DARCY

Darcy is my 12 year old golden retriever. Like all retrievers he is a gentle, loving soul who goes through life with a big smile on his face. This story is about the time when he didn’t have a lot to smile about, and how it took me quite a while to reconnect with him and his needs.

You see, I was so used to seeing him happy and “going with the flow”, that when there were a few hiccups that I didn’t address properly, became a “real problem”.
Not only is he relatively “happy go lucky”, but he is also very sensitive to other animals as well. For example, if we go to our local Pony Club, and another horse is very tense, and playing up, Darcy will walk over and plonk himself down right near this horse. And within a few minutes this same horse will have visibly calmed down. As a family we have seen this happen too often for it to be a coincidence. Our horses love him walking amongst them. There is never any fear that he will be kicked!

Another one of his special gifts, is his ability to sense a change in the weather, always many hours beforehand. He gets agitated if rain is coming, and if a storm is on the way, watch out! He starts barking and whining and wants to be with me, especially.
As he has gotten older, this sense has been heightened to the point of urgency. Which, is part of the reason I am writing this story. The other reason is, that our animals are very direct with their needs and we don’t have to resort to drugs or other drastic measures to find solutions to problems that we encounter with them.

About 18 months ago, my brother had a little Jack Russell cross called Bo. His circumstances had changed and she came to live with us, as he could no longer keep her. She had always been locked in a large pen. So when she came to us, she was allowed the freedom of roaming our 10 acres and treated like one of the family. Being a typical Jack Russell she liked to be boss! And she tried to lord it over our two other dogs – Darcy and Tyson our Border Collie. Tyson would just ignore her, but Darcy being the sensitive type he is, couldn’t. And over the course of the next 6 months, anything he couldn’t handle became a major problem.

Yes, you guessed it – changes in the weather became a major issue. It wasn’t enough to alert us to changes in the weather, but the urgency became extreme.
First, he chewed into my neighbours front door trying to get in when no one was at home. He’d never done this before, so I didn’t worry too much as we’d had a freak storm with no-one at home that day. It was an expensive wake-up call of $400 though!
Over the ensuing months, his attempts to get my attention became more frantic. He started chewing into my front door, taking huge chunks out. To the point where the side panels of glass were cracking then breaking. I couldn’t believe it. My gentle boy had become a seemingly neurotic behavioural dog!!

My husband considered taking him to the vet to mildly sedate him. But we realized we couldn’t always be home in time, when he started exhibiting the first signs of stress. So I quietly mulled it over, until I put 2 and 2 together and realised the correlation between Bo’s arrival and the exacerbation of Darcy’s behaviour.
Next step was how to remedy the problem? Again, I let it ride, whilst having Darcy in the back of my mind sorting out what to do.

Out riding my bike one afternoon, it dawned on me, as if Darcy had spoken out loud. “You never asked me whether Bo could stay” He was right! I had never asked him ! So, as if he was right there, I sincerely apologized to him. And when I came back, I went and talked to him. I told him that he could sleep in the house at night, and could also come in when the weather caused him to be restless.

WHAT A Difference that made!!! He has not attacked our doors since !! Bo still tries to throw her weight around, but it doesn’t worry him.
This is going back 5 months. Darcy taught me “to think outside the square”, and reach the solution that he had been trying to communicate with me all that time.





By EMMY HOILES

Author: Emmy Hoiles
Country: Australia
True story: Yes
Rating: 11 paws up
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