August 2024

Care and Feeding He’s almost a stranger to her. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by IPGGutenbergUKLtd/Getty Images Plus. Care and Feeding is Slate’s parenting advice column. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here. Dear Care and Feeding,  I got a divorce from my husband five years ago and due to a small claims court order (that he brought on), I am forced to share custody of my BFF, a dog who is now almost 15. Since the judge ordered 50/50 custody to be exchanged locally, and the ex chose to move far away, he waived his custody unless he gave the required notice. He has been absent except for a partial week twice a year, when he comes to town. My dog has been declining in health and for the past year, I have cared for her through some challenging episodes, but she has recovered each time. Recently, she lost her appetite and has other signs she is declining quickly, and the vet and I discussed end-of-life planning and an in-home appointment so we could spend her final moments together in the garden sunshine instead of in the vet’s office after a stressful car ride. I’m required by the court judgment for a mutual sign-off for euthanasia, but it is not defined any further. When I informed my ex what the vet and I discussed, he assumed I was inviting him to my home for her final appointment; he said it was what he signed up for when he got a dog. I moved from tearful informant to baffled disdain and shared that I couldn’t believe he expected to be there with her, as he is almost a stranger to her and will cause us both distress. I offered him time to come say goodbye to her and he ignored the offer. He has since steamrolled me with emails, demanding to know when we set the date so he can make accommodations, asking why we can’t schedule for a weekend, and saying it is important for him to do this with both of us present. I am grieving, exhausted, and trying to spend quality time with my girl. I don’t know what to do or how to resolve this. —Grieving Childless Dog Lady Dear Grieving,  I am so sorry for the upcoming loss of your pet. I want to preface my reply by saying that everyone’s grief is different, and it depends on you as an individual, your relationship with the person—or pet—passing, the circumstances surrounding the death, etc. I cannot tell you the single right way to approach a death, because I don’t believe that a single right way exists. I will also preface by noting that I refer to human deaths in my response to your letter. Some readers might balk at the comparison, but to that, I say that grief is a profound human experience no matter who (or what) has died. Prefaces now given, here are some things to consider: I understand that your pet’s death is a very personal and impactful thing for you. It sounds like you and your dog have been a steadfast team these past five years, if not longer. I can also appreciate that, although your dog was a part of your ex’s life for a decade, she was a significant part of your new life after your marriage ended, which maybe gives you a sense of partnership and interdependence that your ex and the dog don’t share. So, I see how it might feel like an invasion to have him with you at this intimate, final moment. But I also think that sometimes, grief is a time for grace—for making space for others, even when all you want to do is process it alone. You write that your husband is practically a stranger to your dog. Is that true? Dogs’ associative memory is rather long. And even if she is uncertain about his identity, would his presence stress her out or be, at worst, neutral? Meanwhile, your ex wants to be there. Maybe he hasn’t visited her as often as you think he should have, but if he didn’t care about the dog, I doubt he would have visited at all. How loved a person (or dog) is doesn’t necessarily correlate to how often one sees them. I think if it were me, I would want to make space for love to show up in many varieties and forms. In my husband’s final days, part of me wanted to have him all to myself, and to be the person by his side in death as I’d been in life. But I wasn’t “the” only person who walked through his life with him, and those people deserved to love and honor him as much as I did. It was poignant to remember that I didn’t have a monopoly on grief. There are things I regret from his final days, but making space for others who needed to be there is not one of them. If, in the end, your relationships with your dog and your ex are such that his presence will disrupt your ability to be fully present with your pet, then I suggest offering a compromise. Allow him in the yard to have a private goodbye with the dog, and then have him step back and let you be one-on-one in the final moments. Want Advice on Parenting, Kids, or Family Life? Submit your questions to Care and Feeding here. It’s anonymous! (Questions may be edited for publication.) Read More

