They Are Talking But Are We Listening?

 One of the things that I was intrigued by in graduate school was how communication could work between humans and animals. Sadly, I was studying at the University of Waterloo where the social psychology department was entirely given over to the game playing, semi deceitful variety of lab experimentation. There were no animals involved with this and I had serious doubts as to whether these studies really were telling us anything about human beings as well. This didn't make me a lot of friends in the department and I ended up leaving with my MA and my sanity, to go teach in community colleges and raise a couple of kids. When my children were still in elementary school we moved to Egypt as I'd had enough shoveling snow on my own in Toronto while their father was spending most of the winter in Alexandria. Not long after we moved to Alex, a family who had children at the French school with our children offered us a baladi dog, telling us that they were sorry but she simply was too stupid to deal with. When we went to meet her, we found that Pepsi was being kept on a balcony while an extremely annoying little poodle was living in the house. The family was upset that when they let Pepsi off the balcony to go through the living room and down the stairs to the garden to pee, she sometimes did it in the living room. Personally, I didn't think that this was a mark of stupidity but it was clearly a statement of territory.  Pepsi turned out to be one of the smartest dogs I'd ever met. She settled right into our home, which had a garden and we all adored her.

If we were out for a while and came home, she always greeted us with a call of "Haroo", which was remarkably similar to our "Hello", and when my husband and I had to go out at night and would leave one of his employees to be at the house with the kids, Pepsi would station herself just outside the children's bedroom doors, so that whoever was there could go to the front door, the kitchen, or the bathroom, but there was no way in hell they could go near the children. Best babysitter I'd ever had.  When she vanished one day after a move of houses, we were all devastated and spent weeks searching for her. After a month or so one of the baladi dogs at Smouha Club gave birth to a litter and I promised the children that we would take one of her pups. The day that we went to pick up a husky little brown female we found that someone had taken the mother to their farm and the pups were scattered throughout the stables. We found a white one with a black face and took her home despite the fact that we had wanted her sister. When we saw her sister a few days later, the contrast between the clean well fed pup and the hungry dirty one was too much, so we took her home as well with the spoken intention of finding a home for her. Like many people I had never had more than one dog at a time in my life. That was my introduction to pack life because Stella and Milligan were with us until their death many years later and following that I would never consider having just one dog.

It's been twenty-five years now that I have had multiple dogs living with me and over time our relationship has changed. I have recently been wondering if the change had something to do with changes in me or changes in the dogs, or whether I'm just beginning to notice the changes. One of these changes has been the increase in vocalisation between me and some of the dogs living with me. One of the first dogs, other than Pepsi, to do a lot of talking to me was Koheila, a rescued Dalmation who likely had been imported from the Ukraine and landed up at our home in Maadi and then moved out to the farm with me. She would come and tell me when someone was at the front door, would greet friends coming to visit with vocalisation, and so on. At the time I was amused by it and I noticed that it seemed to be quite purposeful, but it was just Spots being weird. When the pack was firmly founded by Finn at the farm, Koheila was still around giving orders and chatting with the other dogs and myself, and not too suprisingly, Finn became a very verbal dog himself. In his later years he would sometimes argue with me about actions I might take with dogs in the pack if he disapproved. It was never disrespectful, but his intention was very clear. His vocalisations would run the gamut from affectionate mumbles, to warning growls, to sharp barks of concern if he wanted my attention right away.

My current pack was largely set up and formed by Finn. I rarely have gone out to look for a dog to live with us. Most of them have arrived at the front gate and been invited in by the dogs. Rocky was one dog who came to us as an abused adult when the night watchman at the villa next door was fired and abandoned him. He lay down in front of our gate for three days, never leaving, and overcame my concern that he might be a danger to the children who visit us. Finn's successor, JC, was attempting to dig under the front gate when Finn pulled him in and introduced him to the pack. I thought that was a bit odd at the time, but I have learned that it didn't scratch the surface of oddness. I can joke that there is a sign only visible to dogs outside saying "Safe Haven" or something similar, but I've begun to think that it is more complex than that. Just lately, JC and Rocky began jumping our 3 meter brick walls to cavort in the dirt road in front of our farm with a beige female baladi who seemed to have been dumped here. Eventually they coaxed her into the farm but there was some friction between Marte, as we called her, and Calypso since they are both highly dominant females. After a few months she appeared to come into heat, but a vet exam had indicated that she'd been spayed so we did some ultrasounds that indicated the spay had been incomplete and one of her ovaries was encysted and congested. Once her plumbing problems were sorted she's become more relaxed. This is the first time that the dogs seem to have actively recruited a newcomer. JC and Rocky's attachment to Marte is extreme as well. 

There was a male baladi that lives in our road in front of the farm, we call him Peter, who was very interested in Marte when she was going through her false heat, to the extent of jumping the wall to come into the farm with her. Oddly enough, there were no fights among the males. All of our dogs are neutered but it doesn't at all mean that they don't enjoy sex if a female either is in season or thinks that she is, as in Marte's case. After we had Marte re-spayed, we didn't see Peter again for a while until some of our goats gave birth. That evening the goats were put away in their shed and the girls were woken by the sounds of dogs fighting outside. Marte had invited Peter over and they were headed to the goat pen but the other dogs disagreed with this course of action and attacked the two of them. The goats were fine and Marte and Peter took off, but the worst thing you can have at a farm with animals is a livestock killing dog. The next day I asked a friend to take her over to another agricultural area about 9 kilometers away and I gave him a bag of dog food to feed her with. However, he dropped her off only about 3 kilometers away as reported by a friend who saw her shortly after. I was quite annoyed about this but I told my staff that she would be back here by morning, surely, and she was indeed. She also seemed to understand that she had broken some serious rules and modified her attitude significantly.

So have I taught my dogs to do all of these things? No. Definitely not. For the most part, I let the dog pack train the dogs. Once I have taught one of the older dogs about housebreaking, the younger ones watch and learn. As the young dogs watch the older ones informing us about things with vocalisation, they try it themselves. This afternoon while I was chatting with a friend at my kitchen door, Calypso walked up to our water cooler and took a drink from it by pushing her nose against the lever and letting the water run down her tongue to her mouth. I was astonished. Apparently our Great Dane, who has learned how to open the kitchen door with the handle, also does this. Perhaps dogs are smarter than we thought they were, and also I suspect that letting them live in a natural pack offers them much more chance for social learning. The friend I was chatting with suggested that I look up an article written about some research on wild kangaroos to see if kangaroos ask for help from humans when they need it, despite the fact that they don't live in proximity to humans. They do in fact solicit assistance from humans much the same ways that dogs might. I have noticed this with my horses as well. They lived in paddocks in one large herd and two smaller groupings, and very frequently they will approach one of us to show a cut or scratch or some similar issue that would best be solved with primate fingers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

copyright 2020 Maryanne Stroud Gabbani