Thursday, June 23, 2011

Dog People

Last weekend I was away judging in Finland.

I don’t go away very often.  It is hard for me to be separated from my dogs, and especially Habibi, and it is also not easy to find someone to stay and take care of them when I am away, even though it is only a few days at most.  No one is ever the same as me, of course.  My babies need to be with me, no one else can understand them or take care of them as well, that is obvious…

But once in a while, I am tempted by an interesting judging assignment and agree to leave home for a few days.

Here we come to what makes us dog people different from the rest of the human race. 

Going away is supposed to be a holiday, for rest and refreshment, for seeing different things and having new experiences.

For a dog show judge, especially for one who lives as far away from everything as I do, it means two long and exasperating days of travelling, one day in each direction, often with one or two changes of flight en route.  And usually, two days at the destination, which are occupied from morning until evening with judging dogs.

I really don’t enjoy flying,  We have no choice these days, but being confined in an airborne sardine tin, with hundreds of other people, only a few toilets, and no place to put my feet (and I am short!) is not my idea of fun.  From the time of takeoff, I keep checking my watch to see if landing will be soon.  And once we are down, I want to get off as fast as possible – which is, of course, impossible, as all the hundreds of people are standing in the narrow aisle wanting to do exactly the same thing.

At times it means also spending hours waiting in airports between flights.  Sometimes it is very hard to remember which airport I am waiting in, they all look so much alike, with the same décor, the same shops, and the same endless corridors that you have to walk down to get to your flight. Sometimes I have the feeling that I am walking to my destination…

And once the flight is over, often it is necessary to take a train, or to be picked up by someone from the show committee and spend another few hours travelling to the show venue.  In Israel, we are accustomed to long distances being an hour’s drive away.  In Europe, the US or Australia, a normal drive to a dog show can be three or four hours each way, or more.  We do get to see a lot of countryside, though.  This time, In Finland, there was forest, and forest, and forest, and forest….

The fact is, that we dog show people are really usually not interested in doing much else but seeing dogs.  I don’t really care that much about sight seeing – once in a while, if due to the plane schedule I end up with a few extra hours, I may indeed go to visit some of the points of interest in the vicinity, and it is pleasant – but if I have a choice…This trip, I had a free morning before my return flight, and I was thrilled when I was taken to visit one of the long time well known breeders, and happily sat there for several hours seeing her dogs and her photo albums of fifty years of breeding.

Please note – real dog people carry around photos of their dogs.  They don’t pull out photos of children or grandchildren when meeting friends or acquaintances, they pull out photos of the dogs they are currently campaigning.  We find this perfectly normal.  I now have a little tiny laptop which fits into my handbag, so I can easily take it everywhere with me – and then I have LOTS of photos of my dogs that I can show to people!  There are a few photos of my grandchildren, it is true, but I am not always sure just where they have been filed…

Those of us who show our dogs know how tiring a show can be, and how much running around the ring can be involved.  I pride myself on having dogs with great movement, but then that means I have to be able to run with them in the ring and keep pace.  If I am showing a number of dogs, or if the judge is keen on seeing movement, it can be quite exhausting.

But judging is not any less stressful physically, even though it doesn’t involve running around.  It means standing all day, and walking back and forth in the ring to see the dogs from various vantage points.  Judging a hundred or so dogs is a lot of standing!  Not only does it involve standing, but since I have to dictate a report on each dog, and the secretary is sitting at a table in the corner of the ring, I have to sit down and dictate to her, and then get up and go over to judge the next dog.  This means sitting and getting up about a hundred times – no one can argue that there is not plenty of exercise in that.  I am not sure how that would be rated as far as fitness programs go, but it sure does work those muscles!

This long day of judging can be in any conditions from hot blazing sun – which to my surprise I have found to be the case the last two times I judged in Finland (silly me, to think that Finland is a cold Scandinavian country), to freezing cold and rain.  I have found myself at some shows feeling so cold that I dressed in about five layers of clothes and looked like a stuffed teddy bear – with the same difficulties in moving around.  When it is hot, I do fine, and find it amusing to watch the European judges around me slowly turning a bright shade of red…

One would think that after a long day of judging and looking at and handling many dogs, we would have had enough. Never!  In the evening, all the judges get together for dinner, and of course the major and pretty much sole topic of conversation is dogs and everything to do with them.  True that once in a while there is a bit of gossip – but that also usually has to do with dogs.  And we are not at all bored!  It is hard to imagine that anything else would be as interesting.  And we may well start pulling out photos – not of children and grandchildren, but of great dogs we have owned or wanted to own, and upcoming promising puppies.

The fact is, that whenever we dog people/judges meet anywhere in the world, we always have a lot to talk about, even if we don’t speak the same language.

I arrived home stiff and exhausted from my “vacation”.  Habibi was glad to see me, but was not happy about all the very many smells of strange dogs on me and all my belongings.  “Aren’t I enough for you?” he conveyed.  “Of course you are, every time I go away, I come back even more sure of that!”

The view from my hotel room in Finland
 A note to everyone who has been enjoying the Habibi Diaries - my book Tails of Shaar Hagai is presently available at a special price for a limited time.  Take a look on Amazon.com.  If you enjoy the Habibi stories, you will enjoy it also.

