Sorry—I can’t help myself. I need to write another dog post. (If you haven't read the previous post on My Dog's Job, feel free...)
My dog (famous in our neighborhood for his appreciation of a crowd) has a rash. It’s on his stomach, and if he actually had a real job, he would quit it immediately so he could devote himself full-time to licking his rash. At first, we figured it’d go away if he left it alone, so I put one of my old white t-shirts on him. I used a rubber band to make a knot that tightened the t-shirt around his midsection, hoping to keep him from pulling it up to lick underneath.
And that’s how we rolled for a while, with a dog who looked like a 1970’s sitcom dad with a drinking problem hanging around the house in a saggy white t-shirt with a half-empty beer and a sandwich on a TV tray. But he’s too wily. Knot or no knot, he’d get the shirt pulled up and lick and lick, all night long, slurp slurp slurp until my wife or I would pierce the silence with, “STOP LICKING!” That would quiet him for a few minutes, then it'd start again. Slurp slurp slurp...
So we took him to the vet. “It’s probably allergies and will go away when the weather changes,” she said. "Hmm…," I thought. So we got some pills and ear drops and Benadryl and we’ve been fighting the good fight for a few weeks. And losing. ("Slurp slurp slurp"--"STOP LICKING!") The rash persists. Then our daughter came up with the dog version of a nuclear solution: The cone of shame. We happened to have a cone in the garage (after long-ago doggie surgery) (Don’t judge—we have pretty much everything in our garage). We put the cone on him, and it’s been incredibly entertaining watching the animal equivalent of a dunce try and operate his body with a cone attachment. My favorite moment was when Conehead the Barbarian was coming up the deck steps the first morning wearing it. His cone got stuck on the top step, and he just froze. “That’s it. I’m stuck here forever.” He stood there and stood there, trapped. I’m not making this up—the cat who lives on our deck (a stray who moved in… It’s a long story. My wife has cat issues) was looking at him and I swear, she was shaking her head. If you listened closely, I’ll bet you could have heard her say, “Ayiyiyi. What an imbecile,” before she turned on her heels and went back into her heated cat palace. I finally, opened the door and told the dog to come, and that was enough to shake him out of his hopelessness. He managed to pull his head up a half inch and reach the promised land.
Watching him continue to be baffled by the cone over the past week has brought a few cone-related problem-solving thoughts to mind, and I wondered if they'd be useful for people other than my dog. Here they are:
- Problems are often much smaller than they appear. (A half-inch of head movement would have brought him right up the stairs.)
- Solutions are often much simpler than they appear. (A half-inch of head movement would have brought him right up the stairs.)
- Changing our perspective can help us see new solutions. (If he could look at himself from my view, standing there with the tip of his cone stuck against the deck step, he’d feel like an idiot. And he’d see how easy it is to get up the stairs. But he can only see from the perspective of a doofus in a cone.)
- The exact same problem can crop up again and again and again, each time requiring adjustments, big and small, in our problem-solving strategies. (Sometimes it takes an inch-and-a-half of head movement to the left or right. Sometimes we have to back up to get through. Sometimes we don’t fit where we’re trying to go and need to take a different path. Sometimes we try a shirt, then a cone with Benadryl.)
- Some problems are caused by people who are trying to help us, even if it doesn’t seem that way at the time. (It’s not like he understands why we’ve put a satellite dish on his head. I’ve tried to explain it to him, but all he does is look away, resenting me deeply.)
- Sometimes our problems aren’t what they seem to be. (He thinks his problem is the cone. It’s really the rash that’s itching him so bad he won’t STOP LICKING it. If we can solve the rash problem, the cone will go away.)
- Finding solutions to problems can take persistence and the help of others. (We’re going back for another vet visit, and we’re trying my wife's idea of doggie probiotics. Some of the solutions we try don’t actually solve anything, so we have to keep trying new things.)
- Sometimes people laugh at you and your problems, but, like my dog, ignore them. Someday they, too, may wind up with cones around their heads.
- And finally, with a little practice, we can get better at managing our problems, even if they don’t immediately go away.
Okay, so that’s the problem-solving list from the view of my dog wearing the cone of shame. If you’re facing a problem of some sort, give these suggestions a try and see if they inspire you. If they do, thank my dog!