Let's Play

"Just play.  Have fun.  Enjoy the game."

- Michael Jordan

Cassius Marcellus Coolidge

I did a lot of adulting this week.  I knocked out a lot of that list I was lamenting last week (but not the obedience classes...hopefully I will get that arranged over this long weekend).  And while I was happy with some of the things I knocked out, I was discouraged by the fact that it's a never ending list, and how life keeps throwing challenges at us - sometimes I feel like it's just me that life treats so shabbily, but I do actually know better - to constantly juggle, and it seems like there's never any down time.

That's of course an exaggeration.  I'm sitting here blogging in front of college football...but, you know what I mean, I'm sure.  Being an adult is not the do-what-you-want-when-you-want-to-do-it thrill ride we used to imagine it to be when we were kids being told what to do seemingly all the time.  Now we look at our kids and think, "Man, that's the life.  Nothing to worry about."  And our dogs are our kids too - and they have it even better than our human kids because, outside of an obedience class or two, most of them never have school to worry over, and play and sleep is their main advocation and always will be.

I was watching my dogs playing in the yard at some point, sort of idly pondering all of this, when it struck me that Rooney, my timid sweet natured female, had Sirius, the far heavier alpha male, pinned to the ground.  And after a minute Sirius fought his way up, only to let her pin him back down again.  And this went on for a bit.  Only the day before, Rooney had been the one at the bottom of the pile, but I realized that I've seen Geddy sometimes in the "submissive" position too, and it struck me in a way it hadn't before, that they were taking turns in the roles they play.  I couldn't get that out of my head as I went about my very adult, getting-stuff-done week.  I, like I'm sure a lot of people, have spent a lifetime believing that dogs roll over and show their belly to indicate submission.  So were they actually taking turns in that role?

Turns out it's a) not that simple, and b) not what I thought it meant at all.  The Mother Nature Network published an article online citing university studies that indicate that rolling over is merely facilitating their play.   

But that observation got me curious about how my dogs' play, so I spent the week watching with a different eye to it.  What I realized before that is that the exuberant play of three large, adult dogs looks like it's pretty rough stuff for an outside observer.  There's a lot of body slamming, growling, nipping, stealing toys out of one another's mouths and, of course, knocking one another down.  That doesn't faze me.  I know they're very bonded and only playing.  My biggest worry, with this breed, is that all that chewing on one another is how those mats behind their ears get so big so fast.  (I checked Rooney last Saturday for mats, and by Sunday she had one so bad we had no choice but to very carefully cut it out.) But I admit I'd never really considered any kind of planned communication to their play.  No, "Okay, today I'll be the one to roll over." kind of a thing.  That's too strong, but I think there's an actual collective conscious at work that causes their play to be almost organized.

If you're rolling your eyes right, I don't mean they sit together before I let them out and make choices about what they're going to do today.  I think it's more of a fluid decision making process once they're out there.  I think my own observations bear out what Dr. Barbara Smuts and Dr. Camille Ward wrote seven years ago, "...our studies have shown that dogs are very good at figuring out which dogs they want to play with and how to play well with their friends. Presumably, dogs are better than humans at speaking and understanding dog language..." (Barbara Smuts, PhD. and Camille Ward, PhD. "Is Your Dog's Rough Play Appropriate?" The Bark.com June 2011)

I concluded from all of this that I've been more right than I ever really knew when I would say that dogs are better judges of character than humans.  They assess their playmates quickly, use their innate communication skills to carry on a dialog to set the ground rules, which they can tweak as they go along - I'm sure we've all seen our dogs get tired before another's at the dog park and nip at the other dog as if to say, "Okay, give me a minute here." in which case the other dog almost always acquiesces.  Even within my own group, there is a "safe zone" - under the picnic table - where one of them will go when they need a time out.  In my small human mind, shortsighted to the wonder of other species' intelligence, it never ceases to amaze me how dogs work things out on the fly like they do.  But that's only because I'm too dumb to trust in the complex nature of their constant communication, I think.  I, like those two good doctors, think that we need to stop and listen to what our dogs tell us more. 

But, I personally think it might have a larger message for us.  These canines, who have the genes of their forefathers in them still, leaned over the millennia that cooperation and working together was the key to their survival.  I think they're remembering those lessons better than we are.