DIVA DOGS!

[Amie H]

Oh yeah, Bunny makes me feel like maybe my dogs were really frustrated with me sometimes.
I also follow some parrots,(!) that use a tablet to "talk". Like Bunny, one bird has a prescription medication and will ask for it when not feeling well.
It's a little upsetting to me realizing how complicated our animal friends are, and how easy it is to miss addressing their specific needs. When I got home from my trip yesterday, my female cat, Pumpkin was next to me like velcro. (She is on my lap as I type.) My husband said she was pretty much hiding the whole time I was gone in Colorado.

 

[MissySki]

On the subject of talking dogs, there's a local dog that has an Insta account and uses buttons etc etc. Her "mom" just wrote a memoir, mostly about herself but Bunny is heavily featured. Having a dog with similar issues, this description of an incident (this was in the Seattle Times, I haven't read the book) really makes me emotional.

Writing about Bunny’s reactivity was cathartic, Devine said, because she knows people can feel a lot of shame around their dog’s behavior. She did, too, at first. She couldn’t understand why Bunny would snap and lunge at strangers and why her dog couldn’t sit with her inside coffee shops like she’d imagined. But when Devine began to understand what drives behavior, she said it felt powerful to know that dog owners can affect change in their pets in noninvasive ways.

“When I learned that I could just change her environment and it would positively impact her behavior, it felt like a world opened to me that I hadn’t been able to explore prior to that moment,” she said.

In one particularly tear-jerking moment of the book, Devine recounts a rough day when a child and off-leash puppy charged at Bunny. Later at home, Bunny hit two buttons repeatedly “FEEL ALL DONE. FEEL ALL DONE.” It’s a moment to make any dog owner reading the book with a sleeping pup at their side pause and consider their own relationship with their dog and how they connect.

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Ya know, I have this book on my Kindle and haven’t started it yet.. thanks for the reminder! Bunny is amazing and really made the dog button movement take off on social media. Listening to Alexis in a number of interviews she seems like an amazingly intelligent and emotionally cognizant human being as well.. who has been such a wonderful ambassador for the button dog community and advocate for Bunny and communicating with your best furry friend. Looking forward to digging into the book!

 

[lisasouthbayla]

Russell’s first trip to Mammoth!