05/07/2022
This is the face of Daisy, a very sweet but all be it mildly feral pitty mix mother of 8, 5 week old, puppies. This picture was taken at the end of a week where her, location, food, routine, people and the overall mobility, capability and activity of her puppies has changed. Within this last week she has changed from being avoidant, minimal growling, but growling none the less, and defensive barking when her puppies are being handled to much for her liking, to no growling, minimal to no barking when handling her puppies, to even seeking out human attention but for minimal amounts of time and still very un-confident in how that interaction will actually end.
While Daisy and her puppies have made great strides over the last week when this picture was taken. This picture is not the face of the true Daisy it is the face of decompression. Something that looks different in everyone. During this rotation Daisy decided to come down stairs walk past a fresh full food bowl with very little acknowledgment, walk to a corner of my rock yard without eliminating, all very out of routine behavior for her. Walk to a corner of my rock yard and lie down in a small hole she dug just a day before to, shelter herself from the rain, instead of walking inside, like i said mildly feral. For the next hour she didn't move, she didn't acknowledge me when I called her to come in or try to get her to eat or eliminate or pet her. For a solid hour I stood in my doorway to keep half an eye on her to make sure she was OK and would not try to escape even with a heavily fenced yard. At the end of this hour without any sort of request she stood up walked up my rock yard stairs back into my living room, kitchen and dinning room and stood at the baby gate at the bottom of my stairs ready to go back upstairs to her puppies. I quickly pickup her food up followed behind her opened the gates/doors needed to get to her puppies and placed her food down to eat when she was ready.
Decompression is vital and is not always such an obvious behavior, it took me a couple minutes to figure out what was going on with her but only after she decided to reintegrate herself back into the daily routine.
Try to keep this in mind when your 4 legged family member be it bought, rescued, fostered or found decided to take a step outside the routine. For Daisy it was a small dug hole, for other dogs it might be the opposite, what does your dog do to decompress?
Keep an eye on them make sure they are safe but let them decompress.
