Emotion to Motion: How the Mind Impacts Your Dog's Mobility: A Loyal Companion Guide

By Kate Titus

UNLOCK THE EMOTIONS THAT INFLUENCE YOUR DOG'S MOVEMENT

 

In Emotion to Motion: How the Mind Impacts Your Dog's Mobility,you will:

• Gain insight into the ways your dog's emotions guide the "when, where, how, and why" of her movements
• Identify your dog's emotional states and recognize their impact on her willingness to move and engage with the world around her
• Discover how to shape your dog's environment to enhance positive emotions and minimize situations that generate negative emotions

Your goal to maintain the best quality of life possible for your dog, no matter her age or level of mobility, is attainable. Emotion to Motion will help guide you along the way.

 

Love, love, love this book! Spot on in so many ways! Kate's understanding of how emotions affect your dog's movement goes beyond the basic concept of "good days and bad days." She provides an inside look at what's really going on in your dog's world, including the emotional toll of pain. Once again, she provides invaluable, practical advice on how to impact your dog positively for the best possible life.

—Sonnet Jarvis, DVM

Certified Canine Rehabilitation Therapist

NASM - CPT, Corrective Exercise Specialist, Youth Exercise Specialist

Certified Canine Fitness Trainer

Arizona Veterinary Physical Rehabilitation

• Language: English
• Publisher: A Loyal Companion
• Release date: Dec 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223263234

Book preview

PREFACE

Dog leash

Many years ago, when I was at a crossroads in my professional life, I thought I wanted to be a dog trainer. I loved dogs, especially my dog Harley, and wanted to spend more time with him. What started out as an add-on service to training—canine massage—introduced me to how dogs move and communicate. And it was here I found what truly interested me about dogs.

My passion became studying the unique blend of movement and communication of each dog I worked with. I enjoyed listening to them—not talking, not telling, but truly listening to their wants, their needs, their fears, their joys, their confusion, their frustrations, and anything else on their minds. I wanted to learn their language and each dialect within it to understand how they experienced their world through movement and mobility.

I have worked with dogs of all ages and mobility levels from Quinn, a four-week-old Braque du Bourbonnais who couldn’t stand, to Dottie, a nineteen-year-old Dalmatian with bad hips. I have carried Roxie, a quadriplegic Rhodesian ridgeback, in and out of my pool for soothing swim sessions, and I’ve massaged the creaky back of Gram, a sheltie with agility titles behind her name. This book is a culmination of working with and observing those dogs and thousands of others.

All those dogs combined taught me three things that make up the framework of this book. First, pay attention. Until you allow yourself to tune in to some being other than yourself, you’re missing the best part of the relationship. I touch on this topic in the introduction (please don’t skip the good information there!) and in chapter 7.

Second, recognize and identify what you’re experiencing through all your senses. Being open to the possibility that your dog has a rich, complicated emotional world is the foundation of this entire book. Without it, the following concepts—including the role of pain, quality of life, and joy—have no context. You can find those topics covered early in this book in chapters 1–4 and later in chapter 8.

Third, make accommodations for your dog (and yourself) based on what you’ve learned from the first two. It’s not enough to be a student of your dog’s emotions or an evaluator of her quality of life. Be a practitioner; apply what you’ve learned. Otherwise, what’s the point? Learn more about how to do this in chapters 5–6 and chapter 8.

A word about the science included in this book. As I make clear in the introduction, I’m not a scientist. Rather, I’m a mobility specialist—that is, I identify ways to help dogs move through their world more easily. Because emotions motivate movement, some of the tools in my tool kit are based on the work of leaders in neuroscience, affective neuroscience, animal behavior, zoology, and psychology. I can’t expect a dog to move in her new wheelchair unless I understand what will motivate her to do so.

This book is not meant to be a textbook or a scientific text. It is written for the general public—pet parents interested in learning more about their senior or mobility-challenged dog’s emotions and resulting behavior.

I’ve made bold statements in the text that may make a scientist stop and say, Wait a minute; it’s not that simple. But for my purposes and those of my readers, it needs to be simple and accessible. For example, is the color of the sky blue or cerulean? The specific RGB or CMYK color code for blue doesn’t matter to the general public. Although it may be important to the designer choosing the color for an intricate pattern, it’s not to the novice eye. What matters is that you’re paying attention to the sky. You’re recognizing that it’s blue. And you’re making accommodations for what may fall from that sky based on its color.

I hope you learn something new (many somethings!) while reading this book. I also hope you’ll have fun reading stories about my own dogs as well as dogs I’ve worked with over the past ten years. You’ll see I’ve written quite a bit about my personal dogs because I know them the best.

You’ll probably notice that I’ve used all female pronouns when referring to your dog throughout the book. I did this in honor of my girl Dottie, who passed away while I was finishing this book. If you have a male dog in your life, humor me, would you?

Now, curl up, invite your dog up onto the couch or bed, and dive into her emotional world. I appreciate your time and your trust.

Woof!

Kate

INTRODUCTION

What an Interesting Monster

I scared a dog today. I didn’t mean to, of course, but it happened. I didn’t understand what was making Charlie uncomfortable until I tucked my hair behind my ear. Then it all became clear.

I have crazy hair. It’s curly, unruly, thick, and streaked with silver. Okay, streaked is being kind, and so is silver. Swaths of gray is more accurate. Think less Julianna Marguiles, more Roseanne Roseannadanna. You get the picture.

