Blog post by Emily Jacobs, Summit Admin
“Change is good,” say the seasons. “Change is good,” say interior designers. “Change is good,” say gumball machines. “Change is sometimes freaky,” says my dog.
As the leaves put on a fabulous show and the nights get colder, I can’t help but become a bit introspective. With a cup of tea in hand and a cattle dog noggin resting on my thigh, I get lost in endless loops of thought. Change is important. It’s productive, necessary, and often exciting. It reminds us to pay attention and to not go on auto-pilot. Without it, everything would be boring. I’m with you, cattle dog; sometimes, it totally stinks.
Our responsibility is to understand our dogs to the best of our abilities, but we can’t always keep them within their comfort zones. If we know they will be deeply affected, we can choose not to throw too many changes their way at once. But, we can’t anchor ourselves to one spot and stay there all our lives. For lots of dogs, a new house, a new sitter, or a new sibling can be a welcome change. For others, those new things might be equal to the emotional apocalypse. “I brought home a puppy” might as well be code for “I went to the shelter and selected a baby demon” to more quiet, and often to senior dogs. To those sensitive souls, it must seem like human lives turn on their heads all at once. It seems that way to us sometimes! We avoid that feeling, hopefully, by practicing self-exploration and self-care, then using those tools to decide what changes will be good and which will be catastrophic. Let’s do that for our dogs.
Do you have a dog who has lived in a house full of roommates, is basically a pillow, and sleeps through the sound of a leaf-blower outside the window? Do they jump into the car with reckless abandon and ride happily until they get to their destination, even if it’s the vet? You could probably make life changes without your dog having a total come-apart. Do you have a dog who vibrates and pees down their back legs when you go to a new park? Move slowly. Change things slowly.
Take this hypothetical Pomeranian, Widget. I don’t think anyone would suggest that you should turn down a move for a new job opportunity because Widget doesn’t approve of car rides. Make the change slowly. Go on multiple short rides with plenty of treats, then make those rides longer. Take her to go potty on the little stip of grass at the gas station closest to your house. Do that a bunch! Find a new gas station! Have a new-place-to-potty party! The cross-country trip will still be a change, but it might not be a dramatic one if little bits of it are familiar to your pup. Widget will hopefully come to think that the car is okay, and that peeing a gas stations is okay. That’s progress!
When you get to the new place, it is sensitive and caring to stay home with your pup for a few days. But, would you stay home forever? Would you turn down the move? Your dogs’ fear of change seems like an unfortunate reason to limit your life progress. So, your fear of change is an unfortunate reason, too! Make the move. Rearrange the living room. Paint the house. Maybe it will be scary, or intense, or wonderful. The color might turn out to look crappy, but that’s why you should have taken home a few testers and painted an inconspicuous part first! Maybe change does stink, but it can stink less if we do it with care. One thing we can be sure of with change is that it will probably be important.
Without the opportunity to change, life would be pretty one-faceted. I know that plenty of people think that Summer is the greatest, but as far as I’m concerned, having four seasons beats having just one any day. We can’t get from Summer to Winter without the death of some leaves. We can’t grow our comfort zones without the death of some comfort! If I keep thinking, even though my tea is gone and my cattle dog’s head is cutting off the circulation to my toes, I end up coming back to my original thought. Change is really important. It seems that change is a sort of lesson, and that part of that lesson is in the discomfort that it causes us.
Just like humans, dogs have varied personalities and just like all life forms, experience informs a lot of that personality. Personality is not set in stone, but it doesn’t change overnight. As we build experiences with our dogs, we make the process of change less jarring. If the training environment is too different from the norm, it’s overstimulating. If it’s the same every time, it’s underwhelming. If we take baby steps that build on each other, we can make it all the way across the country! If the new sitter comes over for coffee a few times before she’s in charge of the house for a week, maybe Bud won’t hide in the bathtub! Take the vacation. Make the change but do it with thought. Change causes growth. Growth doesn’t come from over or underwhelming experiences. Growth lives right in the middle.
Growth loves baby steps, and growth loves treats.