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dogs I know of are clomipramine and fluoxetine, which both work well. According to one of my veterinarians, they produce feelings we humans might associate with eating chocolate or falling in love, which tempts me at times to try them myself. Talk to your vet if you want to go this route.
    As for poor Phoebe, who suffered abandonment twice, we placed her with a foster family that patiently worked through her problems with her. They tell me that she shows no more signs of anxiety, and that she’ll live with them forever.
    ( Note to Self : Consider writing a book about family relationships, including crating some family members during the holidays with a gingerbread-stuffed Kong.)



CHAPTER FOUR
Shuuut Up!
    Dear Sir,
    I adopted a dog from you about two years ago. Max is a great dog and I love him dearly, but his barking is starting to wear on me. He barks if someone knocks on the door. He barks at the mailman. He barks if he sees another dog walking past the house. He also barks when he wants to go outside and come back in. Like I don’t know he needs to go out? And it’s not so much that his barking is incessant. It’s the sound of his “woof.” It has a high pitch and I’m afraid he’s going to cause me to have a seizure because the tone really hurts my ears.
    I will need to bring him back today. Please let me know what time I can drop him off.
    Best,
    Duh
    Dear Duh,
    Did you originally think dogs meowed?
    Dogs, for the record, bark. Most of them bark a lot, and if they’re anything like one of my dogs, Stinky, they bark at absolutely nothing.
    Best,
    Randy Grim
    S tinky, a stumpy little yellow pit bull, barks at rain, new art on the wall, his empty food bowl, piles of laundry, and birds. Sometimes he sits in the middle of the backyard and barks at air. One night, while loading the dishwasher after a dinner party, I dropped a fork on the floor and Stinky went nuts. When one of the guests asked with panic in his voice what the dog was barking at, all I could do was shrug and say, “A fork.”
    Stinky is only one member of the pack that inhabits my house, and his barking usually sets the others off en masse. If I’m on the phone and, say, a large mosquito flies past the front window, I can’t even hear myself yell “I HAVE TO CALL YOU BACK” into the receiver, which is especially embarrassing if you’re being interviewed on a live radio talk show. One time I listened to a tape of one of these radio interviews, after it aired—but all that could be heard was a lot of barking and me screaming, “SHUT UP !”
    The second Tuesday of every month is the worst. That’s when the city tests its weather sirens, and the dogs stand at the front window and howl like a pack of wolves in the Grand Tetons during a full moon. The second Tuesday of every month is the only time my neighbors venture near my house because they want to make sure “everything is all right.”
    Several years ago, a reporter from a national magazine asked if she could interview me “in my own environment.” She suggested my house. I suggested an abandoned parking lot on the far south side.
    At first, I thought Stinky in particular barked to get attention. See, dogs evolved from wolves, and while adult wolves don’t bark, wolf pups do. It’s the equivalent of a human baby crying to get his mother’s attention, because he doesn’t yet know how to communicate in any other way. So the wolf pup barks until he learns how to communicate in adult-wolf ways.
    But over the millennia, humans have selectively bred wolves into mere shadows of their former selves, and the result—dogs—are really just adult wolves physically, and wolf pups emotionally. In other words, dogs are big babies looking for attention.
    Stinky, for instance, would sit in the middle of the backyard and start this woof-woof-woof thing while his head turned slowly from side to side like he was sending out warnings to anything that might be in the general vicinity. My first