“I’m going to break my rusty cage/and runnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn”
-Chris Cornell, Soundgarden, “Rusty Cage”
Those of you who know me well know that I have had 3 dogs for a while. I have a pair of cute little synchronized Yorkies (Chewie (AKA Wiggles) and Wagnar) who are my mom’s support animals, and BooBoo Dawgz, my questionably sane but whip-smart Shih-Tzu/Jack Russell mix. Boo has recently become my sidekick after her hernia surgery turned her from an unreliable urinator back into the lil dynamo I remembered.
But much like those picture perfect Bradys (not Tom and Gisele), when Julie and I married, I gained two scrapping young lads. Dobson we shan’t speak of, as he is currently Canine Non-Grata after violently peeing a river onto the laundry. He’s a puzzle.
Today I want to talk about our little co-dependent walking Odie, Cody. Cody is a handsome boy, he’s the most friendly dude you could meet, and he’s a super-athlete. I’ve taken to lovingly calling him Usain Dolt, as he runs faster than any creature I’ve ever come into contact with. This amazes me even more when I remember that he is, theoretically, 11 years old.
Cody is a great dog with one possible exception: he might love people too much. We were told he was never allowed on furniture or anything of the sort before Julie got him, so that might be why, but you cannot pry this dog away from you. He spends most nights sitting on either Julie’s head or, more often, mine. That, of course, can be a problem when you work crazy hours.
We’d been trying to train Dobson with a crate. Limited luck. But Cody enjoys entering the crate, getting in the cage so to speak. So Julie decided the other night to see if he’d wander into the cage before bed. Then we closed the door.
No freakout. No anger. Some brief confusion, then he nestled in and got comfy to sleep.
We both managed to get a better night’s sleep without Cody stumbling over us in the night. This could be the new arrangement that leads to happier nights for everyone involved.
But it made me stop to think. The reasons that Cody likes the crate are pretty obvious. It’s a shelter. He’s in his own space, and no one can invade it. It feeds his desire for a den, for a nest. He has a blanket and toys and his own private water bowl in there. It’s sort of like a tiny Cody apartment.
But then I thought about how he also likes the kennel when we board him. He likes being enclosed with a proper space of his own. It comforts him.
This is in stark contrast to the usual freedom we afford him. Cody gets his run of the yard when he wants it, and as one of the few dogs in our house who hasn’t had any problems with anyone else, he gets pretty much free run of Castle Alexander when he wants it. And when given his freedom to run, he always picks small pockets of space to confine himself and stake out an area. He likes that life. He actually paces uncomfortably when given too much space to cover. I think he feels exposed when he doesn’t know the edges of his area.
This is the polar opposite of how I view the world. I long for my own freedom, my own space, but in a different way. I don’t ever appreciate being confined, and I often prowl or pace the regions where I find myself contained. I think this is because as a human being, I feel much more restrained than my pets. I’m never certain where my freedom ends, and so I think about that all the time.
Maybe I should be more like Cody, and just enjoy the space I can control and have my own thing going on.
Then again maybe my anger about being stuck in a place is more metaphorical, and perhaps it’s feeling as if sometimes people treat me worse than we treat Cody is the whole issue in play?
Either way, it’s a dog’s life.