Ever had your dog do a complete 180° and start acting in a way you would NEVER have predicted?If your answer is no, you don’t have a dog. That furry thing that rules your household is probably a cat.
MY dog- yes he is a dog- is a Chesapeake Bay Retriever, and he is fearless. True to the breed, he will charge anywhere, into anything and not even blink. That includes icy-cold lakes in sub-zero temperatures, such as we find quite often in our lovely but harsh Northern climate. When we go out for our evening walks, we often will pass by snarling, snappy near-rabid dogs that are straining at the leash, just craving to get a small piece of my dog’s flesh.
And my dog walks on. He might occasionally raise a canine eyebrow and say… “Huh. Dude, take your meds…they come with peanut butter!” but for the most part, he ignores it.
Thunderstorms… nothing. Gunshots… no reaction. Seriously we introduced him first to a .22 shot when he was less than 6 months old. He yawned. So we fired off several dozen rounds from the 30-.06, just a few feet from him. His only reaction was to look down range, which we thought was actually pretty awesome.
He is a Chesapeake, our first of this breed, and he constantly surprises us with just how stoic he is. Without any training, conditioning, dog-whispering on our part at all, Gunnar is just really tough. He just doesn’t really get scared.
Until last night.
I burned the bacon. I mean, I burnt it so completely crispy that even I, Little-Miss-I-Can-Save-That, had to admit that it wasn’t even worth bacon bits.
Please note: there are three activities that do NOT go well together if performed at the same time. Pressure canning meat, oven-roasting bacon, and relaxing in the bath. I buggered up the math on the one timer that I set for the first two activities (Note to Self: Use ONE timer per activity) and I just completely forgot about the entire pack of bacon that was cooking in the oven.
(Look Here to read about oven-cooking bacon, it rocks)
So there I am in the bath, Sven is in the living room watching TV, and it took him rather a long time to figure out what the hell that smell was..
Why didn’t the smoke detector go off? Don’t know. I’m going to get Sven to check the batteries right after I finish writing this post!
So when Sven opens up the oven, of course a bunch of smoke pours out, and the dog loses his mind. Gunnar went bat-shit crazy. He ran to the door and Sven let him outside, but then he would not come back in. The door to let him out into his dog run just happens to be in the kitchen, and there was no way that dog was coming back into the stinky FIRE!!! Place. By the time I finished my bath, Gunnar still would not come in the house at all. That was about 30 minutes outside, in the evening, temperature around -20° C. For my dearest Step-Mom and other ‘Merican folk, that is -4° Fahrenheit. Cold, damn cold. We had to finally lure him in with a treat, which he snatched out of my hand as he bolted past me into the living room.
He paced back and forth, panting and shaking with anxiety. I mean, he was really quite freaked out. I don’t blame him; a dog’s sense of smell is said to be about 1000 times better than that of a human, and that charred bacon smelled pretty bad. What surprised me was not his sense of smell, but his instinct.
I’m pretty sure that he thought our house was burning down. And honestly, I don’t even know HOW would a dog register that as a danger? Sure, he’s been around campfires – plenty in fact. So why did he know that this was a threat to our safety? I can guarantee you, he was not taking his cue from us. We weren’t running around shrieking and flapping towels or anything, we were quietly mourning the loss of 500 grams of perfectly good bacon; that’s all.
Chessies are damn smart dogs. The reason why we got him, and not a Lab, is because they quite protective of their people. No disrespect to Labs, but I don’t want a dog that will show the nice robbers where all my stuff is; and I don’t want a dog that thinks every single stranger out there is his new best friend. I knew they were this way, but I did NOT expect that he would instinctively KNOW, in his bones, that a smell like that in the home was just downright BAD. But he knew.
Gunnar is 14 months old now, and I have definitely seen that he is rather reserved around strangers. He’s friendly enough, but he really doesn’t care too much about other people. Perfect. And yes, he barks when the doorbell rings, or he perceives some other threat. He’s not quite perfect at the Shut the Hell Up! Command yet, but we are working on that. He lets me know if someone is invading our space, so again, perfect. But this fire thing was definitely different. He showed such anxiety that I truly felt sorry for him. He ran back and forth between the front and back doors, whining and panting. Then he’d skootch up to me and press against my leg, and just sit there and shake.
What did I do? Well, PETA, arrest me… because I did nothing. I could have tried to soothe him with treats and affection…but I didn’t want to reward the dog for unwanted behavior. And honestly? Self-serving and cruel as this might sound… this behavior was NOT unwanted. In fact, this behavior is wanted very much indeed. I WANT my dog to be deeply afraid of a house-fire, and I want him to express that fear pretty openly. Because that might just save my life someday.
As I can see from that one small incident last night, my dog’s sense of smell is far, far more reliable than that of the smoke detectors’. Batteries fail. The dog’s nose won’t. So I let him be scared for a while. I didn’t really react to him, I just let him stay in his panic mode for a few minutes, and then I just quietly cleaned up the burnt bacon and turned on the fans. Gunnar settled down after a while, though it took him about an hour before he was comfortable going into the kitchen again. And that’s okay.
When we brought a Chessie into our home, it was with full intentions of working with him to become a protector, hunter, and useful member of our pack. Not everyone does that with their dogs; many people just want a pet and a companion. Even so, I was pretty surprised at Gunnar’s instincts in this situation, and I was glad that I had the insight to not correct his behavior as many people would have done. It was hard to see him distressed like that and not try to comfort him. But he’s not my baby; he’s not a kid, he’s a dog. He’s got a job to do in this home, and he certainly did it. I was pretty proud.
By no means is this sense of alarm at the smell of smoke limited to Chessies. Many dogs, large and small, would probably have reacted just the same as Gunnar did. If you find yourself and Fido in a similar situation, I strongly advise you to stop and think before you try stopping your dog’s behavior. He may very well be trying to warn you of something seriously dangerous to you! It could be anything, it doesn’t have to be a fire. It could be a flooded basement, or a band of looters coming down the street. It also doesn’t have to be related to their sense of smell, powerful as it is. They can hear better than you can too. Sometimes it almost seems that they have psychic abilities. Dogs have danger-alarms wired into them that we haven’t even begun to understand. So if he seems like he’s trying to warn you of something, get your butt up off the couch and investigate.
I don’t advise that you let your dog free-fall into a blind panic, that’s just not fair to the dog. He’s looking to you in a dangerous situation, and he trusts you to lead him out of it.
What I am saying is, trust him.
Trust your dog. His instincts are better than yours.
Someday, he could save your life if you let him.
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