Teen First Dog Knot Stories

Teen First Dog Knot Stories
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This article is more than 6 years old
Eleanor Morgan with her first dog, Sniff
Thu 27 Aug 2015 13.16 BST Last modified on Mon 19 Jul 2021 13.40 BST
Our rescue dog was a beloved sidekick. How could we cope when she died? | Christine Retarides
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As someone who has experienced mental health problems, I can testify that a dog is not just a pet – they have incredible healing powers too
I grew up with dogs , no fewer than two at any one time. All the photos of me growing up, from Brillo pad-haired toddler, to teenager about to leave home, involve human limbs and furry legs intertwined in some way. Our first dog, Sniff, was the special one. A black whippet-labrador cross with a white diamond over her heart, she let me and my siblings ride her round the garden all day long and suffered the endless tugging and twirling of her ears, all with a stretchy smile on her face. She sat still as I put her in flowery dresses and tied tea towels round her head to make her look like an old Italian nonna. Silly girl.
Sniff wasn’t just a dog. They never are. There are those who balk at the idea of attaching such profound emotion to an often stinking animal (I know one person who says “all dogs are Tories”), but if you know, you know. When I think about my childhood , happy and bucolic but spliced with trauma, I remember above almost all else the weight of Sniff in bed with me, under the covers. She was mine and I told her things. When your world fills with pain as a child – family separation , infidelity , arguing, courts, protracted physical illness – throwing your small body over something unfalteringly loyal, warm and with a heart beating just like your own, drowns out all the noise. And when you wake up in the morning and they’re still there, looking at you, not getting up until you’re ready, you feel safe. Watched.
When Sniff died, my dad laid her out in a blanket on the back doorstep for us to say goodbye before he buried her. There was my best friend, lying stiff on her side with her tongue hanging out. She never let her tongue hang out but her heart wasn’t beating now, was it? She didn’t care about being graceful any more. Our other dog, Scruff, came and sniffed her up and down before running inside to hide. My own teenage heart was too heavy to keep me upright. I had two days off school and I’m not sure I’ve known grief like it since.
The things animals can do for mental health are well-documented. Across America, people are taking dogs, cats and llamas (really) everywhere with them for emotional support, as explored wonderfully in this New Yorker piece . Pet therapy is used widely in settings such as residential homes, children’s wards and psychiatric hospitals, particularly with dogs, because their presence is both calming and highly sensory. Dogs have been shown to reduce the agitation of dementia patients , for example, and increase pleasure just by being there. The patient may take the time to groom the animal, take it on a little walk or give it a treat, and with that comes a sense of purpose. In fact, there are studies that show significant reductions in anxiety scores after animal-assisted therapy sessions in hospitalised psychiatric patients.
I know first hand what dogs can do for an anxious mind. After an initial run of bewildering panic attacks at school, aged 17, anxiety would grow into something that would overshadow great blocks of my adult life. As a late teen, one of the only things that made me feel better when I got anxious at night was picking up my mum’s Jack Russell, Harry, when everyone had gone to sleep and taking him into bed with me. He wriggled and snored and dropped the kind of hot, meaty farts that can actually induce terror in a person, but it didn’t matter. Listening to his breathing as he lay there was the most soothing thing I knew.
All through my anxious years I’ve quietly craved a bit more than the shimmer of human contact. Love from a partner is essential and life-affirming, and with the patience and kindness of a few select people, I have reached a point where – touch wood, because anxiety can turn even the most positive of statements into a ruminative whirlpool – anxiety is still something I live with, but no longer defines my life to the extent it has in the past. But there’s always been space for something else.
In my bleakest of moments, I have found myself craving the company of a different four-legged friend. Not just for the comfort, but purpose and focus, too. A real reason to leave the house and make conversation.
Somewhere in my subconscious, memories have been built that associate pain relief with the presence of a dog. Four years ago, I became depressed as a result of unsustainable anxiety levels. This depression was defined by utter bewilderment and constant physical pain. It was the most intense pain I’ve ever known. During this time, I had a recurring daydream of lying on a sunny patio with a dog, stroking its hot belly, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that even the thought of it built a moat around my misery. My partner was heroic, utterly, but something in me regressed to craving the near-telepathic micro-ness that is holding a dog in your arms, telling it that it’s a good boy or girl while smoothing its ears down. Only, it was never the right time to get one, because of work and life.
This summer, I left my senior position at Vice to write a book about anxiety. Writing it has been very rewarding but also hard, because it involves re-visiting some of the most desperate times of my life, which triggers all sorts of anxious muscle memory. Writing is also, by its very nature, defined by long periods of isolation. That isolation and room for my thoughts run wild can be a trigger and, after an afternoon spent agonising over something or other, I thought: I’m going to do it.
Initially, I swore I’d get a rescue dog, but during an idle look online over breakfast one morning, there she was. A fuzzy picture of a three-month-old smooth-haired cockapoo, black as a crow, needing to be re-homed because her young owner was pregnant with her second child and didn’t think she could handle the puppy anymore. We sent a few emails and I went to see her in Essex the next day. It had been a bad week, anxiety-wise, but sitting on their kitchen floor as this Hairy Maclary ran rings around me, I clean forgot. The day after, we went to get her and bring her to London.
In the five weeks that she’s been with me, Pamela has injected more joy than I thought she could. Amid the turds (in their myriad consistencies), the biting, the tapeworm (long gone now) the digging, the following, the jumping, the goose shit eating, the farting, sweet jesus the farting, I feel different.
I’m not saying she’s taken away my anxiety, but she’s given me focus. It’s not just the bomb that goes off in my chest when she tries to get up on the bed in the morning, gruffly howling with her mouth in a perfect, tiny “o”, nor is it about losing the plot when she runs full pelt at me with her ever scruffier beard full of water and kibble bits. I have a lot of purpose these days, but she’s given me more, on the days I need it most.
A dog is better than any mindfulness app – it’s not a pre-recorded thing for everyone, it’s living and it’s for you. In the moment. They can sense when you need calm and they respond. CBT and medication might be the stalwarts for treating anxiety long-term, and both are part of my life, but in the day-to-day, moment-to-moment, sometimes we need something else, something tangible. I wish more anxious people had such immediate access to dogs, because they’re better than any benzodiazepine or beta-blocker out there.

