This is the Doofus. This is one of the last pictures we took of her before she died on Sunday, August 28, 2010. Her real name wasn't the Doofus, it was just the most used of several names she acquired during her time with us ...
She was nameless and anonymous for the first six or so years of her life. She spent those as a Westie breeder dog in a puppy farm in Missouri. All of the puppies that she produced over that time doubtless received names when they were dispersed and sold to the public. But she went nameless until she was finally released from her sentence and we acquired her as a rescue dog around Christmas time in 2005. The folks who rescued her that Christmas cleaned her up and named her Noel before turning her over to us. We called her Ellie. We were supposed to be fostering her until they could find her a permanent home, but we knew as soon as we saw her that we were going to keep her.
When we first set eyes on her, her rescuers had cleaned her up from the horrendous conditions she had been living in, groomed her, and put a big red bow on the top of her head. When they brought her out and handed her to Kathie she had a look of fear and utter confusion on her face. Over time, the fear left but the confusion was always there to a degree. Kathie held her in her arms during the 3-hour ride home and by the time we got there the two of them had formed a permanent bond. Ellie became physically attached to Kathie, following her wherever she went, and in so doing she earned her next name - the Leg Iron.
It was obvious from the beginning that her puppy farm incarceration had imparted certain physical limitations on Ellie. Here feet were flattened and splayed outward from resting on the bottom of the wire cage. Her breast bone projected an inch or so too far out from her chest, probably from having to maintain an unnatural position while she was growing from a puppy. She always had a rattle in her breathing and would periodically cough and make hacking noises like she was trying to clear something from her throat. Her muscles were soft and she didn't have the athleticism exhibited by our other Westie.
In addition to the physical problems, Ellie also had some developmental deficiencies (an understatement). When we put her on a leash and tried to get her to walk she would freeze in place and absolutely refuse to move. We speculated that at the farm, the leash and maybe a choker collar were used to hold her in place for insemination or examination, so she came to associate the leash with the need to stand perfectly still. If you picked her up and set her back down on the floor, she would often just stand there in one place for what seemed like a minute or two before she decided it was OK to move on. She would sometimes sit in one place looking off into space and rocking back and forth on her front legs. She was pretty good at avoiding accidents in the house, but when you put her outside she always preferred the concrete patio or sidewalk for her poops and piddles rather than the grass because that was the surface she was used to. The first time we set her on the grass she got a wide-eyed deer-in-the-headlights expression on her face and stood still looking around for a minute before carefully stepping back over to the sidewalk. She also did not recognize table scraps as food and would not eat them if offered.
In general, Ellie's initial relationship to people was one of mistrust and fear. She had bonded with Kathie (as the Leg Iron) and somewhat with me because I was the one driving while she sat on Kathie's lap during that initial three-hour ride home. But, while she was never defensive or aggressive toward any of us, she did her best to avoid any other humans she came in contact with (she spent a lot of time under the kitchen table). This included our sons Kevin and Will, and Kathie's Mom and Dad who were living with us as well as Kathie's dog-loving brother who, during a week-long visit shortly after we got Ellie, spent hours lying on the living floor unsuccessfully trying to coax her to come over to him. While her fear was directed at all humans, it seemed to be more intense in the presence of men, perhaps again reflecting her puppy farm experience.
All of this anomalous behavior, along with the the bewildered expression on Ellie's face that seemed to be a permanent part of her makeup, led us to begin calling her Clueless. Clueless quickly morphed into Doofus or the Doofster. I don't know the exact origins (or correct spelling) of the term "doofus" but it worked for us in conveying in a non-pejorative and affectionate manner the confused nature of her psyche that resulted from her upbringing.
Ellie's disconnect with the rest of the world could probably be best summed up by saying that, during her first six years on this Earth, she never got the chance to learn how to be, and relate to humans as, a dog. Fortunately, once she was with us, her existence was transformed from a wire cage on a concrete slab to a household with four full-time human residents and two canine companions - Todd (Beagle) and Anna (Westie). In this environment she began the process of losing her fear of humans and learning the essence of being a "real" dog.
Out of desperation and necessity Ellie had bonded with Kathie and I from the beginning, but her introduction to the concept that other humans were not always to be feared began with Kathie's Dad (Ellie's newly designated "Grandpa"). In the beginning, Ralph made his overtures to Ellie and was consistently rebuffed. This went on for quite a while, but a significant break-through occurred when she began to discover the joys of eating human food. This revelation probably came about through Ellie's observations of Todd's and Anna's preferences, a little experimentation on her part, and Ralph's propensity for slipping scraps of food under the table to waiting mouths. Soon she was so invested in obtaining table scraps that she completely forgot about the scary proposition of having to be in close proximity to Ralph in order to obtain them. She quickly became the top beggar of the three dogs, assuming a "Westie sit" on her hind legs with her front legs in the air and one front paw scraping Ralph's thigh to remind him she was there. Such behavior at the dinner table is not necessarily considered acceptable in some households, but in Ellie's case it was considered a milestone on her path to dog-dom.
