Not Spring Chickens
Spring is here!
The long awaited time of the year when we have longer daylight hours as our clocks “spring ahead”. Spring plants are resilient as they rise up through clumps of hardened earth, and best of all we get to look at winter in our rearview mirrors!
Spring is energy, growth, optimism, like a “spring chicken, so to speak, or the opposite when someone lets you know you are no longer one!
As the line from the Sinatra song goes, “But now the days grow short, I'm in the autumn of the year.” Oh, poor Frank, he’s not a ‘spring chicken’ anymore. Such a buzz kill, but I will digress…
As I’ve written in past blogs, I have senior dogs, and they don’t bounce around like they used to, they sleep more, eat less, and often times they are not as playful as they once were.
But as I reflect on our lives together, we have weathered many winters as well as experienced all the glorious springs, and I am learning to remove the bar of judgement that puts these amazing dogs in a category that sets them up to be “less than”. If we see our senior dogs or humans as “less than”, we just expect them to slowly deteriorate because you know, they just aren’t spring chickens anymore. I’d prefer instead to see “spring” in everything new that they do.
Fanny, my Bully dog cannot leap onto the sofa, but she is able to use her muscle strength to climb, effortlessly onto the sofa. Fonzie, my little terrier mix, doesn’t walk as far as he used to, but he’s able to do a 1/4 mile walk/jog every morning! Both dogs love engaging in brain-games such as puzzles and clicker training, and they relish the soothing warmth when they take long naps in the sun. They still respond to the “Puppy come!” song as enthusiastically as any racehorse sprinting out of the gate, just not as fast as they used to run.
So here’s to celebrating another spring, another trip around the sun, and the many more new beginning behaviors from my “Not spring chicken” dogs!
HAPPY TRAINING & ENRICHMENT
© Fran Berry CPDT-KA, UW-AAB all rights reserved 2024
