On Being Walked By Our Dogs

Eddie and Shadow back in the day. On the bed, their rightful place.

I wrote this initially for a different purpose than our blog. However, since it describes a significant portion of our lives, especially Scott's, I thought I'd post it here.

Since moving to Portugal from Charlotte, NC in early December of 2024, we’ve changed our lifestyle in huge ways. In part because our dogs have totally retrained us. More on that in a minute.

Other than, you know, being in Portugal, the biggest change is that we are renting an apartment. Before this I hadn’t lived in an apartment since 1989. Scott and I got married in 2009. He had a brief stint in an apartment before we met, but other than that, also hadn’t done so in many, many years. We were in the house we sold before we came here for 10 years.

When we met, I had two indoor cats. They were brother and sister and were approximately 7 years old when Scott and I met. They ultimately lived to 18 and 20! Anyway, I hadn’t had a dog since I was 18 and I wanted one (or two as it turns out). A few years after Scott and I married, we adopted 2 puppies (separately, one was a foster failure, stories for another time). The cats hated the dogs. HATED. THE. DOGS. They weren’t very big cats and these gallomping, drooly puppies (actually, neither of them are droolers, but try to tell cats that) were too much. Where am I going with this?

No, really. Where am I going with this? Don't you hate losing your train of thought?

OK. Well. We got Lola about 8 months before we ended up with Bitsy. I had learned that crate training was a good thing to do and also, the cats, Eddie and Shadow, got custody of the bed. So the dogs were definitely crate-trained. To help get to the focus here, I’ll just add that both dogs received other training (with and without us), they went to doggie daycare and we took them to dog parks.

The main gap in their education was walking on leashes. I mean, we did walk them, but it was more occasional than regular. The house we lived in when we got them had a partially fenced backyard. We taught them to ring bells that hung on the door when they needed to go out and then we put them in the fenced part of the yard.

We sold that house and the one we bought had huge front and back yards. The backyard had a physical fence. We had Invisible Fence(IF) installed to enclose the whole property so if we went out in the front or the back, they could just come, too. Scott always likes to add to the story how, due to the IF, the only way we could take the dogs off the property was to put them in the car and drive them off. They WOULD NOT cross the boundary.

More importantly, after we added a screened porch to the back, we also had two dog doors put in. One that let them out of the house onto the porch and the other to get out to the yard from the porch. THIS WAS THE BOMB! Doggie freedom! PEOPLE freedom. We could also block them from either door when we wanted/needed to (at night, if we weren’t home, etc.). The bells were still available for these times.

Fast forward to now. We live in an apartment with no choice but to take them out on leashes several times a day.

Lola is 13 and Bitsy is 12. When she was less than 2 years old, Bitsy, at separate times ended up tearing both of her ACLs. Who knew dogs have ACLs? Who knew dogs have KNEES? I sure didn’t. But we did get them fixed so she wouldn’t start getting arthritis when she was still so young. They both are increasingly suffering from arthritis and probably the same sort of spinal degeneration that I am. But I digress.

Even though we finally wised up a little and got harnesses (so there is no pulling on their necks), walking with them is not very fun. And although they follow me around inside like, well, like dogs, ALL the time, they seem to have stopped regarding us as the alphas. Or, holy cow, were we just fooling ourselves before?

Usually one or the other of us will take them both out at the same time. That’s probably our first mistake. But we have some fundamental differences in how we walk them….

Scott: Let’s go girls, chop, chop. You don’t need to stop to poop or pee, just keep walking. Oh, yeah, I do need to pick up the poop, so you may as well stop, I just didn’t look to see what you were doing. Oh, geez, what did you just eat? Oh well. No time to sniff around girls, keep walking. Ah, there’s a pastelaria, we’ll stop here for me to have a drink. Sometimes he’s gone for at least two hours. WOW.

