Moody Blues

Geddy was in a bad mood last night.  My first clue was when he and I were sitting on the couch together watching baseball after a hard day of working on the outside of the house (okay, so he was sleeping and I was watching, and I had the hard day working - he had played).  Anyway, I gave a "hoo-rah" when Francisco Cervelli scored the Pirates one and only run at the top of the 9th (which was enough to win it) and Geddy lifted his head to give me a long, calculating death stare.  A bit later he leapt off the couch and practically attacked Rooney when she was trying to play.  Like a petulant child who doesn't want to play with a toy, but doesn't want you to have it either.  Finally, and this was when I knew he was really, truly grumpy, he didn't come up on the bed with me.

At some point during the night he relented, and I felt him next to me, and he seems perfectly normal this morning, but it's making me crazy wondering why he was so grumpy yesterday.  The weather was beautiful, so they had a lot of outdoor time (maybe he was just tired and didn't want to be disturbed), I was home with him,  the cat was not tormenting him (unlike early this morning).  It was just odd for him to act so grumpy.  But of course, he can't tell me why.  So I'll never truly know, and as long as he's all fine today - well, except for the cat - I suppose I need to put it down to just one of those things.  I'm not always sunshine and roses, so why would I expect the dogs to be?

And I'm not even sure why I was so surprised at his mood.  We accept that dogs feel love and can be happy, then why can't they just have bad days?  Yet, I was.  Because I don't see them that way usually.  Rooney gets distressed if you put her in the car.  Sirius wasn't happy with me when I took the baby mouse away from him (he wasn't trying to kill it, but wasn't understanding it wasn't a toy for his amusement) last night and made him come inside.  But they both shake it off quickly.  Geddy is, I realize, maybe the moodiest of the lot.  In some ways Sirius and I are the closest - he's my big shadow.  But Geddy, I think, is more emotionally tuned to me.  Well, to be emotionally plugged in to someone, you have to have emotions yourself.

I Googled it, as we all tend to do with every little problem in life these days.  Have a question?  Chances are someone has put up something about it on the Internet.  Of course, how reliable that might be...who knows.  In this case, before I'd even finished typing, Chrome was filling in the search for me.  I clearly was not the first to look at why their dog is in a bad mood.  And sure enough, there was a wealth of articles and message boards out there.  And like I would expect, some sites seemed more credible than others.  But I learned that "bad moods" among pets is hardly a rare occurrence.  Maybe I'm just lucky that my dogs seem mostly happy.  Or accepting anyway.

Ironically, I had just had a conversation across the fence earlier in the day with the owner of Cocoa, the infamous dog that mine bark at, causing a problem with the neighbors.  He was saying that the dogs pick up on the tension of the playoffs (we're in the first round), and he had noticed that we are big Penguins fans.  So maybe Geddy's just unhappy at the results of Friday night.  Who knows.

One article written by an Indian vet suggested to "just communicate" with your pet when they are in a bad mood.  To look them in the eye and talk to them.  She may be confusing spouses with pets.  Or children.  But I've always heard looking at dog straight in the eyes is an act of aggression.  Of course, what do I know?  I recently stumbled across an article about what not to do with your dogs only to discover, to my deep chagrin, that I'd done almost all of them at one time or another.  But, let's just say I did look searchingly in Geddy's eyes and talk to him: what's he going to say back?

After some consideration, I think my answer to his next bad mood is to let him do what I do in similar situations: just ride it out.  Emotions are like the tides: they rise, they fall, they're constantly in motion.

May our days be mostly smooth waters.