Sunday, June 5, 2011

Over and Under

There are a few things in particular at which Canaans are extraordinarily talented.

The ancient Chinese believed that the Chow Chow was part bear.  I believe that the Canaan dogs are part monkey.

I have never known another breed where a six week old puppy could climb up a wire fence to get to the top of the dog house.  Not only do the puppies climb up effortlessly, they also get down – usually with a kamikaze leap.

The last few months I seem to have been spending most of my time trying to fix up fences that will keep the Canaan puppies where they are supposed to be.  Pens that hold adult collies without any problem are a joke for the Canaans.  When I brought Tutti, the little red girl, home (she was not born here, but up in the Galilee), at seven weeks of age, after a long drive of several hours, I thought I would put her in the pen for the night, so that she could settle in and not have to meet the other puppies yet.  That was a laugh – ten minutes after I put her in, she had figured out that she could climb up the fence in the corner and jump over the top.  She spent her first night in the house – which no doubt was her plan from the start.

My Canaans stay inside our fences because they don’t really want to go anywhere else, not because they can’t.  When there is a serious reason for it, they have no problem at all getting over – fortunately for me, that is rare.  There have been a few, though – Zik used to climb up and walk around on the kennel roof, until I managed to fix him a kennel that is closed in on all sides and top.  Now that he can’t get out the top, he runs up the walls and somersaults off the roof – very hard to describe, you have to see it to understand it.  

Another bitch we had, Salima, would climb up the kennel fence, walk along the roof, jump down into the yard, climb over that fence, and then run around outside taunting everyone – “Look where I am!!! You can’t catch me!!!”   She never went anywhere, she just liked to feel free.  She could get out of a mousehole, I spent enormous amounts of time and energy trying to block all the holes that she made and managed to get out of.  When I finally did manage to close off the top of her kennel, she would stand on the wire at the top of the two meter high fence, with her body curved into the corner and head touching the roof, front legs on one side and hind legs on the other, and watch life go by from this nice high vantage point.

Having had two litters of puppies here at the same time, with a month’s difference in age, I fixed up a pen so that the younger ones could be separated from their bigger friends when I was not supervising play time.  The small ones did not at all approve, and started climbing up the fence and over the top. Thinking myself clever, I took another fence panel and attached it flat across the top of the fence, so that is was covering the corner they climbed up. Certainly they couldn’t climb over and around that!

Next time I came out, the little ones were fast asleep curled on top of the new fence panel.

Up, up and away....


Then of course, if you can’t go over something, then you might well be able to go under.  If the Canaans are half monkey, then the other half is mole.

All Canaans love to dig.  Soft earth is the best, especially if it has already been prepared for them by being part of the garden.  And if you get to it by digging under fences, that just makes the challenge more exciting. In our hot climate, of course a nice muddy hole provides a lovely cool spot to relax in.

Of course, there are definite rules involved.  Digging, for a Canaan, is not scratching around a bit and kicking up some dust.  Digging means a proper excavation; the ideal is a tunnel big enough to crawl into, turn around in, and lie down with your body well protected and your head facing out so you can see what else is going on while relaxing in your new cool den.  If the excavator happens to be a female, she might also be considering that this den has to be big enough so that if, at some time in future she has puppies, the whole family can enjoy it.  It should be dug deep and well in under plants, trees, rocks, or whatever is available, to make it almost impossible to get in to the digger to pull him out, and also almost impossible to fill in again.

Persistence being another well known Canaan trait, hard or rocky ground, protruding boulders, or thick tree roots, are no deterrent.   It just means that the digger gets to keep working and having fun for longer – but in the end, success!

When we were filming the Animal Planet program here, the photographer wanted to know if I could get the Canaan puppies to dig – he thought that would be a fun scene.  Well, that was no problem – a few pieces of sausage buried in the dirt at the edge of the garden was quite sufficient to set off a digging frenzy. The problem, of course, was not to get them to dig – it was to get them to stop.  Since that rewarding experience, every time the puppies are out in that part of the yard, they head straight for the grass and start digging away, looking for more hidden treasures.

 The Canaans also are very frugal by nature, and like to keep their possessions safe.  It is very effective, of course, to bury them.  So I often find old bones, toys, or other objects neatly buried for future use. I have even found entire food dishes with some food in them – the portion was more than the dog wanted to eat at the moment, but certainly it is a good idea to save it for the future.

If there is no readily available dirt, this does not discourage the attempts to dig. Habibi, as a puppy, had a very strong instinct to hide his favorite toys and bones, but had a hard time finding a suitable place in the house,  He would carry them around from place to place, “digging” in the book case and shoving them in between the books, and carefully trying to cover them with his nose, though there was no dirt to cover them with, or digging in the sofa pillows and hiding them well down in the sofa. 

Nowadays, he has realized that this doesn’t really work.  But he still runs out and daily digs vigorously at the floor of the dog house outside, apparently in the hope that, overnight, it has become soft enough to start tunneling through.


Here we go - a good spot!


This rock will not defeat me!!!!

And a little help from a friend...