Introspection Time

Sep 30 2014 : Mirror (Bangalore)

Today, I want to touch a sensitive topic ­ Our responsibility as pet parents. The first question to address is, do we have responsibilities at all? Yes, we do. We do legal ly and ethically. Legally, we are required to treat our animals well. That means give ample food, provide easy access to toilet, protection from the elements and at least some level of social interaction either with people or with other dogs. If not, by law, we can be fined and the dog can be taken away from us.

The more interesting question is our ethical responsibility.

Today, the mood in India is of “Clean India“. Socially, as pet parents, we take up responsibility by cleaning up after our dogs. Carry a plastic bag or newspaper and when our dogs poop, clean it up. Yes, we still need the social infrastructure of sufficient dustbins in public places. But we don't need to wait for that to happen to start building a habit of cleaning up after ourselves.

In India, while we believe in living in harmony with our environment and the animals around us, we have an explosion in the number of dogs. This balance needs to return. There are several organisations breaking their backs at spaying and neutering street dogs, not to add more dogs into the scene. We can do our bit by adding no more dogs of our own.

By learning as much as possible about dogs before getting a dog, we are less likely to be taken by surprise with how much of a responsibility a dog is. Seek out help of dog lover friends and behaviourists to know what you are in for. Pick your dog based on realistic estimations of what you are capable of doing. This way you are less likely to feel completely in over your head and less likely to abandon your dog.

To further reduce the likelihood of abandonment is to not create more dogs. So not breeding dogs that you have and spayingneutering your dog at the right age will show your solidarity with pet parents and the animal lovers community.

Adopting a dog is also a very nice gesture of responsible pet parenting. It helps take one more dog off the streets and gives a home to a dog that needs one, instead of adding more to an already unmanageable population.

Part of our diversity is that while some people love dogs, some others just can't stand them. Figuring out a way to live and let live is the only way to live in peace in such diversity. So it's critical to keep dogs leashed in public places where people who don't like dogs are going to be around.Work with local communities to see if there can be a time or space sharing arrangement in a local area for off-leash play for the dog. But not on streets. This is as much a responsibility towards our dogs as it's towards our fellow citizens around us.

Our streets are not safe for our dogs. They are full of manmade machines called cars that our dogs don't entirely understand. So it's important for us to protect them from the perils of speeding cars and not expect them to understand the “norms“ of this world.

Introspection is difficult. One that requires us to put away our sense of entitlement, put ourselves in others' shoes, in those of our dogs even and ask, “Are we doing right by them?“ It's a tough question to ask. But I promise you that if we all did it, it will help our own little community of animal lovers. It's introspection time.

Dealing with Diwali Stress

Sep 23 2014 : Mirror (Bangalore)

Diwali is round the corner and it’s time for us to start preparing for it. I don’t have to mention that it has to all start with a pledge not to burst loud crackers. We, pet parents, are just like any regular parent. We are aware that there are ‘family members’ who are highly sensitive to the noise. We want to celebrate the festival of lights, not sound and pollution.

One of the best Diwali plans would be to leave town — with your dog in tow; go to the hills or villages, far away from the din of the city during this festive season. If taking your dog on your holiday is not an option, please do not leave your dog behind and take off on your own. Diwali is NOT the time to leave a dog alone surrounded by terrifyiny sounds of firecrackers.

Remember that dogs can hear at least a magnitude better than us and Diwali is a terribly scary time for most dogs. They get highly stressed. If they have to be able to cope then we need to start bringing their overall residual stress levels as low as possible, so that they are calm and in a position to cope with Diwali. There are some neat tricks in the book for calming a dog.The first is walks. Yes, walking the dog every day can be an extremely calming exercise — if done right. The right way to walk a dog for calming purpose is to slow the pace down tremendously. Encourage your dog to sniff as much as possible during walks. The more he smells, the more his mind settles down.

We can do the same at home by giving him some nosework to do. Nosework is a fancy name for a very simple game.

Cut up treats into really small pieces, as small as the nail on your little finger. Scatter them around the house. Don’t be shy.

Scatter them around the entire house. The whole house. Make it tough for your dog. He will use his nose to start finding the treats. When he is looking in another room, you could even hide the treats in the next room so that he cannot see it but needs to use his nose to find it. It will take you all of five minutes to set this up. But your dog can take several minutes searching for it and will sleep for hours after that.

The next tool is — a special massage. When your dog is lying down, but not sleeping, sit next to him. If he does not get disturbed, then you can run your hand from his neck down to his tail in soft, long, slow strokes. Do this for about five minutes each day. This releases happy hormones in the body that can help the dog settle down further. Remember not to pet the dog when he is sleeping; do it only when he is awake. DO NOT touch the top of his head — start stroking from the neck and proceed downward. You can talk lightly to the dog, in a soothing voice. There’s even a special diet to calm your dog — curd rice. Add some til or yellu or sesame to the rice. Feed this concoction at night. This carb-heavy meal will make your dog sleep well. A well rested dog is a happy dog.

As pet parents, we need to stand together as a fraternity that recognises that this festival and its true spirit lies in creating light and joy in our lives and in those around us; not pain. And loud fire crackers cause a lot of pain!

