If you’re in the market for a dog, think twice before making that dog a dachshund. No doubt there are millions of happy dachshund owners who would disagree, but millions of happy dachshund owners never met Sossi.
Sossi was a dachshund of indeterminate age that lived next door to my family during the late 1960s and, given the rancor she inspired among her neighbors, was lucky to see the 1970s. The first problem with Sossi-- one that, granted, wasn’t her fault--concerned her looks. When choosing a dog, most dachshund enthusiasts set their aesthetic standards low--and well they should. Given the canine industry’s obsession with breeding and bearing, it takes some courage to select a dog that looks as though at least one root of its family tree is firmly planted in the Jimmy Dean sausage factory. Sossi, small at birth and throughout her life, took the distinctive dachshund body type even further, appearing less like a huggable household pet than a sort of high-speed kielbasa with feet. But Sossi’s worst feature was not her wurst feature.
If part of a dog’s job in the whole interspecies domestication deal involves keeping the human’s home safe from intruders, Sossi was evidently bucking for employee of the month. To be sure, a home guarded by 11 pounds of mobile luncheon meat is not exactly impregnable, and Sossi must have known that, deciding that what she couldn’t accomplish with her bulk she would accomplish with her bark. Rising at least 15 minutes before sunrise, she would spend up to 11 hours a day standing in her front yard and barking in a high, piercing register at any unfamiliar person she detected within the tristate area. As Sossi got older, she grew even more cantankerous, routinely barking not just at strangers but at family members, friends, cats, plants, furniture, and on one memorable occasion, a fresh loaf of Roman Meal sandwich bread. Eventually, Sossi became so antisocial she simply retreated to the attic, took her meals in her room, and spent much of her dotage looking out her window and alternately barking at passersby and yelling at neighborhood kids to turn down that confounded rock and roll.
Sossi’s snappish temperament is not uncommon among dogs, and it is by no means the only behavioral quirk the canine personality can exhibit. For every breed of dog available, there is a breed of dog dysfunction never mentioned in the owner’s manual. Nowadays human beings are beginning to realize that their best nonhuman friends have psyches that are every bit as complex as their own--and every bit as in need of understanding. More and more, the person providing that understanding is Dr. Nick Dodman.
Dodman is the director of the Tufts University Animal Behavior Clinic in Grafton, Massachusetts, and the author of the upcoming book The Dog Who Loved Too Much: Tales, Treatment, and the Psychology of Dogs. The acknowledged leader in the admittedly narrow field of dog psychology, Dodman has spent much of his career studying the canine mind and has developed a wide range of methods for curing what ails it. The way Dodman sees it, troubled dogs, like troubled humans, can respond to a variety of psychotherapeutic protocols, including behavior modification regimens and even the use of psychotropic medications like Anafranil and Prozac. While many pet owners may doubt whether treatment of this kind is ever right for a patient that would just as soon chew a couch as lie down on it, Dodman, a dog lover himself, is not among them.