I adopted a sweet dog from the shelter and we immediately bonded. So much, in fact, that I felt almost like he could read my mind, and I could read his. It wasn't until he went into heat and I felt the urge to take of my clothes and feel his fur against my skin that I realized something was wrong. But I didn't care. As crazy as it sounded I wanted my big, huge Freddie inside me. But after hours and hours Freddie's knot still hasn't gone down and he's stuck inside me. I don't know what to do so I call the veterinarian from the shelter. When he sees what's going on he has ideas of his own. He wants to participate, and he says I can't tell anyone what's going on or he'll turn me in!
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The Rainbow Family gathering got plenty of local and national media coverage.

Denver7 via YouTube

The fiftieth-anniversary gathering of the Rainbow Family is officially over, but the U.S. Forest Service is still working with the group to clean up and rehabilitate the Adams Park area of Routt County's Hahns Peak/Bears Ears Ranger District, where the event took place.

In advance of the gathering, the feds had created a National Rainbow Incident Management Team, with around sixty law enforcement agents and Forest Service staffers assigned to handle the event. Thousands of people attended this year's gathering, and according to Forest Service estimates , they racked up 495 law enforcement actions including incident reports, written warnings, violation notices and arrests.

"These law enforcement actions ranged from inoperable vehicle equipment, damage to natural resources, narcotics possession and/or distribution, and interference with federal officers and assisting other cooperating law enforcement agencies," says Hilary Markin, the team's public information officer.

The numbers were down from last year's gathering, which resulted in approximately 600 law enforcement actions. Even so, Markin says that officers found large amounts of illegal drugs, particularly fentanyl, as well as LSD, heroin, methamphetamines, psychedelic mushrooms, cocaine and marijuana — which is legal in Colorado, but not on federal lands.

Law enforcement is still in the area, as are dozens of Rainbow Family members who committed to staying and helping to clean the area.

