Moses, a Golden Retriever, highly trained to be a search dog, is now retired. The years of hard work have taken their toll. His right rear hock is slightly deformed from arthritis. His once smooth gait is now weak and slow.
He is well housebroken. When he needs to go out he will bark at the door. When he is ready to come in he will do the same. In his retirement years he has developed another set of instructions for me. He will stand between me and the TV and stare. If I ignore him he will go through a routine of backing, side passing, sitting and barking. These directions mean that he is going out and I am going with him. If I take him to the door but don’t go with him, he will turn around and bark at me until I come outside with him. Once I step out the door he gets beside himself with excitement and grabs up anything he can find, usually somebody’s shoe and heads out with it, challenging me to see if I can get it back. Moses has always been a self-rewarding kind of dog. In training when he finds someone he immediately starts looking for anything he can take as a reward. He has been known to take hats, radios, cell phones and if that fails he will bring you a stick. Fortunately, he does not do this on a search.
Once outside, I walk with him down to the barn to feed the horses. Dribbling a little horse feed on the cement floor in the barn is the highlight of his trip. He does have one habit that I can’t seem to break. He goes around the barn and comes in behind the horse. From there he stands under the horse trough hoping to get a little more feed from what the horse drops. The horse does not bother him but I am afraid that, with Moses’s reduced mobility, he may get stepped on. In addition to this, in order to get behind the horse he has to go through a large mud puddle. This gets us in trouble with my wife Bobbie, because now he has to be cleaned up before he can return to the house. After our visit to the barn, I go sit in the swing. This is where I ponder the events of the day and Moses finds a stick to chew on while he rolls in the grass. This gets him as dirty as possible but to him, the back scratch is worth it. Moses in dog years is probably older than I am, but neither one of us is as spry as we once were. After we ponder for a while Moses gets up and chases a squirrel he cannot catch and I go get ready to play senior softball, which I can barely do. I have to admit, there is nothing better than pondering life with a dog.
