Large Fierce Mammal

Milo Whynacht. 2006 – 2022 (Mrs. LFM Photo)

Mrs. LFM and I first met Milo at the SHAID (Shelter for Helpless Animals In Distress) Animal Shelter in February 2007 where even before being taken in to see him I was specifically told straight away at index finger point that, “He won’t like you,” the implication being he harboured an ingrained dislike of men.

In Medicine there is a phenomenon called “chart lore” in which a misdiagnosis added to a patient’s medical history, even through something as mundane as a brief interaction with an overworked ER doctor, becomes taken as gospel defining the shape of future treatment. Animal shelters and rescue organizations are similarly afflicted, and in Milo’s case the lore had it that he had been given up by his previous owner, a young woman, who had gotten him as a puppy when she moved to Halifax. There he was her surrogate baby until a sequence of bad boyfriend choices finally led to her moving back to live with her parents where there was no room for one year old Milo.

In keeping with the sage words of J. Allen Boone — “There’s facts about Dogs, and then there’s opinions about them. The Dogs have the facts, and the humans have the opinions. If you want the facts about the Dog, always get them straight from the Dog. If you want opinions, get them from humans.” — We went straight to Milo’s enclosure whereupon my arrival in front of it was met with a cacophony of excited barking. I waited while his excitement declined into curiosity and then, riding that wave in its moment of relative calm, I opened the cage door ready for the expected attempt to charge through it. He did not disappoint me and so was met with my blocking knee and a sharp, “Wait!” whereupon he took a step back and looked up at me. In that teachable instant, I applied the leash I had been holding and stepped back in readiness for the equally expected second attempt to charge past me. This time the timely application of, “No! Wait!”, and moving into his intended path was sufficient to arrest him to again look at me, gaining him an immediate, “OK!” and a stepping aside.

Timing is, if not the universal “everything”, a very, very big part of Everything.

February 2007. Still an inmate out on day pass. (Mrs. LFM Photo)

That point marked the first of many walks from, and back to, the shelter, and the only reason Milo wasn’t taken home with us earlier was because he hadn’t yet been “temperament tested” by SHAID’s official trainer who happened to be away at the time. As the visits continued and both the Shelter Director and the Volunteer Trainer got the measure of us, the argument was successfully made to jump the line of official doctrine and either defecate or vacate the receptacle.

Milo was ours. We were his. He came home with us on 24 March 2007 to join the Esteemed Dusty of whom I have previously written.

Dusty and Milo (Mrs. LFM Photo)

Together in the Field. (Mrs. LFM Photo)

And that chart lore about hating men? According to Milo himself, people got that idea because of all the male humans he’d been seen interacting with before me, he had never actually met an actual Man, let alone a Man who wanted nothing more from him than to be the Dog he was, and not an amalgam of misconceptions on a continuum from well meaning to outright stupid. As he found his place in the framework of his New Reality, this manifested in his being happy in the company of Mrs. LFM and me, individually or together, but to a clear bonding with me in particular. Always under my desk when my work put me there, snuggled up to my feet while Mrs. LFM and I took our ease of an evening, and always eager to share the other end of the leash with me when afield. On the Dog to Dog level, he and Dusty got along, but while Dusty was gregarious and all about the sheer joie de vivre, Milo found his fulfillment in the Hunting legacy his Beagle and Black Labrador Retriever lineage made him heir to, revealing himself to be a superb and natural tracker.

Me and Milo somewhere in the Field. I’ll leave it to you to figure out which is which. (Mrs. LFM Photo)

None of this is to imply that the development of the relationship was unerringly smooth, nor to cast ourselves as the be all, end all, all seeing, all knowing supreme specimens of Canine Leadership. Before us, Milo had not only never met a Man, let alone a stable mating pair of Humans, his experience with people in general had convinced him that none of them could be trusted. While some who briefly touched his life may have been worthy of it, they never stuck around long enough to make a difference. So by the end of his first twelve months in the world, Milo had never known consistency, and his way of expressing himself was to assume he was on his own, particularly where food and toys were concerned. That only the most violent expressions of ownership would get him through a mealtime fully fed.

So he came to us with all the signs of a Dog who expected anything that came into his possession to be taken away by the first passer by, even if it had been specifically given to him in the first place, so nothing was his unless he defended it, and defending it branded him rotten to the core.

This can be an outcome of the all too common misconception that the measure of “goodness” in a Dog can be discerned by whether or not anything given by humans can be taken away at any time absent protest, and held up as incontrovertible proof of “Alpha Dominance” where only the most heavy handed measures will teach a “food aggressive” or otherwise “resource guarding” Dog the error of his ways. Mix this with the special flavour of meanness unique to humans and you get what Milo exhibited, and slowly lost, in his early years with us.

