Madeline: The Early Years

I met Madeline in the Decatur pound in May 1993.

After 10 years of living in the Chicago area, I had started a new job in Champaign at the beginning of April, bought my first car a week later, moved into an apartment shortly thereafter, and the next week adopted a dog.

I had visited the Champaign County Humane Society several times and not found the right dog there, so I went to the pound in nearby Decatur, where my parents and sister lived. The pound was a very depressing place. (The only other time I had been there was to select a dog for my sister Carol in 1980. Both times I was attracted to black dogs with a classic beagle face. In fact, Maddie grew to very much resemble Bowser, my sister’s dog, except that Bowser was a 30-pound dog, and Maddie was a 20-pound dog who aspired to be a 200-pound dog.)





In the dog pound Maddie was in a small concrete run with a mother and a bunch of puppies, but Maddie was not of that litter. At 8 weeks she already had that imperious stare. She didn’t whine or wag her tail and show how eager she was to be chosen. She just expected that I would choose her. And so I did.

She wore a tiny yellow cloth collar and the pound told me she had been relinquished by her first owners. The first vet we visited pegged her at just 8 weeks and later we hypothesized that perhaps her lifelong food insecurities stemmed from being taken too soon from her mother.

Our first weeks together were very rocky. Before I had even selected a name for her I nearly brought her back to the pound because she was aggressive. She would tear around the house and attack me and her little eyes would roll back into her head. She’d steal a Kleenex or other object she shouldn’t have, drag it under the bed or couch and snarl and snap at any hands that reached for her. At 5 or 6 pounds she wasn’t terribly dangerous, but I knew she’d get bigger and become a serious problem.

I talked with trainers and vets and friends with dogs. What to do about this angry little puppy? She was especially food aggressive. One of the trainers advised me to take her food dish away randomly in the middle of a meal just to show her who’s boss. I was also supposed to correct her aggressive behavior by pinning her down on her back. The person explained that she’d immediately recognize me as the pack leader and go limp. Instead, she’d keep fighting for minutes.

After several days of this I recall talking on the phone with my sister and announcing that I was ready to give up on this dog and take her back the next day if the situation didn’t improve. Miraculously, things turned around almost immediately thereafter.

I’m not saying she became compliant. We went through obedience training, and she quickly mastered the required behaviors, but she never quite made the transition from doing them for the treat reward to doing them to please me. We achieved a harmonious household less because she followed the house rules than because I arranged to keep every temptation out of reach. It became ingrained in me to push chairs into the table so she couldn’t get access (though that wasn’t always enough to stop her) and to never leave the kitchen when food was on the table. All my waste baskets lived at counter height. I never brought food out of the kitchen or dining area, and I generally kept a very neat floor.

It took a long time for me to settle on a name for this dog, but eventually I chose Madeline so I could call her Maddie, because she seemed to have a lot of anger issues. I followed the spelling of the character from children’s literature. Her last name, of course, is Dog, the only appropriate last name. Her middle name is The.