Molly
This is our routine.
I get their leashes on and nudge Molly toward the front door. She slowly, awkwardly, haltingly walks to the door and goes out. Daisy is always several steps ahead of her, because a) Daisy always wants to be first, and b) Molly, a 15-1/2-year-old blue heeler mix, is beset by all sorts of physical problems; chiefly, she looks like she’s in pain whenever she walks somewhere. Her back legs just can’t do what they used to do.
A big hurdle is getting down the four steps from our front porch. She has learned to let gravity do most of the work, but still, when she’s standing at the top of the stairs, you can feel her trepidation. (Our back steps are steeper and there are five of them. She definitely prefers to go out the front; there are times when I offer to let her out in back and she’ll just stand there and turn her head toward toward the front of the house.)
She makes it down the stairs and stops to pee on the edge of the sidewalk about four feet from the bottom step. Then, usually, she’ll slowly walk forward as if to explore the front yard. Sometimes she’ll make it to the street; sometimes she stops to sniff the grass around the street sign planted in our front yard. And sometimes she just turns around after peeing and walks back toward the steps. At her age, I let her set the terms of the walk; we’ll go as long as she wants, and when she’s had enough she’ll turn around and head back for the stairs. Rarely does she go more than 25 yards or so from the front steps.
She never pulls on her leash any more, instead, she’s much more likely to step over the leash so it’s then under one or two of her legs. While most dogs can easily extricate themselves from that situation, she has lost that ability and I generally have to lift her leg to pull the leash out.
When she’s had enough, she turns back toward the front door. Going up the stairs is clearly less scary, but more painful. There have been more than a few times when I’ve felt sorry for her and carried her up the stairs, but she definitely doesn’t like to be picked up, so she generally tries to make it up by herself. Once up the stairs, she’s home free, and she heads back inside the house.
Daisy
By contrast, Daisy is just getting started at this point. Daisy is only about four years younger than Molly is—still 11-1/2 years old—but is showing no signs of slowing down, and that’s significant, because she has always been able to move at the speed of light if she wants to. After we get Molly back inside, if I feel like it, Daisy and I will go back out and walk around the block. This is a huge thrill for her; she bounds down the stairs and goes as far as her retractable leash will let her, sometimes pulling me off balance when she reaches the end. Daisy is a Parson Russell terrier, which means she has all the manic energy of a Jack Russel, only there’s more of it because she’s a little bigger.
Daisy will spend the entirety of her walk using every inch of leash that I’ll give her, and trying to get more. If she finds an area she wants to smell, there’s nothing that’s going to stop her from parking there and taking a good long sniff, no matter how hard I pull on her.
On the whole, she attacks her walk with all of the gusto of a 11-week-old puppy, not a 11-year-old senior citizen. I’m tempted to attach my smart watch to her and try to figure out how far she actually walks, bouncing from side to side of the street like a pinball the way she does. For me, it’s about a third of a mile around the block; for her, it’s probably twice as far.
When we return home, Molly is inevitably standing at the front door, watching for us. Molly has never liked Daisy, and I think she still harbors resentment toward us for bringing the younger puppy into the household when she, Molly, was doing fine as the center of attention. When Daisy and I come back up the front steps, the look on Molly’s face lets us know that she feels completely betrayed by our continuation of the walk after she went inside. It’s a look she has perfected over the years; she has big, beautiful, sad-looking blue eyes, and she can really turn on the melancholy when she wants to.
Ever since Molly started resisting those back steps, a year or so ago, I’ve been walking them more often than (I confess) I had been. It was always so much easier to just let them out into the fenced back yard than to leash them up and take them out front. But I wish now that I’d made a habit earlier of taking them on multiple walks a day. In these quarantine days, it’s my best excuse for getting out of the house, and I plan to keep going as long the girls want to.
