I told her truthfully that I didn't know the breed. "Mom, they're the BEST dogs, and this one is just beautiful. Do you want her?" Well, we had talked about getting another dog, but we weren't sure we wanted to make the commitment. I said I wasn't adopting a dog that I had not even seen. "But she'll be GONE! Mom, I'm going to get her. You will love her!"

I hung up the phone after telling her that I was not promising we would take that dog and told my husband Lizzie wanted to rescue a purebred German Shorthaired Pointer for us. "You told her no, didn't you?" he said. Two people at our table immediately said they knew someone who would want the dog if we didn't. This response, of course, made me perversely think that if others valued these dogs we might be interested in one too. Another phone call from Atlanta: she had the dog and she wanted to keep her. "Great," said my husband. "It's her dog. Let her take care of it." However, I knew that apartment living and two roommates weren't conducive to successful dog ownership. The next week consisted of lots of phone calls and emails and a few tears. My suggestions that Lizzie find a home for the dog up there met with stubborn opposition. Lizzie wanted her, and if we could just keep the dog for six months, Lizzie's apartment lease would be out and she and a dog-loving friend or two would rent a house with a fenced yard together. In the meantime, I had been doing some reading on the Internet, and I was feeling strong reservations. GSP's are HIGH energy dogs. They are sporting dogs, hunting dogs, bird dogs. They require a LOT of exercise, my sources said, and if they didn't get it they became destructive. The perfect home for a GSP was with a young athletic family, preferably a family living on acres of land. GSP's needed to run five to eight miles a DAY, and they were the perfect companion for the distance runner in the house. The thing was that there was no distance runner in our house. I'm 50, and my husband is 68. We had both just retired and planned to apply ourselves to our individual writing projects. He plays tennis, and I do photography, garden, quilt, do home maintenance chores, occasionally do yoga and/or hit the gym. There were no extreme athletes in this house. "You will lose so much weight walking her, Mom," my daughter said. The next weekend Lizzie brought Heidi home to stay for six months.

Six months ago...

Some background:

The old dog had died, and it had been very sad. We had recently retired during the summer following our youngest child's graduation from high school. That fall he joined his sister as a student at the University of Georgia. We were finally, after 24 years of kids, (he had two daughters who were 11 and 13 when I married him) empty nesters--well, empty except for a nineteen year old cat and a 14 year old dog.

Then the cat died in the late summer of 2006, and the following spring our old dog Windsor, a big handsome yellow Golden/Malamute mix, died peacefully and quickly late one afternoon of what looked like a heart attack. He was almost 15 years old. That night was one of the saddest and loneliest I have ever known. I remember tearfully saying to my husband that it seemed that all of the joy and purpose had gone out of our lives. He looked at me as if to say "and what am I? Chicken Soup?"

But anyone who has ever loved a pet, especially one who has been a member of the family for YEARS, understands. I had mourned the cat's passing, and as I told several people, I had had that cat longer than we'd had our son. But the cat had been a stray who had wandered up and was NEVER a friendly cat. She refused to be held, tolerated only a little petting before she would spit and hiss, and pretty much just allowed us to feed her--a LOT--especially towards the end when she was diagnosed with renal failure and we were giving her 4-6 cans of the most expensive cat food made (because we thought her days were numbered.) This strategy caused the cat to hang on for at least another full year.

But back to the dog, Windsor. Those first few nights the house seemed so lonely. It also didn't feel very safe, although this idea was ridiculous--there was an alarm system, and besides, the poor dog had been deaf and practically blind. and he had never met a stranger. For weeks we were questioned by neighborhood walkers, the postman, the UPS delivery person--"where was the dog?" and I'd find myself tearing up all over again as I reported that he had died. He was a special dog with ears that faced forward yet flopped over and he wore a continuous puppylike expression. He never barked or jumped up on people, and he was universally liked. His passing left a huge hole.

However, gradually it began to dawn on us that for the first time in our lives we were FREE. No work to go to. No kids at home. No PETS. We could do anything we wanted, whenever we wanted. It took weeks, or maybe even a couple of months, but we adjusted to the quiet and got comfortable with not having to make the evening walk that would ensure no accidents in the night (as Windsor had aged he had developed severe separation anxiety, so he wouldn't go outside and take care of his business. It didn't take many occurrences of him pooping on the playroom carpet for me to learn to make whether or not he had taken care of his business MY business.) We could go out of town for the day easily. If we planned an overnight trip, we simply asked a neighbor to pick up the paper and the mail. Freedom felt good.