Yoga for your dogs

By Sindhoor Pangal, Bangalore Mirror Bureau | Sep 1, 2014, 09.48 PM IST

We are all quite familiar with this concept of balance —be it the new corporate parlance of work-life balance or the old adage about all work and no play. What we are not familiar with is how this applies to dogs.

Classical training looked at keeping a dog physically fit and receptive to owner's commands. But there's more literature from different parts of the world that not only recognises the more cognitive part of animals' brains, but also their emotions. We are not talking about simple emotions like anger and joy, but the more complicated ones like love and grief.

If our dog is capable of these emotions, then one cannot help wonder how much more that furry head is capable of. That begs the question, are we mentally stimulating our dogs enough? It does not take much imagination to realise how difficult our life would be if there are no outlets for our mental faculties. Would the same not hold true for your dog too?

Let me ask you to indulge me in a little test. Take a little piece of your dog's all-time favourite food. Let your dog see that you have put the food on the floor. Quickly cover the food with a piece of kitchen towel or cloth. See how your dog solves this problem. I am quite sure that if you all wrote back to me with what your dog did, I would have as many different solutions as I have responses. Dogs are indeed smart and have a personality. 

So the next question to ask is: how do we ensure they get enough mental stimulation daily. For this, we just need to look at what are those pesky little areas where they seem to cause us inconvenience. See how they use their brain and play that back as a puzzle. For example, my Indy, Tigger, likes to tear things out. So I give her a newspaper, crumpled up with treats and stuffed into a box, which is then stuffed into a bigger box and taped up. She can go at it for quite a while and is spent at the end of it.

Another thing that dogs are so incredibly good at is using their nose. When they are born, for a few days they are blind and deaf. Even at that stage they can smell and smell well. So giving them something to use their nose is a great idea. Get them to sniff out hidden treats. As he starts getting better, complicate the game. Push his limits. He will surprise you at how good he is at sniffing out treats.

If you have a lawn, scatter treats around and let him sniff it out. It's like yoga for a dog. Nothing calms a dog down like this particular activity. When I was studying dog behavior in Norway, I was able to witness a project called Dog Pulse. The project measured the heart rate of a dog as he went about doing his usual activities. The dog that had come in for the test that particular day was a very stressed dog. His heart rate should have been at 120, but was at 200-plus. As he started sniffing out the treats the heart rate dropped gradually to 130.

This is the amazing thing about use of brain and indulging in calming activity. It exercises our dogs in areas where they are largely ignored. And it calms the dogs too. Blindly increasing physical exercise as a response to all issues is not going to solve the problem. If a dog is mentally stressed, his mental issues need to be addressed. Calming activities like nose work help reduce some of the mental stress in dogs.

Dogs hate to reden

By Sindhoor Pangal, Bangalore Mirror Bureau | Sep 8, 2014, 10.29 PM IST


Moving houses can be intimidating for anyone. Have you ever thought of how it would be for a dog? Moving a home, a fundamental place of warmth and comfort, is a very disconcerting thing for anyone who has gotten used to a way of life. But it gets harder with dependents. If the dependent is a child or an adult, a reasonable dialogue may ensue. If your dependent is your dog, then you are dealing with an individual who does not get the concept of 'moving'. Dogs make a den and unless they perceive a threat they don't see the need to re-den. Given the unlikelihood of your dog having perceived any threat in your current living arrangement, convincing the dog that a move is even on that cards is a tall ask.

We are moving house. In our case, we knew what we were in for. So we wanted to spare our dogs the stress of watching movers and packers in action. Don't get me wrong. Watching their clockwork like precision is quite fascinating. But for a dog, who is at this point basically taken completely off guard, to have someone come in take all their belongings, box it, take all their humans' belongings, box it and take it all away is utter madness! Some dogs may even get aggressive in an attempt to stop the sudden depletion of resources. So in our case, while one of us oversaw the packing and moving, the other was with the dogs — away from all of this.

We moved by 5 pm, or at least moved enough to call it a day and relax with a calming beverage of choice. Unfortunately for our dogs, the adventure had just begun. After spending a day at a friend's place, they were brought into a home that is not theirs, that smells strange with a hint of aromas of their things and big boxes towering everywhere.

They came in, inspected everything and then were quite done. They had pleading expressions on their faces, "Please take us home now. We are done here. We would like to go home and relax with a drink of water in our bowls, in our home." It was heart wrenching to watch their faces. They barely ate. Most of the night they kept checking on us to see if we would make plans to leave and go 'home'!

To add to this, they need to be freshly toilet trained.

Most pet parents discount this. Habits have to be rebuilt. Most habits can wait. But toilet training has to happen soon. Lack of certainty in use of toilets adds immensely to stress in dogs. But intense stress makes bowel movements irregular, making toilet habits irregular and harder to train. The first few days are hard.

A stressed dog poses many risks. In a moment of complete oblivion, our cook left the main door open. After watching the open door for a while, the dogs decided they could take this no more and had to head out. They went out, found a spot of lawn to relieve themselves and headed back. But not all dogs and people get as lucky. These are follies of stress. Hence the extra emphasis on settling things down soon after a move. The sooner we get there, the sooner we will be closer to having a normal life. So wish the Tiggy-Nishi household some luck in achieving this and write to me if you are in a similar situation.