“Inside the Mind of a Dog” delivers on the promises in its title, both stated and implied. The movie is packed with adorable dogs of every conceivable breed; it puts readers inside the mind of humanity’s best friend; and — to address a question it poses at the very end — it lets us know whether or not dogs truly love humans. “There are things that people can do with their dogs to improve their relationships.” “There is a lot of what we call convergence between dogs and humans,” Dr. Vanessa Woods, the director of the Puppy Kindergarten at Duke University, told Salon. Woods, who is featured in the documentary, mentioned that humans will often notice a dog staring at them quietly and not understand what it means. Woods explained that this relates to the fact that dogs and humans both rely on eye contact when they are young to connect with their parents. Even as adults, humans and dogs still experience a rush of oxytocin — the so-called “love hormone” — when they make sustained eye contact with other individuals they care about. In a very real sense, they are hugging humans with their eyes. “Basically they’ve hijacked this oxytocin loop,” Woods said. “When your dog stares at you and you stare back at your dog, it increases your oxytocin and it increases their oxytocin. Basically they’ve taken over this neurological loop that we developed between our children and ourselves. And for another species to do that is quite extraordinary.” Woods’ observation about translating dog stares appears in “Inside the Mind of a Dog,” and the documentary (narrated by Rob Lowe, who takes the opportunity to show off his own pets) also includes many other tips so that dog owners can enter their friends’ minds. We are informed that dogs bark to express emotions or recruit a human’s attention — but that a bark is never “just a bark.” In a high stress situation, dogs will bark at a higher pitch; if their high pitch bark repeats itself without pausing, they are in a state of outright distress; if they bark and pause, that means they still have some cognitive ability. Then again, some dogs are just more inclined to bark than others based on their breed, with Siberian huskies particularly notorious for being whiny. Similarly, the movie teaches viewers that dogs communicate with their tails: loose equals curiosity, tight means anxiety, tucked or wagging low suggests stress and helicopter tail and/or butt wiggle indicates a very positive emotional experience (such as love for their owner). Scientists have even learned that if dogs’ tails wag to the right, it means they have a positive association with a specific human being — suggesting, once again, affection. Although dogs only have 16 different facial expressions (compared to humans’ 27 expressions), they use their eyes, barks and tails to make up for their limited facial expressiveness. Also like humans, canine intelligence is built around problem-solving in the world around them, even though they rely on a different primary sense (smell) than humans (vision). If dogs did not share this basic intelligence with humans, they would not work with us so closely… or be so similar to us. For instance, some researchers suggest that dogs can have ADHD just like humans. Additionally, puppies whose mothers let them figure out problems on their own wind up being better guide dogs than puppies whose mothers micromanage them, an observation that also has parallels to human experiences. The very fact that dogs are the most diverse animal on Earth is because they were subject to humanity’s genetic meddling. (The movie does not mention the ugly connection between the history of dog breeding and many dogs’ chronic health issues, as well as the dog breeding movement’s ties to the racist eugenics movement.) Want more health and science stories in your inbox? Subscribe to Salon’s weekly newsletter Lab Notes. “Understanding how the puppy mind develops helps us manage our expectations of what puppies can do or learn while they are growing up.” According to Dr. Brian Hare, a professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, all of the movie’s pieces of trivia add up to a single important takeaway, which is that doggie brains are far more complex than the popular perception often admits. “We now have overwhelming evidence that dogs have multiple intelligences — these different types of cognition already emerge in puppies but first appear at different times,” Hare said. “Some cognitive skills appear early, like the ability to read human gestures, and other cognitive skills, like self-control, come online a bit later. Understanding how the puppy mind develops helps us manage our expectations of what puppies can do or learn while they are growing up.” Some can grow up to be guide dogs or perform other services, like rescuing trapped people or detecting diseases including cancer, diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. There are dogs that can learn hundreds of words (one learned up to 1,000), while others have very limited verbal comprehension. In some cases, there are dogs best suited to simply serve as a happy companion to a human family. As people learn more about dogs, though, scientists like Hare hope it will be easier for scientists to train large numbers of smart canines to help people. “Dogs have more jobs than ever, but there is a shortage of professionally-trained dogs,” Hare said. “A big factor behind the shortage is the difficulty of knowing what job any individual dog might be best at doing. The holy grail is to use a puppies’ performance on our cognitive games to predict which job they will be best suited for as an adult. Will they be best at helping someone with a physical disability, a child with autism, search and rescue, or a veteran with PTSD?” Hare added, “If we can predict this early in a dogs life we will have much more success training them and we will greatly increase the supply of dogs available for all

