On being Lady-like

Alright, this one is about my dog. 
      Lady is a Great Pyrenees, weighing in about 120 pounds. When she was about three-years old, Lady was rescued from a backyard where she’d been chained and neglected. Coming into the rescue society she was dirty, her fur matted, and her beautiful face given over to absolute terror. Struggling to find an adoptive home, the rescue society wondered if she might just have to be euthanized. A kind foster family stepped up. Unfortunately, they could only be a temporary solution. 
      When Lady first came to our home we noticed signs of her having been abused. She cringed away when feet too close to her moved quickly. We think she had been kicked. She absolutely couldn’t tolerate men in baseball caps, still can't. She was wary of idling pickup trucks. From her reactivity to other dogs we think she’d been taunted by dogs running loose when she was chained in that backyard. Lady didn’t know how to walk on a lead and would either pull or lay on the ground stubbornly, her front paw folded beneath her. 
      Now almost three years later, Lady is the most loving, loyal and personable dog we’ve ever had. It took her over a year but she eventually started to play with toys and do zoomies. All in all, she has completely re-defined the word Lady-like for us.
      Just in case you’re not familiar with the breed, Great Pyrenees look like a massively oversized English Cream Retriever. One dark night a visitor coming out of a neighbour’s house when I was walking Lady exclaimed there was a polar bear roaming the neighbourhood. 
      But despite their polar bear /retriever looks, Great Pyrenees have a personality more like a German Shepherd. The breed originated as a guard dog for the sheep on the slopes of the Pyrenees Mountains in France. 
      And this is where the similarity between my dog and me comes in.
      No, I haven’t guarded sheep on the slopes of the mountains and I’m sure that unlike Lady I’d be really bad at it. And no, I don’t have a deep coat of white, self-cleaning fur. Also I’m not apt to use a punch with my left hand if someone stops showing me affection (Lady has perfected that, it’s called the Pyrenees’ Paw).     
      But Lady and I do resemble each other in personality. The dominant trait of the breed is that of being iconically independent and stubborn.
      I’ve met my match.
​      Let me give an example. Pyrenees typically require a period of thinking time between when you tell them to do something and when they do it. That is, if they do it. It goes something like this: “You’ve asked me to come. I’ll have to figure out whether coming to you at this moment is more important than watching out the window. Watching out the window for people or dogs that might invade our front yard is very important. I’ve no idea why you are asking me to stop, but stopping right away just doesn’t feel right. If you’re serious enough about it you’ll ask again and then maybe I’ll consider it. Or not. 

But that’s not the only tempo variation Lady has thrown into my life. There is also the five-alarm, lights-and-sirens, fast-off-the-starting blocks reaction she has to intruders in her zone of protection. More than once on a walk I’ve ended up flat on the ground as she has taken off after what she considered an existentially threatening other dog. If I allow her to get more than two steps into her pursuit I’m in danger of being dragged across the road.  Remember, Great Pyrenees were bred to keep other predatory canines (e.g. wolves) from the flock on those Pyrenees Mountains. Protecting me from other dogs is the closest thing Lady can get to living out her heritage.
      Of course, as the human I’m supposed to be able to control Lady. Matching her instantaneous strength takes all of mine. The obvious solution would be to take her to obedience school. However, there she would be stuck in an enclosed space with many attack targets a small fraction of her size. Nope.
      But we’ve figured it out. It’s more about cooperation than control. It’s about mutual respect and recognition of what is important to each other. It works like this: I notice her body alerting from her usual easy-going gate at my side. I stop. She sits. I ask her what she's noticing and look around to find what she thinks might put our existence in peril. I talk to her about what I see, let her know my assessment of the risk. With the sound of my voice she starts to ratchet down her alert level. I reassure her we’re okay. If all else fails, I massage her ear. Eventually, she goes back to the scanning mode from her locked-in-on-the-peril mode. Then we walk on, the lead between us loose again, Lady comfortably adjusting to my pace. Well, that’s the way it works on a good day. Occasionally, we have a more difficult one.
     We still need to yield the sidewalk or walking path to other dogs, this for their safety. Lady sits peacefully beside me about ten meters off the path, me talking, her senses latched onto the other dog but drawing reassurance from the sound of my voice. Over time, her level of reactive intensity is coming down.
     I’m learning again the lesson I needed to heed over and over again as a psychologist. Psychotherapy was about providing companionship in moving through the client’s subjective experiences of treachery and trauma. It was about being sensitive and accepting to what the other was feeling, respecting each other’s strengths and working with those strengths. It was about figuring it out as we went along, knowing it worked best when I formed a secure relationship with my focus on the safety and wellbeing of the other.
     Oh, that way-too-loud barking you hear? That’s Lady. There was a doorbell on a tv commercial and she’s at our front door keeping us safe. I might need to go and reassure her that nobody is actually there.