I don’t often wear it down because it takes on a life of its own, expanding to double the size of my head. Most days, it’s on full lockdown, wrapped in a bun (known as the Ruth Bader Ginsburg or RGB for short) or a tight ponytail.

I love my brothers, but they’ve had a field day making jokes about my hair since I was a little girl. They made references to Broom Hilda, Witchy, Crisco, Medusa, rats’ nests, plus they warned me to stay away from open flames.

By far my favorite (and certainly the most enduring—and endearing) hair joke in my family revolves around a Bugs Bunny cartoon called Water, Water Every Hare. In this classic from 1952, Bugs finds himself trapped in the castle of an evil scientist who needs a rabbit brain to complete his experiment. The scientist sends Rudolph, a big, red-haired monster in white tennis shoes, to capture Bugs and bring him to the laboratory. In an effort to escape Rudolph and the castle, Bugs becomes a gabby hairdresser. Bugs asks Rudolph where he got such a terrible hairdo and convinces him that an interesting monster should have an interesting hairdo. Enter the bobby pins and dynamite curlers.

So, as I entered Charlie’s house, my hair must have been, eh, quite witchy. I would love to know what was going through his mind as his mom, Pam, opened the door to welcome me in. He knew I was coming and had always met me with an enthusiastic greeting.

Charlie is a rat terrier mix, so his normal greetings include a full array of spins, leaps, jumps, barks, paws-up dancing, and excited sprints. Today? Shock. Complete and utter shock. He stopped mid-jump and backed away in silent confusion, thinking, It smells like you, but why is your fur so big? Are you mad at me? Are you going to hurt me? I’m going to wait by my rawhide until Mom makes this better.

Embarrassed that Charlie was afraid to come near me, I pulled the hairband off my wrist and started to corral the curls. With a few swift swipes, I wrangled my hair into a thick gray-brown bushel and secured it with my brown elastic. As I brought my hands back down from my head, I sat down in the floor and called to Charlie. Looking at my face and head, he approached cautiously, amazed at the transformation. Finally, he broke out into an ornery grin and ran onto my lap.

Whew! Don’t ever do that to your hair again. It’s scary!

Thanks, Charlie. I hope my brothers send you something nice.

Dog leash

Why?

I think I was a precocious kid. My favorite question was (you guessed it), Why? I didn’t want to know how things worked but why they worked. It wasn’t the mechanical that inspired my questions. I was a Lego kid, not a Tinker Toy kid. My mother was an elementary school librarian, so my family blames her for encouraging my irritating childhood habit. After all, she’s the one who would say, Good question. Why don’t you go look that up? As much as I hated that response at the time, it has fed my curiosity for fifty years.

During my sessions with pet parents, many ask me why their dog’s mobility is failing. They want to know why she won’t jump into the car anymore or why she no longer follows them around the house. The simple answer is usually physical: she’s too weak in the rear end, her wrists hurt, she has nerve pain in her back, or her elbows are sore, for example.

But there’s more to this answer, and it’s anything but simple. Behind that why is the power of emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, and happiness. Behind that why is a complicated decision-making process determining the action that moves her toward pleasure and away from pain. Behind that why are evolutionary forces that drive behavior. Behind that why is the connection between the body and mind.

There’s Gotta Be a Reason

The mind is the most underappreciated aspect of canine mobility. Everything your dog experiences in her life is processed through her emotions. If your dog doesn’t feel thirsty, she doesn’t move toward the water bowl. If she doesn’t feel elation, she doesn’t dance to the door to greet you. If she doesn’t feel pain, she doesn’t protect herself against further injury. No one’s body makes a move without the mind.

The words emotion, motivation, and motion all share the same Latin root word: mot, to move. Emotion motivates motion. Emotions move your dog toward comfort and away from discomfort. She feels hot in the sun, so she moves into the shade. She feels lonely, so she moves toward a companion. She feels scared, so she moves to safety.

When you look at your dog, what do you see? What do you wonder about? When I ask my clients those questions, the most common answers are, I see my best friend or I see a dog who loves me or I see a dog who is struggling. When asked what they wonder about, clients most often say, What is she thinking? or Is she in pain? or Is she happy? and Am I doing everything I can to make her comfortable?

What you see and wonder about all relate to your dog’s emotional experience. The first step in learning about her emotional world is to acknowledge that she has emotions and that those emotions drive her behavior. Learning to recognize how your dog expresses emotions such as joy, fear, anger, and frustration helps you respond in ways that maintain or restore her physical and emotional comfort.

Intuitively, you know that what your dog feels and thinks affects the way she moves through and interacts with the world. You may be recognizing changes, but you don’t have the vocabulary to put words to it yet. Let me help you with that in this book. First, chapter 1 identifies your dog’s basic emotions and introduces common situations that trigger these emotions for mobility-challenged dogs.

Pay Attention 2.0

The common thread among all the books in the Loyal Companion Guide series is learning to pay attention. Sit. Stand. GO! emphasizes recognizing physical changes in your dog’s mobility and making accommodations for those changes. That’s only part of the picture.

Emotion to Motion, the second in the series, illustrates how your dog’s emotions guide the when, where, how, and why she moves. It prepares you to examine your dog’s emotional state and recognize its impact on her willingness to move and engage with the world around her. From there, it helps you shape her environment to enhance positive emotions and minimize situations that generate negative emotions. Your goal? To maintain the best quality of life possible for her, no matter her age or level of mobility.

Quality of Life—Not Only for End-of-Life Decisions

The phrase quality of life can be scary. It’s often spoken in hushed tones by veterinarians and pet parents as they discuss end-of-life options and euthanasia for a