Recognizing early signs of dog arthritis
The one thing I’ll always regret about my first dog — the step fall
My first dog, Shep, was a wild child — untrained (minus paper training), big, furry, and loved to eat tissue out of garbage cans and snatch Christmas decorations off the tree. My father made the mistake of leaving a slab of BBQ steak on a kitchen counter, and Shep decided it was lunch in the backyard before anyone even knew he ate it.
Thanks to a tornado, he was also terrified of lightning and thunder, and would scratch the wood off of our basement door until we let him upstairs — only to knock over ceramics and anything else that was unlucky enough to get in his way. Considering I didn’t want the dog in the first place, I really didn’t care at first. But once I warmed up to him, it was a little annoying when I’d let him upstairs and my parents would send him back downstairs for wreaking havoc.
Recommended Read: “Getting over your fear of dogs ~ ‘Ready to Love’: Why Darin letting his Labs run loose wasn’t a bad idea”
But there were two things that Shep always did from his puppy years to adulthood, and it made it much harder to identify his playfulness and semi-dog tantrums versus pet arthritis. Anytime we’d open the outside back door and point to the basement door, he’d almost always resist the final destination.
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When it was dinner time, he fled downstairs. Any other time though? He was sure to dawdle around and want to see what we were up to. Had he been a house-trained dog (our fault, not his), this wouldn’t have been a problem. But Labrador Retrievers are big, energetic and hard to ignore. So we usually grabbed his collar and sent him to his home (i.e. the basement).
He learned a trick that he used all 13 years though — the handshake. On the fourth-to-bottom basement step, he would stretch his entire body on that stair and refuse to move. He knew two things would happen, especially if we were doing laundry. Sometimes we (me, my parents and my brother) would not feel like stretching our legs up two steps, and would sit on the steps and play with him until he decided to move. Who wants to clutch a laundry basket and do a balancing act at the same time? If he still weren’t ready for us to leave him, he’d stand at his full height — still blocking the steps — and reach his hand out for a handshake. Who could deny a dog who looked like this with a handshake? So we’d get stuck on the steps again until he was good and ready for us to move.