Politics A controversial American government decision to impose new requirements on dogs entering the U.S. was prompted by a “dramatic increase” in falsified documents and fraud — including cases of people using Canada to bring dogs from countries with high rates of rabies into the U.S. CDC document raises questions about whether Canada has to tighten dog import rules An American decision to impose new restrictions on dogs entering the U.S. caught Canadian officials by surprise. (Bartley Kives/CBC) A controversial American government decision to impose new requirements on dogs entering the U.S. was prompted by a “dramatic increase” in falsified documents and fraud — including cases of people using Canada to bring dogs from countries with high rates of rabies into the U.S. A lengthy notice from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — obtained by CBC News — sheds new light on a decision that took the Canadian government, Canadian veterinarians, dog owners and federal Health Minister Mark Holland by surprise in May. The notice also raises questions about whether Canadian officials are doing enough to prevent dogs from countries where rabies is rampant from entering Canada. Dr. Tim Arthur, president of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, said the problems the U.S. is trying to address with new rules could also affect Canada. “I think it would be very helpful for Canada to tighten up our border about dogs coming in from countries that have canine variant rabies,” he said. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency says it introduced new measures in 2022 to prohibit the commercial importation of dogs from countries with high levels of rabies into Canada. It says it “continues to explore options to further strengthen Canada’s import requirements for dogs.” The controversy centres on new requirements that went into effect on Aug. 1 for anyone bringing their dogs with them to the U.S., and for Americans returning to the U.S. with their dogs. Following negotiations between Canada and the U.S. and a trip by Holland to Washington, the U.S. agreed to a nine-month grace period for countries like Canada with low rates of rabies. Dogs covered by the grace period will have to be at least six months old and microchipped, and will have to have spent the previous six months in a low-rabies country; their owners also will have to fill out a form. The CDC has simplified other requirements during the grace period. New rules planned for at least a year The notice published on a U.S. government website on May 13 reveals that the new rules have been in the works for at least a year, with a consultation period that resulted in 2,106 comments — including one comment from animal rescue groups with 118,312 signatures. In its notice, the CDC says the risk of rabies being re-introduced into the U.S. has been rising, fuelled in large part by dogs being imported from other countries for profit and by international animal rescue organizations. The agency says it has also seen a “dramatic increase” in people falsifying the paperwork that has accompanied some of those dogs. WATCH: U.S. announces pause on restrictions for dogs crossing the border   U.S. suspends onerous border rules for dogs — but it’s just a nine-month pause, health minister says Health Minister Mark Holland says that ensuring your dogs have up-to-date vaccinations is a ‘good idea.’ Holland added that ‘mistakes get made’ but in a short period of time, the Canadian government worked with the American administration to make sure Canadians were treated fairly. “In 2020, CDC observed a 52-per cent increase in the number of dogs that were ineligible for admission due to falsified or fraudulent documentation as compared to 2018 and 2019,” the CDC notice says. The CDC says some people also claim dogs are theirs when they aren’t. “CDC has documented numerous importations every year in which flight parents transport dogs for the purpose of resale, adoption, or transfer of ownership that do not meet CDC’s entry requirement,” the agency wrote. “These flight parents often claim the dogs are their personal pets to avoid U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Animal Care entry requirements and potential tariffs or fees under CBP regulations. Even when well-meaning, these importers jeopardize public health, as many of them do not know the history of the animals they are transporting.” The notice says that in some cases, importers have been turning to Canada in their efforts to get dogs from countries with high levels of dog-maintained rabies virus variant (DMRVV) into the U.S. “HHS/CDC has documented many instances of young dogs under six months of age being routed from DMRVV high-risk countries through DMRVV-free countries, such as Canada or Mexico, to circumvent U.S. entry requirements,” says the notice. The notice details four cases since 2015 of dogs with rabies brought into the U.S. by animal rescue groups — three from Egypt and one from Azerbaijan. An investigation revealed the documents for the dogs imported from Egypt had been falsified. The notice says two rabid dogs were imported from Iran to Canada in July 2021 and January 2022, pointing out that it occurred at the same time as the U.S. had imposed a temporary suspension on the importation of dogs from countries with high rates of rabies. The criminal dog trade The notice also cites a Canadian study conducted between 2021 and 2022 which found that, when tested, nearly half of the rescue dogs with current rabies vaccination certificates brought into Canada had no detectable rabies titer to indicate they had actually been vaccinated. The notice says it’s not just international animal rescue groups bringing dogs into the U.S. “There is growing evidence that criminal networks are becoming involved in the lucrative dog trade, and the illegal puppy trade was reported to have increased during the pandemic,” the CDC wrote. When a dog with rabies is detected, the CDC estimates it costs $270,000 on average to investigate and vaccinate humans exposed to the dog. While human deaths from rabies in the U.S. are rare and generally follow exposure to wild animals, the CDC estimates