One canine or two will focus on their Human as the Alpha Mega
Plus Top Dog. Bringing another dog into the equation shifts
the energy. Behaviours change. Hierarchies are reassessed.
They all watch each other jealously to make sure that no one
is getting more than their fair share of the Human’s
attention. This means that until things shake down, there
are dogs underfoot all the time. The newest one is usually
the most emotional and needy, which makes the others cross.
I always forget this, somehow, when there’s a dog-shaped
vacancy in the household I’m tempted to fill. We all
have to adjust to make space for the newcomer.
Hamish joined the family in December and Kalypso and Daisy,
two females, were delighted to see him. They’d never
had an opportunity to hang out with a male dog who had not
been rendered uninteresting by surgery. But Hamish was so
weak, recovering from a near-fatal case of mange and related
infections, that he hardly acknowledged them at first. Daisy,
a shocking flirt, tried all her wiles to attract his attention.
She licked his face, tickled his ears and made indecent forays
under his tail. Hamish, like any good Scot, was appalled by
this forwardness and ignored her.
In fact, he ignored everyone but me. I fed him and painted
his burning skin with potions and he wouldn’t let me
out of his sight. For several weeks he hardly noticed that
there were any other canines in the household; he was too
sick to be a dog among dogs. Then one day he made a half-hearted
response to Kalypso’s invitation to play. It seemed
to do him good. The more he interacted with the other dogs
the more energy he had. Eventually he started following them
as they raced barking to meet visitors at the gate.
Some kind of agreement was quickly struck about what dog would
sleep on which Persian carpet. (Don’t ask me why I brought
carpets to Bali. I was on another planet at the time.) Daisy,
being black, prefers the darkest rug in the hall where she
is essentially invisible and can trip me up at night. Kalypso
likes the one with the white background, so that her long
dark hair will show up in strong contrast. Hamish has chosen
the dark red and blue one on which his newly acquired but
already shedding white coat is highly visible. Wayan Manis
chases them around with the little vacuum cleaner, muttering
affectionately.
Now Hamish keeps up with Daisy and Kalypso as they dash around
the garden chasing chickens and scaring off imaginary intruders.
One of the reasons my garden doesn’t look like a picture
out of a tropical garden book is the effect of many dog-stopping
fences and gates necessary to keep them away from the cliff.
Daisy, bred to hunt, squeezes through a hole the diameter
of a beer bottle after some hapless creature. As she goes
baying off through the jungle, Hamish and Kalypso bark encouragingly
from the garden while kicking up the grass in their excitement.
No one pays any attention to me when I order them to stop.
Like people, when dogs live together they figure out how to
get along, when to push a point and when to let it go. Dogs
also like to be the boss and will constantly, subtly test
one another and their Human to see if they can grab the top
spot. They will sleep on each other’s beds and sneak
food out of one another’s bowls if they think they can
get away with it. Dogs don’t usually eat peanuts, but
Daisy hangs around under the parrot’s cage and picks
up the unshelled nuts he drops. She’s learned the trick
of shelling them from watching Rama. Kalypso, a much fussier
eater, never showed any interest in peanuts until Hamish arrived.
Suddenly she too would carefully pick up a peanut between
her teeth, carry it to her favourite carpet and daintily deconstruct
it over a period of several minutes. I finally figured out
she didn’t really want a peanut, she just didn’t
want Hamish to get any. Hamish accepts this as typical Alpha
Dog behavior, then sneaks off to see if he can trump her by
getting away with sleeping on my bed.
I thought it was only Bali dogs that liked to roost high up
off the ground on tables, chairs and even garden walls. But
Daisy has developed a passion for sleeping on the ironing
board. Not only was this out of bounds for hygienic reasons,
but it’s a dangerously long way for a miniature dachshund
to jump. We pull the chair away from it now at night so she
can’t make the leap. But Hamish soon decided that the
ironing board would make an excellent perch and is easily
able to achieve the height in a single bound. The day we found
a small, dry dog dropping on the ironing board marking it
as Daisy’s indisputable territory was the day we started
locking the pantry door. What are the chances of having two
dogs that want to sleep on the ironing board?
Hamish had never seen a parrot and was so timid when he first
arrived he was terrified to eat within several metres of Rama’s
cage. Last week I caught him sitting directly under the cage,
staring fixedly at the featherless cockatoo. Rama hung from
one leg, swinging in a circle a few inches above Hamish’s
head, staring back. There was a certain bizarre resemblance
between the two bald creatures, both with white tufts growing
out haphazardly here and there. They seemed to be asking each
other, “What the hell happened to YOU?”
Now an hour might go by without Hamish anxiously seeking me
out. I often find him napping with Kalypso, his head on her
paw. At night when Daisy barks in the garden, they both leap
up. Hamish casts an apologetic glance at me, then disappears
into the dark with his pack.
