Mar 16, 2018 3 min read

I almost missed my deadline for this column because I’ve been dealing with a depressed dog.

Howard the Wheaten terrier has been moping around like a teenager without a Smartphone since Wednesday night, when I returned home from a few hours away to find him not greeting me at the door.

He was lying on the bedroom floor, his legs stretched out away from his body, forming the capital letter “U,” as if to say, “Unhappy.”

“He’s a weird dog,” said the farmer when I alerted him to the latest crisis.

“Check his vital signs,” which in this house means 1) is his tail wagging, 2) will he eat a bit of meat, 3) will he go outside and try to dig under the side porch and 4) will he follow me around the house?

Howard wasn’t doing any of them, and with my tendencies leaning toward the hypochondriacal side of things, I concluded there was something terribly wrong with him.

I signed onto Google and then stopped myself. I know better than to wade into the scary pond of internet diagnosis.

Thirty seconds after typing “sad dog” into the search bar, I would have concluded that Howard has either a terrible, incurable disease or a common disorder requiring thousands of dollars of testing and treatment.

I stayed off the internet and instead dedicated myself to cheering him up. I lay down beside him and rubbed his belly for a whole entire episode of “Dr. Phil.” And then I went and scrambled Howie some eggs. He turned his nose up at them, looked at me sideways through his shaggy bangs, and wandered back to the bedroom and assumed the “U” position.

“Are you sick?” I asked him. Wouldn’t it be nice if dogs were able to speak just enough to tell us? When my son comes for a visit he prances around the room with the Howie leaping after him. I danced around the bedroom like a Zumba class reject, but Howard was unmoved. If he could talk, Howard would have said “Meh,” as he turned away.

We don’t think of dogs as being depressed. In fact, our other dog has been treated for just the opposite problem, taking medication to stop him from spinning and barking at his reflection in the oven door. It didn’t really help, and we stopped giving it to him.

There had to be a reason for this sudden drop in Howard’s mood and energy. I paged back through the last few days. Had someone said something to hurt his feelings? Was he mad at me for being away those few hours?

“It’s not nice to hold a grudge,” I told him.

Then came my aha! moment: the bone. A few days ago I gave him one of those hard dental bones. He paced around with it for hours, looking for a place to bury or hide it; he must have found a place because he eventually settled down without it in his mouth.

Had he forgotten where it was?

I found it buried deep under the sofa cushions in the den. I put it on the bedroom floor in front of him and, hoping to spare him embarrassment, walked away.

A few minutes later he was in the kitchen at his bowl, gobbling the scrambled eggs. His tail was wagging. When I pranced around, he refused to join in.

But that’s no big deal. I’m a weird person.

Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.