I want to share with you an important milestone for me, it might seem strange that it was sparked by an eight-year-old Labrador Retriever who eats awful things, but that is the nature of life, you grow as a human being when you can.  Today, for the first time perhaps in my eight wonderful years with her, I did not yell at Lenore once on a long morning walk through the woods.

Lenore, as a proud Lab, eats gross things, and this has always bothered me and I have always tried to stop her. As someone who writes about dogs, I well know the folly of this, I know it won’t work, isn’t right, is not about her but about me, the legacy of issues of my own involving cleanliness and order. Lenore is about as good a dog as one can ever hope to have, she is loving, gentle and obedient.

As a Lab, she cannot help herself, it goes directly against her nature to walk through the woods and not eat grass and other mostly unspeakable things. A hundred times I’ve told myself to stop worrying at her stop thinking about it, it disturbs the walk and accomplishes nothing. I have no apologies to make for yelling at Lenore, I yell at my dogs all of the time, I am a human being, not a saint. Positive reinforcement, like spirituality, is a worthy goal, I doubt one ever completely gets there. Yesterday I wrote about this issue, and it often happens with me that when I am really ready to confront something, I write about it first, that works with me.

I believe one of the most wonderful things about having a dog is that to have a good one, you really do have to become a better human. Everyone of my dogs has made me better in some way – less angry, less frustrated, less distracted and impatient. Today, after years of frustration, I was somehow ready. Lenore scarfed grass up, dug stuff up in the woods, licked coyote scat, I started to open my mouth once or twice, I closed it, I walked on and as she always does, Lenore followed us along, came when we called, was the wonderful dog she always is.

It is so important not to project our many neuroses and issues onto our dogs, I was proud to have completed our first walk in a long time where I was not trying to impose something on her that was neither right or acheivable. It was about me, not her, it almost always is, and strange as it may seen, I think it was one of the bigger steps I have taken in my life with animals.