Me: Sniff away girls, I know that’s what you like most, except you ARE also looking for some other animal’s poop or whatever you can find to eat. ARG. Let’s get some poopin’ and peein’ done my girls! Song time! Sung to the tune of an old girl scout camp song – Poop, poop, poop, poop, pee, pee, pee, pee! Pooped yesterday, pooped the day before, gonna poop tomorrow like we never pooped before, cause when we poop we’re as happy as can be, for we are members of the poopy-pee-ary, poopy-pee-ary (Sorry, that last part doesn’t really fit the song. Could that be the problem?)

See, Lola especially used to pretty much pee and poop on command. Not so much now. But I still have to try. Sigh. Anyway, unlike my beloved husband, I am aware when they stop to eliminate or find something to eat. Well, not always on the eating part, but I do my best which means yelling NO! and dragging them away if they attempt to eat something. Sadly, another issue is that they are losing their hearing. Generally, once they have each done their business, I turn back for home.

Now I get to the truly unfunest part of this whole thing, and where these dogs are for sure training US…. And this is partially weird because we always perceived Bitsy to be the alpha between the two of them.

1. Lola has developed OPINIONS about where she does and doesn’t want to walk. She no longer just goes where we go. If she doesn’t want to go that way, she just STOPS. STOPS cold and will NOT “come”. WTF? Pulling her, of course, makes no difference. She is NOT going that way. Bitsy generally will just keep sniffing at this point, ostensibly waiting for us to settle the direction. Sometimes I have managed to fool Lola by starting to sort of run, rather than walk in the direction I want to go.

2. Sometimes, nay, often, Lola will automatically start turning up a sidewalk or a street where SHE wants to go and if you try to stop her, she’s having none of it. SHE wants to go THIS way. I know I cave way more than I want to admit. Damn dog.

   
   

3. Bitsy is more determined to sniff stuff. It drives Scott out of his mind. HE wants to keep walking, keep walking. It’s particularly funny to me to see Lola stop to sniff something and even if Bitsy has already been there, she darts back to see, or rather, smell what Lola is smelling. However, when either of them manage to eat something they have found, it drives ME out of MY mind.

4.  Grass – they won’t walk on the grass. Or mostly won’t. We assume that they smell the pee/excrement of lots of other dogs and that’s why, but we don’t really know. Sometimes they will sort of veer into the grass and eliminate, but then it’s right back off the grass. And mostly it’s the stiff-legged act, for both of them. NO, not gonna walk on the grass.

5. Finally – other dogs. As I mentioned, the girls had a lot of experience at dog parks and doggie day care. Also a lot of our friends brought their dogs to our house. Bitsy has always been sort of a social butterfly. She loved running around with other dogs. Lola has tended to prefer people (um, WHY?). Lola would kind of run with them, but if a boy-dog started sniffing her butt too much or something, she would turn and snarl at him. Sometimes that dog would back off, sometimes not. If any sort of altercation seemed to be starting, Bitsy would run up and get between Lola and the other dog and snarl at LOLA to get her to back off. I’ve never seen anything like it.

On their leashes, both girls are far more likely to react negatively to other dogs. Not all of them, but most of them. What IS that? I guess it’s an odor thing?? And when this happens, so does the Bitsy thing with her going more after Lola. It’s REALLY hard for me to control them or get them away when this happens. Lola weighs around 55 pounds and Bitsy around 45. It’s not exactly easy for Scott to control 100 pounds of suddenly-triggered dog either. We try to stay aware of people with other dogs, but sometimes they just round a corner or stop at the same pastelaria and it’s off to the races. Very unfun. Seriously unfun.

One other thing, people here in Portugal tend to give both of our dogs a wide berth. When I’m with them, almost nobody tries to stop and pet them. The altercation-thing seems to really freak some folks out.

I suspect that many people who read this will be thinking, “Wow, you two are a couple of dumbasses aren’t you? How could you not train your dogs to walk properly on a leash?”

Well, I don’t know, we just didn’t. And my time machine is on the fritz.

“Why don’t you get them training now?”

Haven’t you heard you can’t teach old dogs new tricks? Perhaps, you are confused about just who the “old dogs” are. That would be us. Mr. and Mrs. Dumbass.