The Case for the Boring Walk

There is a privet hedge on the parkway outside my building, and on a Tuesday last October a foster dog named Bruce put his face in it for nine minutes and eleven seconds. I timed him. I was timing things that fall, because a coworker had told me I was letting the fosters get away with murder.

We did one block that night. Down to the corner and back up the other side. Twenty-two minutes, most of it the hedge plus a stretch of retaining wall a raccoon had been using as a bench.

He came in, drank half a bowl of water, turned one circle, and went down on the kitchen tile with his chin flat. Still there when I went to bed.

Six days before that I'd taken him on a four-mile loop, because his kennel card said high-energy dog, needs a lot of exercise. He got home and paced. He mouthed my forearm, not hard, but over and over. It was almost eleven before he lay down, and he didn't sleep so much as lie there with his ears swiveling at the radiator.

The tired dog magnet

A tired dog is a good dog was on a magnet on our break room fridge, next to a Bears schedule from 2011. I said it too, at the adoption counter, handing people a leash and a folder. Four of my six years there.

Exhaustion and calm are two different things that look similar from the couch. You can run a dog's legs off and leave the alarm system fully armed. A veterinary behaviorist on our hard cases called it an engine idling at four thousand RPM. The panting that never slows. The dog who can't take a treat without taking two fingers with it.

Those dogs are not under-exercised. Most of them get more physical activity in a day than I get in a week. What they never learned, or lost somewhere, is how to come down.

Bruce, kennel 14

Bruce came in as a stray off Kedzie in February. Fifty-four pounds of boxer and something else, head like a cinder block, tail that could clear a countertop. He was the dog every new volunteer wanted and nobody wanted twice. His paperwork said a lot of dog, which is shelter for we are out of ideas.

So we did what everybody does. We ran him. Twenty minutes of fetch in the side yard, then thirty, then a volunteer with a Chuckit and a serious commitment problem started doing forty-five. Bruce got worse. His kennel scores dropped two weeks running. He started guarding a rope toy he'd ignored for a month.

He bit a leash in half while a staffer was still holding it.

What finally worked was so boring it embarrassed me. We took him out on a six-foot leash to the weed strip along the fence behind intake and let him read it. Twice a day, fifteen minutes, a dog nose-down in dead grass and cigarette filters while a human stood there doing nothing. Training the human was the hard part.

Eleven days in, he started sleeping through the afternoons. He still knocked a volunteer's coffee off the ledge on day twelve.

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The morning an owner got it

A year after I left the shelter I was doing in-home consults, and I spent a Saturday in a field in Portage Park with a guy named Marcus and his lab mix, Tuck. Marcus was throwing a ball ninety minutes a day. Ninety. He'd wrecked his own shoulder doing it, and Tuck was still eating the drywall by the entryway closet.

I asked him to put the ball in his pocket and stand still. He was polite about it, but he clearly thought I was wasting his morning, and for a while I was. Tuck ran the fence line. Came back. Screamed at the pocket. Ran it again.

Fourteen minutes of that, which is a long time to stand in a wet field being judged.

Then he stopped at a fence post and worked it over with his nose, and at some point his tail dropped out of the stiff flag it had held since we arrived and just hung there. Marcus noticed before I said anything. He said it quietly, like he didn't want to break it.

He looks like he did at the vet after they gave him the sleepy stuff. But he's awake. He's just awake and fine.

Marcus, Tuck's owner

Tuck lay down in the grass eleven minutes later and rolled onto one hip. Marcus texted at 8:40 that night to say the dog was asleep. Tuck was never asleep at 8:40.