Car Trouble

It might surprise you given how much I talk about disability rights that that is not on the top of my mind right now. I don’t have much to say about disability at the moment.

The last time I blogged about Leon, you told me you wanted to know more about my journey with him. So now you’re getting a second blog post.

One thing that we’ve noticed about Leon is he doesn’t like riding in cars. Every time he’s in a vehicle that’s running, he cries loudly, and he won’t keep still. This situation reminded me of something I learned about through my disability work: how the adverse childhood experiences, or ACES for short, can stick with you, and negatively impact your future life, Including health issues that suddenly arise and don’t make sense, if you don’t know a person’s history. I’m not a doctor or any other type of scientist, so I’m not going to explain precisely why that happens in people’s brains, but the fundamental lesson is the more ACES a child has in their background, the more negative impacts they have in their adult lives.

I have not thought about the applications in non-humans, but it does explain why both my rescue dogs had strange reactions to ordinary experiences. I may have mentioned that Duke was part Labrador, yet he hated water. Also, anytime someone had a plastic bag, like a trash bag, he would make sure he left the room. The tricky thing with dogs is that they can’t always explain what happened in their past and what might be a trigger for them. You have to stumble across it, and if you’re lucky, you can help your dog work through it. 

Mom and I decided to enlist the help of our dog trainer and friend, Michael Lee Brandon, after a nerve-wracking experience on Thanksgiving Day.  I happened to be sick with a bad cold that ran through my whole family. We wound up not driving to the family gathering for the first time in many, many years. It was so bad I have not gone to see the Mr. Rogers movie that I talked about last time.

On the evening of Thanksgiving, we were going to go to K&W, since it’s the only place that seemed to be open that we can get a Thanksgiving meal. I did not want to bring the dog, but I lost that argument. I could see Mom’s point, though, that we want to have more rides with him, so he feels more comfortable.  So, I was OK with a quick trip. On the way there, Leon was very nervous; he would not sit down at all. He would be up sitting in my stepdad’s lap and crying and not being comfortable. Unfortunately, all that commotion fogged up the windows, so Mom cut one turn short and hit my ramp door.

We got to K&W, and Mom was going to run in and get the food and come right back out, but as you probably know already, Thanksgiving is one of the busiest nights at K&W.  I wound up sitting in my van with my stepdad and my nervous dog, and the ramp door would not stay closed after we bumped it. I guess it thought someone was there because it wasn’t closing correctly. That’s when I got nervous, because Leon has a history of bolting, and my Stepdad and I both have mobility issues. For a while, I had him calm, because we had been training him to be quiet when people have him on his leash. He was picking up on my nervousness because dogs can do that. But at one point, he slipped on the ramp and managed to push it open. Thankfully, my stepdad had the leash at that point, so he was able to use the opportunity to walk him around the parking lot. The whole time he was out of the car, I wanted him to get back in the car as safely and quickly as possible.

He eventually did make it back into the van, but there was a girl who happened to be running. Apparently, German Shepherds have an instinct to bark at people who are running, so that was loud.  

In the week since, we’ve been working with Lee’s experienced help to ameliorate Leon’s behavior in vehicles. It’s been plodding progress, but there has been some improvement. Lee agrees with us that there was some trauma that happened in a car. He’s fine until the motor comes on and the doors close. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, we’ll never be able to know what happened to Leon in a car, but our hope is, with more and more supervised trips, Leon will get better.