hu cares | training miss cookie

hashtag who rescued who (hu?...)

On the first of the month, we went to Seattle Humane to pick out a new dog. My top choice was a brown and white pit mix with a corner kennel, who sat politely as we walked by. When she came out to meet us in one of the shelter’s fenced turfs areas, she was so nervous that she wouldn’t even eat the treats out of our hands. After five minutes she had warmed to us, laying on her side to get belly pets. We brought her home and named her Cookie.

The list of facts we know about Cookie is quite short. The shelter thinks she is around four, and she came from Louisiana. She is shy around new people and she is hyper-attuned to loud noises or sudden movements; at first, when we patted her on the head while standing over her, she’d flinch. One night in bed she startled at the sound of me turning a page in the book I was reading. She’s peed in the house twice, once at the sound of the clothing dryer and another while I vacuumed. She has been incredibly contrite afterward, cowering and nervous. She likes it when we sit next to her as she eats. I don’t know what her life was like before but her skittishness makes me think her first four years were not easy.

Years ago, a friend shared some dating app screenshots in our group text of the guy she was talking to, and after five minutes of Googling, I learned that he was, in fact, engaged. I’ve been chasing that high ever since, and I decided I would sleuth around to find out anything else I could about Cookie. I looked at the medical records the shelter sent us, identified the shelter in Louisiana she came from, and combed through that shelter’s Facebook posts, but there was no trace of her. I googled every combination of her shelter name (Remy) + Louisiana + pitbull that I could.

The medical records also told us that she entered the Louisiana shelter in February (!), and at that time, her age was listed as one year. She was transferred to Seattle in mid-November, and the shelter here decided she was, instead, four years old. The company that manages the microchip in her belly (what a sentence) sent us an invite to “claim” our new dog by attaching our contact info to her account; when I logged in, I was surprised to see there was already a photo of her. In it, she’s wearing a little pink sweatshirt, with a matching pink leash. When N came home from work, I told him what I’d found, and burst into tears. “It’s so nice, but so sad,” I explained. “Clearly, she was loved.”

She was loved, but then something happened and she was in the shelter for 9 months. And now that she has found loving humans again, she’s melting into us, revealing how sweet she is when she’s not terrified. But she is definitely still terrified, and we are finding ways to work around that. She hates to be alone, so we are helping her microdose loneliness by leaving for a minute at a time, sometimes just closing the door and opening it again right away. We want to teach her we will always come back.

When she’s alone she’s so scared she tears up the house, shredding paper and plastic bags, chewing our shoes and knocking over plants. To help her with that we are crate training her, so that she knows she has her own place in the house where she can safely be while we are gone. She hasn’t been alone in days because we learned we have to build her trust; she has to like being in the crate, and associate it with good times. If we move too quickly and leave her alone for too long, we’re just reinforcing that her worst fears can come true.

On walks, she is scared of new people and other dogs and loud sounds, so we’ve learned to not overload her with new experiences. We turn around if it’s too much; we let her know she can trust us and we will not walk her towards the thing she is afraid of. I’m already seeing her slowly build her confidence by observing scary things at a manageable distance and we reward her handsomely for seeing a dog without losing her shit, but sometimes she’s still so scared she won’t take the treat from our hand.

Convincing Cookie to love her puppy palace.

We’re training Cookie but I am also inadvertently training myself. I’m remembering that it’s ok to be scared of things; everyone is afraid sometimes. That being scared and acting out has no bearing on whether or not we are a good girl deep down. That the solution to fear is not pretending like it doesn’t exist or pushing past it, but finding a way to manage it. There is no shame in rewarding ourselves for living through a big, scary thing, for figuring out ways to disassociate our triggers from the fear and instead associate them with something good. Most of all, I’m remembering that it’s impossible to be brave about everything. If we ask too much of Cookie on any given day, trying to crate train and practice good leash walking and microdosing loneliness, she is exhausted and falls apart. Which, honestly, same.

