How my dog told me he was missing his water bowl…
I have ADHD, and sometimes I begin a task, and then the task partway complete, disappears into the ether of my consciousness, and I unwittingly end up on a different path. This happened to me yesterday when I went to wash my dog’s water bowl and ended up leaving it washed in the sink, and naturally never brought it back. This is not his only water bowl, we have others placed strategically around the house, but it is the one for our recreation room which is where we spent most of the day.
This room used to be a garage, as such there is only one door that enters back into the house, which was closed as our house is under construction and there was a lot of noise coming from that area. And two doors leading outside. One door leads into our biggest fenced-in backyard and his preferred potty area, and the other leads to a patio that connects with the sliding door into our master bedroom.
He has been equipped with many gestural strategies to communicate what he needs, and his vocabulary for water contains more than one option even in this room. It varies depending on how close he is to one gesture vs. another, and if I miss one, he will often simply move on to the next and persist until I catch up. One such gesture is to simply point at the nearby case of water bottles, another is to stand next to his empty water bowl, sometimes he will lick the empty water bowl to add an acoustic flare as it clanks around. Now at this time, there was a stand for the water bowl, but no bowl, and he did not choose to signal me to look at the water bottles. Is this because he realized even if I fetched the bottle, there would be nothing to pour it into? I may never know, but something about this chain prompted him to instead use his repertoire of skills obtained from B.A.A.R.C.™to walk me through a unique chain of communication that had not happened in quite this way before.
He first stood by the door leading to outside, the one that takes us to the patio and bedroom, which is very uncommon for him. As he was standing there, he began to grunt at me, soliciting my attention. Once he had my eye contact, he began to tap his feet, a sure sign he wanted to move, and I was expected to move with him so I stood from my seat. He turned poking the door with his nose enthusiastically and, ran out the door to the sliding door as soon as I opened it. I thought he was telling me he wanted to lay in bed, another prized activity, so I said “I’m sorry we can’t go in there right now”, left the door open, and stepped back. He quickly loped back into the rec room, and stood in front of me, confirming that I was making eye contact, before he went to the bowl stand and shoved it with his nose, as if to say “Look at this, it’s wrong” before running back outside to the sliding door once again. And then it clicked, that was where I was washing the water bowl and had left it in the sink. I confirmed by asking “Water?” and he jumped around excitedly, letting me know I was on the right track, I retrieved his bowl, filled it up, and he drank happily.
One of the goals of B.A.A.R.C.™ that will never cease to amaze me, is how it empowers animals to get creative in generating new ways of communicating with us, and persist in solving problems with the resources available to them. He could have continuously pointed at the bottles of water until I understood, but instead, he put together a far more complex chain of communicative behaviors to show me not only that he wanted water, but that his bowl was missing, where he knew a bowl would be, etc. The unparalleled access I get to my dog’s intelligence is not only a source of constant fascination and admiration, but enriching to both of our lives. It also frees me from much of the guilt and shame I would have previously felt, if I was left to discover that I had forgotten his bowl and wondered how long he may have wanted it but didn’t have it there. Instead, knowing that my animals are empowered to not only tell me what their needs are, but to persist until they are fulfilled helps me to take the best care of them possible, while allowing myself grace for my mistakes knowing the negative impacts are buffered, we are not perfect, and we don’t have to be.
