DocAndersen
Gwen (the Shepard in the pictures) was a talker. Some dogs talk. Our current dogs, Raven and Dylan both talk at times. For example, Raven is known to announce on occasion by whooping when people are not doing what she wants to be done fast enough. She lifts her head and lets loose with the woo, and it makes me laugh every single time. Except when she does it to me, then it doesn’t make me laugh. Gwen, on the other hand, really tried to communicate with humans. A lot. Gwen would talk about virtually everything. Dylan talks to my wife and me when he is displeased with the current state of various activities. Or when things are not progressing probably.
Raven complains when the twins (or me or my wife) aren’t moving fast enough to complete her assigned tasks. Gwen, on the other hand, talked about everything. She talked about food. She talked about what the kids were doing. She talked about everything, except thunder. When the thunder started, Gwen was gone —hiding in the master closet. I suspect she would have invited us to join her, by talking, if space was large enough. I doubt she would have. Gwen wasn’t always a big fan of humans. Plus we used to gather, for tornado warnings in a lower section of the house. We tried hiding in the master bedroom closet, but it didn’t have a structural wall next to it.
The bathroom and closet in the basement had two concrete walls that made it even safer. Plus the basement closet was against the stone wall that was cut into dirt. We only had to be in there five times in the 11 years we lived in Indiana. The first two times, we hid with Gwen in the master bedroom. In our house now we have a bedroom that doesn’t have windows that we have space for the Dogs to hide in when thunderstorms happen. Neither of our two labs likes Thunder much. They aren’t as destructive as Marley was in the book Marley and Me. They are just scared. They have a nice comfortable Thunder Room in the basement with a bed and less sound of thunder!