According to the Rainbow Family website , organizers met on July 7, the last day of the 2022 gathering, to determine the location of next year's event; that information has not yet been posted.

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Catie Cheshire is a staff writer at Westword . After getting her undergraduate degree at Regis University, she went to Arizona State University for a master's degree. She missed everything about Denver -- from the less-intense sun to the food, the scenery and even the bus system. Now she's reunited with Denver and writing news for Westword .

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Adam Cayton-Holland

December 18, 2008

4:00AM

The whining starts about 5:30 a.m. — a slow, heartbreaking cry from the crate at the foot of my bed that I can usually silence by screaming "No!" as loud as I can, then collapsing back into my pillow. (The neighbors probably think that the curious fellow next door greets every day by fighting off a rape.) But after a half-hour or so, Annabel has Emeriled it up a notch, and there's no ignoring the lunatic baying coming from the floor of my bedroom, particularly since it's accompanied by Annabel hurling herself into the grate of her kennel with such force that it often moves several feet. It is at this juncture that I sigh, put on some warm clothes and release the wrath that is my Chesapeake Bay Retriever she-bitch.
Said bitch shares a quality with many working dogs — one no doubt born of years of hunter beatings — and that's an insatiable need to collect something in her mouth. Chessies are bred to retrieve felled fowl for their masters on the Chesapeake Bay; with Annabel, this trait manifests itself in a wholly deranged need to blast out of her crate like a fucking cannonball, furiously find something to pick up in her mouth — a sock, a shoe, a water bottle, my wallet — and then bolt toward the back door, all the time whining and trying hard not to squat and piss en route. Twice I've fallen down the stairs trying to keep up. I'm thinking about getting a LifeCall necklace: I've fallen and I can't get up, and now I'm lying in a pool of my puppy's urine and she won't stop licking the inside of my gums! It's kind of adorable, but I think I just shit part of my hip bone!
I let Annabel out and she does her business, after which she comes in from the cold. At this point, I have a choice to make: Either I throw her back in the crate and she chills out and I go back to sleep, or I let her hop in my bed and she chills out and goes back to sleep. If I'm completely sober, it's back in the crate, bitch, you gots to learn that I am the master. But if I'm even a touch hung over? We're spooning.
That was the routine on Election Day, November 4, when I awoke for the second time that morning to a dog licking my face and bloodstains on my sheets: Clear Creek Annabel Lee had decided to greet the dawn of a new democracy by becoming a woman. I had not neutered her, since my mother is still making up her mind whether she'd like to show or breed Annabel. So the next month of my life was spent dealing with my dog's period. (They get about two a year, concerned citizens.) I was lucky that Annabel was not much of a "spotter," as they say, and other than having to keep her out of doggy daycare and go back from work to check on her several times a day, all was good. She wrapped it up nicely and life returned to normal.
But the other day, guess what? More blood! My mom took Annabel to a specialist; turns out she has what's called a "split heat." It's like two doggie periods for the price of one! And as for Annabel Period Version 2.0, let me tell you, Holmes, it's no dry run. She's a better spotter than that closet queer at the gym!
Why am I sharing the intimate details of my puppy's menstruation with you? For two reasons. One, because it's my life, and two, because my little baby is growing up. Clear Creek Annabel Lee turned one this week — seven in dog years. Sure, she still tears shit up with lunatic zeal — the day Cloverfield arrived via NetFlix, she smoked that flick in a way I did not know a DVD could be destroyed. And yeah, the other day she escaped down the block for the first time and was very derelict in responding to my demands to return, but she's still a pretty good dog. She's sweet as can be, and the way I can get that old hound a-howling, well, you'd think we was both inbred. Also, if you look at her and say "Annabel" with real purpose in your voice, she will stare at you with an intensity typically reserved for the lobtomized. When she's gazing at you like that, you can't help but think, "My God, that's a fine-looking puppy!"
But alas, my Annabel is a puppy no more. And so it is to that little lady — and to her brothers and sisters around the city — that I say "Happy Birthday."
And if you find me annoying now, just think how insufferable I'm going to be when I have kids. The thought alone is enough to make even me puke.

Catie Cheshire

July 8, 2022

10:59AM

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