After about six months, positive experiences such as her begging activities and receiving affection rather than abuse from the humans she was living with brought about a complete 180-degree reversal in Ellie's attitude towards people. From then on she treated anyone new that she came in contact with as a potential friend rather than a potential enemy. No more hiding under the kitchen table. The transformation was amazing. One relationship that was particularly joyful for Ellie was with Susan, the care-giver who came once a week to stay with the folks so that Kathie and I could get away for the day. Susan is very much a dog lover and always spent considerable time greeting the dogs when she came in the door as well as always having a treat for each of them. She had a particularly strong impact on Ellie who would just go bananas wagging her tail and trying to jump into Susan's arms whenever she came to the house. Such unbridled enthusiasm for a human she only saw once a week was a sure sign the Ellie's natural but long-suppressed dog instincts were slowly surfacing.
The most important influence in bringing those instincts to the forefront was Ellie's relationship with Todd and Anna. As a beagle, Todd's life is pretty much centered around eating and following his nose. He is a lover not a fighter and his approach to other dogs is strictly non-confrontational, to the point of rolling over on his back in total surrender upon sensing any potential conflict (unless the conflict involves access to food). For some reason, something about him seems to have particular appeal to female dogs in an everyone-is-neutered, non-sexual sort of way. Anna, on the other hand, is a prototypical squirrel-chasing, hole-digging Westie whose behaviors are so emblematic of dogdom that we call her a "dog's dog". She is not, however, particularly territorial or naturally aggressive toward other strange dogs. Both Todd and Anna are also rescue dogs but they were rescued early-on in life and did not experience the harsh realities that Ellie had to deal with for so long. That said, they both probably have some subtle behavioral traits (perhaps only detectable by other dogs) derived from having spent one or two years in adverse circumstances.
Upon first meeting Ellie, both Todd and Anna were unimpressed. She did not address them in the normal dog-to-dog manner (she never did quite adopt the normal butt-sniffing protocol) and presented absolutely no threat as she stood frozen in place while they examined her. From then on the relationship seemed to be settled with Todd and Anna doing the dog-appropriate things while Ellie just followed along learning the ropes. Over time, Ellie slowly adopted the behaviors she observed. She went from being grass-averse to running and barking with Anna down our hill when Anna was chasing squirrels, although I'm not sure Ellie was always clear on what it was they were chasing. At night we would open the front door and Anna and Ellie would sprint out down the hill barking a warning to any unseen enemies lurking in the dark (Anna actually became dependent on Ellie to back her up in this endeavor and, since Ellie has been gone, Anna seems much more reticent to run out into the darkness on her own).
One of the hurdle's Ellie had to overcome was learning to go up and down the stairs. In addition to being totally unfamiliar with what stairs were all about, she did not have the normal dog athleticism necessary to navigate the stairs in a dog-like manner. We had too living spaces - one downstairs and one upstairs - so the stairs presented a constant obstacle to, at first, her desire to be Kathie's Leg Iron, and, later, to just be where everyone else was. For a long time she was unwilling to try and would adopt her freeze posture whenever placed at the bottom or top of the stairs (although she was much more rigid and unmoving when at the top staring down). In the course of carrying her up and down we found that if we placed her on the third step facing upward and encouraged her from the top, she would attempt to hop up from one stair to the next. It appeared that, in her mind, the trip up was much more do-able than the dreaded hazard that confronted her when she looked over her shoulder and observed the way down. Eventually, she could be pretty much counted on to hop one step at a time in an un-dog-like manner all the way to the top, even when not placed on the third step first. And so she earned yet another name - the Up Dog.
A couple of months before we finally executed our move back to Colorado, Ellie was taking her first tentative steps toward navigating down the stairs. She was on her way to overcoming the last big hurdle and becoming a dog's dog like her mentor, Anna. Sadly for all of us, it was not to be.
We always took Ellie, Anna, and Todd on our road trips to Denver. On one of those trips late in the summer to visit my Mom and look for a new place to live, Ellie was doing some coughing and making her typical rasping noise. The rasping in her chest had been checked out in the past by the vet who attributed it to a non-treatable condition stemming from her puppy farm experience. Because it was nothing new, we were not concerned about it when we arrived in Denver. A few days later, however, we noticed that she seemed to be having trouble breathing. Since it was the weekend, we had to take her to an emergency vet clinic near my Mom's house. They put her in an oxygen tent because the oxygen levels in her blood were very low. She was diagnosed with severe untreatable pneumonia and we were left with no choice but to relieve her suffering in the only way we could. It was very difficult to realize that we might have saved her if we would have recognized sooner that her symptoms were more than the usual puppy farm-derived problems.
In the immediate aftermath of losing Ellie, many thoughts come to mind: the cruelty and inhumanity of the puppy farm "business" in Missouri and many other places throughout this country, the perseverance it took for her to survive her years in that cruel environment, the courage of her struggle to learn how to be a real dog and her triumph in doing so, and the nobility of her willingness to overcome her well-grounded fear of the human race and to finally accept us as her family. Ellie certainly earned the right to a much longer life and we are saddened that it ended so soon. We are grateful that we were able to give her five years with a family that loved her. She used those years to overcome her history and earn the honorary title of "dog's dog". We will miss her.