My Dog Chad - Michael Evans

I have a somewhat sad experience that supports the idea that animals, even domesticated animals, cannot adapt well when moving from a free and open landscape in nature to a domestic enclosure. I used to live near the top of a mountain in Lynchburg, Virginia where we owned five acres of land, at least four covered in trees. We had no leash laws and therefore no need for fencing to keep our dogs enclosed. So we had free and open land on which our two dogs could roam. Then we moved to a more settled area, I suppose, where are neighbors were a yard away rather than a mile away. Where we live now we have leash laws and we still have no fencing. So we are forced to chain our dogs up when we let them out, severely limiting their freedom to roam. Now one dog, Casey, is old and actually grew up in a neighborhood like this, then moved to the country where she generally stayed inside; thus the move back to the neighborhood like this wasn’t strange or new. For our other dog, Chad, he wasn’t prepared for the shift. As he tried to adjust to the new way of life, being confined generally, he developed the nervous habit of licking his paws all of the time. He licked them to the point of making them bleed. Our vet said that it was like a human biting their nails, something that made him feel good. So we had to get him medicine for his paws, which consequently weakened his bladder and caused him to pee all over the house. We have since had to pass him off to someone else because we couldn’t handle his new behaviors. However we noticed, and the vet agreed, that it all probably stemmed from his dramatic shift from wild and free to chained and confined. The decrease of open land is doing the same thing to wild animals, they are being metaphorically chained and confined to smaller and smaller spaces as humans take control of the lands.