Surprising how often I videoed Luna with her objects. A good friend, familiar with Luna’s lines, had told me that Luna would have big feelings about possession* so I had great bias about possible resource guarding. Looking back, I was studying how I could least obtrusively build her trust in my proximity to Luna and her objects. Respecting her possession or initiating fair trades which translates to ‘winning by losing’ felt like the most personalized approach. I didn’t want to prompt guarding instincts in Luna where currently I saw none. My assumption (right or wrong) was that once that ownership became a negotiation it would remain part of a negotiation. Sharing or co-ownership seemed like a much cleaner path to
You may remember that Luna touched down in Wilbraham with her eye and her mouth closely linked to a random object. This looked to be in a vacant, semi cognizant manner like a ghost in a machine reaching for the familiar. As she became buoyant, lovely and confident and a gracious hostess she maintained her affinity for objects. In a way, her feelings about things reminded me of some of my friends' feelings toward shoes in that she liked them and liked having them available to her. All the while she was growing up and learning new things she kept an eye, and sometimes a paw, on her things. It could have been tempting to focus on teaching her to give things, to give up possession, especially because there can be a tendency to exert control in dog training conversations. My decision was to leave her objects alone as her possessing them was innocuous. I wanted to develop and observe shared custody with her objects. She was showing no guarding behaviors or tendency to ingest things which meant safety was not a factor. It was playful interaction around stuff she found interesting.
Items she selected (based primarily on proximity from what we could see) became like accessories to her. She liked to have them around her the way some of my friends have an affinity for jewelry, scarves and shoes. She could carry them from room to room and house to yard, put them down and pick them back up again and if she left something behind she’d know exactly where it was when she came back to the location where she’d left it.
This video is one that I took to share with a friend to show them how Luna and I shared a novel (to her) and exciting dog chew. something I not want to enjoy myself which I would show her by my actions. I did this because I’d given Luna a long trachea and she’d taken it off and consumed the entire thing and was not herself for about 30 minutes after the mega-exciting event. In this video I am giving her a planned *higher than normal* value chewing object as a planned shared custody event for the two of us. Here I am intentionally re-writing a script with Luna.
The following video was taken a little bit less than a month before Luna died. She’s trying to pull a root out of the ground and I call her away so she can return to her project. I’m putting it here because of the stuffed blue toy you can see in proximity to where she is amusing herself pulling on a root. Blue Square was her Object of the Moment and she’d been taking it with her to all the new spaces we were visiting in the house and yard.
With the benefit of hindsight, a desired consequence of Project-Object became that Luna’s self reinforcing behavior of object holding/owning became, by extension, a relationship reinforcer with her family and trusted humans.
For Luna, possession was innately an action that felt soothing, satiating and fulfilling so it was all good and happy things in her world. Never turning the happy thing into a bargaining chip between us and her was a really good idea and it began on Day 1.
This individual is from working dog world so her suggestions included strategies that a skilled owner would implement and Luna was in a strictly non-competition home with normal people. I didn’t want to start that type of game with her. I wanted everything I did to be something her family could easily do without taking a webinar on dog sports or changing their lifestyle to take classes. Understanding from a position of respect and learning from the puppy was always in motion with Luna.
Copyright Emily Rogeness 2021
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