Beyond this, Milo had clearly been teased, coming to us with an overpowering fear of the sound that Velcro makes when it’s being ripped apart, and packing tape does when being pulled off the roll. Either would send him running to hide in a quivering ball as far away from the source as he could get. His response was not startlement, but abject terror of the sort that led us to believe someone I would like to meet privately one day discovered this and enjoyed the hell out of it.

He had also been kicked, and often enough to initiate a full on defensive response at the mere passage of any innocent foot.

He came with an ingrained hatred of the kind of rude asshole who stops outside his girlfriend’s residence and summons here to his car with a beep of its horn. Probably a development of her trying to keep asshole boyfriends and surrogate baby apart, it manifested in her growing puppy as a hackles raised, teeth bared, ravening race to whatever portal was nearest the source of any offending honk, even if it came from the television.

In short, Milo had never known Trust, and not having received it he had never learned to give it.

Milo didn’t need pity or atonement by members of his now Family for the sins of others in his past. No Dog does. What he needed, as social creatures of all kinds do, was to be part of a whole that he could count on to make sense in positive ways, and where every stimulus didn’t need to be painful or frightening. Not one that came absent rules of conduct, but instead brought them loud, clear, and binding to all parties concerned, with the evils he had come to see as normal to his world view rendered conspicuous in their absence, and never to be seen again.

My Esteemed Friend Master At Arms James A. Keating (on Facebook here) speaks a cautionary bit of advice for those prone to view every thought, word, and deed they see in the most negative of terms: “Don’t judge others by your own shitty standards.” Over time, not a very long time all things considered, and not in so many words, Milo embraced the Wisdom of Jim’s  admonishment. So layer by layer the red hot coal at the center of his brain that had so readily leapt to flame at the slightest fanning of ingrained shitty standards not of his making, came to cool in favour of an informed enjoyment of his place in the band of scoundrels he’d fallen in with. When you learn to Live in the moment, as Dogs do, you can find forever in a year.

As he came into his own, Milo revealed himself as a thinking Dog, even as he found me to be a thinking Man, and a thinking Man needs a thinking Man’s Dog every bit as much as a thinking Dog needs a thinking Dog’s Man.

In August of 2007, five months after his arrival, circumstances called for emergency adoption of a most splendid German Shepherd — Gunner — who was around Milo’s own age. Things were stable in our household by that point, and everybody settled in together nicely.

Gunner and Milo in an obvious moment of great tension. (Mrs. LFM Photo)

Dusty, Milo, and Gunner wreaking havoc together. (Mrs. LFM Photo)

Mrs. LFM and the Boys cooling off in a woodland stream on a mid-summer expedition in 2009. (LFM Photo)

Over the years, our Pack of Loyal Canine Retainers waxed and waned, and three Bairns LFM joined the ranks! Preparation of the light cavalry for #1 Son Viktor began the glorious day in 2013 when we were sure we were pregnant, and continued like clockwork every two years with the arrivals of Lukas in 2015 and Maksim in 2017. Milo took his cues from me and Mrs. LFM, adopting a watchful yet distanced air in his interactions with the boys.

Without getting off the trail down paths yet to be trod here, our move of “… the LFM place of residence lock, stock, barrel, and Fortress of Solitude …” in October of last year found Milo with a year’s standing as the Last of the Old Pack. No matter to him with new digs, new territory, and three boisterous boys to watch over. There were kids to track, balls to chase, branches to gnaw, and adventures to have.

That was Milo’s Life right up to the moment, curled up in Mrs. LFM’s lap, his heart beat its last on the eighth day of June 2022.

I will conclude this homage to Milo, a Thinking Man’s Dog, with a few more pictures from random moments in his Life with us, beginning with a verse from a rewrite I did a few months ago of the 1922 Henry Burr classic, My Buddy.

My Buddy
First verse: Henry Burr (1922)
Second verse: LFM (2022)

Nights are long since you went away,
I think about you all through the day,
My buddy,
My buddy,
Nobody quite so true.

I’ll miss your voice, the touch of your nose,
Until we meet again I suppose,
My buddy,
My buddy,
Your buddy misses you.

December 2021. L-R: Me and Milo, Viktor, Maksim, and Lukas (Mrs. LFM Photo)

This last motion snipped was lovingly handcrafted through the mind and hand of the incomparable Mrs. LFM, capturing Milo in motion culminating in his transformation into the logo for our now retired business, Golden Mountain Dog Solutions. Click the image to activate it if it doesn’t start automatically. (Mrs. LFM photo and Gif)