Cookie, like our last dog, Maeby, is wiser than me in so many ways. She naps when she wants to. She takes up space — maybe too much space in the bed at night. She’s unabashed about what she loves. She eats voraciously and is incapable of self-consciousness about that. She zooms and prances around the yard like a total goofball, flops onto her back for belly rubs. She can’t help but wag when she sees us. I’m moved that she’s so trusting. Despite whatever she’s been through, she’s known us for three weeks and is so ready to love hard again. I think that’s so brave.

When Maeby died, I wasn’t sure I could ever love another dog the way I loved her — she was my first dog, and she saw me through my first leg of adulthood. I still miss her, but I’m surprised by how quickly I’ve fallen in love with sweet Cookie. Ok, maybe not that surprised, but rather, scared. To love something means to care; caring means I’m committing to the next weeks and months being about Cookie, even if that means being more homebound and less social than usual. Caring means missing her, it means worrying about her — and it means that it will hurt when she some day leaves me too. But if Cookie can be brave, so can I, and we can just take things one day at a time, together.

Lately

• Some Oregonians in end-of-life care are interested in trying psilocybin, but the state’s psilocybin program rules require them to do so at a licensed service center — something that’s not always possible when you’re terminally ill. Psilocybin facilitators are suing the state to provide disability accommodations for those people, and I wrote about it for Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB).

• I also recorded an episode of OPB’s podcast The Evergreen based on my print story. I really wanted the emotion and tone of my sources to come across, and audio does that so succinctly; I appreciated the opportunity to tell this story in that medium. It’s my first audio piece and I hope to do more in the future

  

  Many thanks to Project Circle in Portland for having us, and The Evergreen team for recording interviews!

• The second, expanded edition of The Open Notebook’s Craft of Science Writing is out, and you can order it here! We had a launch party at the National Association of Science Writers’ conference in Raleigh and it was great fun to celebrate with everyone.

I promise I am having fun here.

• The federal government is, uh, not on the leading edge of understanding internet culture, but that’s come up twice for me in my reporting for The Microdose lately. First, Shahin Shams, a data and patent analyst at Porta Sophia, an organization that challenges “bad” psychedelic patents, told me that an application trying to patent the combination of MDMA and Viagra was rejected in part because someone on Erowid had posted about “Foxy Sex-tasy” years ago, demonstrating it wasn’t a new combo at all! Then, scientist Alaina Jaster told me that in a recent DEA hearing about whether to schedule DOI and DOC, two psychedelic compounds used by researchers, lawyers cited a Reddit post saying people were gathering to use DOI recreationally — which led to a “very interesting conversation about what it means to be a Reddit troller or shitposter, in federal court,” she told me. What a time to be alive.

Substack yells at me if I don’t include this: if you’re not already subscribed, SMASH THAT LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE BUTTON. Ok, but seriously: this newsletter is a passion project, not a cash cow, and I currently have no plans to put things behind a paywall, especially in light of some recent decisions from Substack management that I can’t say I love.

I cherish all of you for being here, and I’m especially grateful to the paid subscribers who support my work. If you’re one of those lovely patrons and you would like to skip Substack as the middle man, my DMs are open.

Unsolicited recommendations

• This kintsukuroi video healed something deep inside of me.

• Fried chickpeas. We’ve been making this recipe with a ball of burrata on top.

• Spamming spammers, as a little treat.

• Deleting your Goodreads account after seeing how quickly Luigi Mangione’s entire reading history surfaced after his name was released.

• I read philosopher L.A. Paul’s Transformative Experience last year and could not shut up about it. In it, Paul describes the decision to have a child as an intractable problem because becoming a parent is an experience that transforms people; it’s impossible to know the thoughts and preferences of the person you’ll be on the other side of it. She likens it to vampirism, which delighed me. Earlier this month The New Yorker published a great profile of her that told me basically everything I wanted to know about her and how she landed on this idea.

• Setting your autoreply and logging off. Happy holidays, all, and see you in 2025!