She Has Created Her Own Party Everywhere She Goes
A dog who cooperates perfectly in front of a camera is a dog performing.
The dog that makes your life harder is usually the one making it richer. And the two things are not separate. They are the same dog.
That dog, for me, is Carolina.
A Thirteen-Pound Chaos Engine
Carolina is a French Bulldog mix. She is five years old, almost six. She operates in two modes: completely off the chain, and asleep.
There is no in between.
She weighs thirteen pounds, which sounds manageable, petite even, until you understand that thirteen pounds of Carolina is pure muscle that can launch directly from the ground to your face a hundred times in a row without apparent effort or remorse. We have worked hard on not jumping up. It continues to be a work in progress.
She loves to kiss you, with her teeth. This is not aggression. This is just how she expresses joy. It is a lot. Hands, noses, cheeks, it’s all fair game.
We have been planting a garden this spring. Carolina has dug up the okra seven times. Not because she wants okra. Not because there is anything especially interesting about okra. Because it is there, planted right in the ground and she probably thinks she’s helping. She also leaps into the raised bed — a four-by-four foot square that’s nearly two feet high — and executes a round of zoomies within its borders before launching out the other side and sprinting directly into the horse & donkey pasture, where she is one hundred percent not allowed and has known this for her entire life.
On the Subject of Staying
Carolina has been doing agility for years. Every other dog in our class has a beautiful start line stay — their owners can walk a solid distance ahead, get into position, and the dog holds until they're released.
Carolina cannot imagine anything more dumb than a stay when it is time to fling herself over a jump.
We have worked out our own system. I toss a treat far enough away that she has to sprint to get it. While she's running back toward the first obstacle, I am already sprinting forward toward the second one — buying myself just enough distance to be ahead of her, to tell her where we're going next before she gets there.
It works. It is not elegant. It is completely, perfectly Carolina.
The Song of Her People
Since Lira passed, we've gotten more serious about how the dogs ride in the car. Lira had very specific rules about dogs should ride in the car, quietly napping in the back the entire time, and she enforced those rules with an iron paw. Without Lira to run things, we’ve had to make some changes. Carolina now rides buckled in, because an unbuckled Carolina will launch herself onto your head mid-turn.
Carolina has opinions about this.
She expresses them by singing. For the entire drive. A sustained, earnest, deeply felt vocalization that communicates her view that the seatbelt is unjust and she knows exactly whose fault it is. She does not get tired. She simply continues to let you know, for hours if necessary, that things could be different. She could be free. Did I mention agility class is a 1.5 hour commute each way.
After agility class, when it is time to leave, she flings herself to the ground. All bones gone. She becomes a small, uncooperative puddle who cannot walk because she does not accept that it is over. You have to carry her out, and then buckle her in the car for the next round of singing.
Where She Came From
At four in the morning on September 11th 2020, a message came in to the Rescue Ranch page.
A litter had just been born. One of the puppies had a severe cleft lip and palate. Could we take her?
I was in the car before 5 AM. Two hours to almost the Alabama line in the predawn traffic. I had grabbed everything I could think of — supplies, formula, feeding tube — because I knew what was coming. I did her first tube feeding on the way home pulled into a parking lot.
We weren’t planning on a cleft palate puppy with all of the feedings. And it was a busy season.
Cleft palate puppies need to be tube fed every few hours around the clock. Which meant Carolina went everywhere. I tucked her in my shirt. We brought formula and supplies in the car. We stopped at gas stations to get hot water to warm everything up. We fed her in parking lots and at campgrounds and wherever else we happened to be at the time.
We tube fed her for the first six months of her life. Including through a feeding tube in her neck after her palate repair surgery, while it healed.
She was very small, just ounces, and she had not had an easy entry into the world and she had no idea.
She just wanted to eat and be warm and be held. So that is what we did.
The Fight in Them
There is something we have learned at the Rescue Ranch over years of taking in medically fragile dogs that I believe completely:
The puppies with the most complex medical needs, the ones who fight their way through the hardest beginnings — the ones who actually make it — come out the other side with more personality than any single dog should have.
There is a zest in them. A desire for life that you can see from the very beginning. Something that says: I am here and I intend to remain here and I will make the most of every single second of it.
Carolina is the perfect illustration of this.
She fought for this life.
Every zoomie through the okra bed, every tooth-kiss, every car song, every launch toward your face — that is a dog who knows, on some cellular level, that being here is not a given. She beat the odds. And she is not wasting a single moment of it.
The Other Mode
When Carolina is sleepy, she finds you.
It doesn't matter what you're doing. It doesn't matter if you're working. It doesn't matter if you're eating dinner. When she reaches that point of tiredness and is ready to snuggle in with her person, she is not asking. She climbs directly onto your chest, knocks whatever is in your hand out of the way, tucks her head into your shoulder, and goes completely limp.
All thirteen pounds somehow feels like thirty. The whole weight of her is against you and she is just entirely, completely at peace.
She is one hundred percent clear about what she wants, one hundred percent of the time. In this way, she is exactly the same in every mode.
There is nothing better in those moments.
She teaches the other dogs how to play. Newer dogs, nervous dogs, dogs who don't quite know how yet — she figures out what they can handle and meets them there. She is endlessly gentle when playing with Poppy, who deals with chronic neck pain, always seeming to know without being told.
She has worked on our foster dog Pickles for weeks — patiently, joyfully, persistently — until Pickles came out of her shell and now they race through the house together like they've been doing it their whole lives.
She wants to teach Bento the cat how to play. She brings him toys. She does little playbows in front of him and waits, hopefully, for him to catch on. Bento remains skeptical. Carolina remains confident she will get there. She has an endless supply of confidence in herself.
She is always smiling. In every situation, every location, every hour of the day — she is having the absolute best time. She does not create parties. She is the party. She just carries it with her everywhere she goes and assumes everyone will catch up eventually.
What I Already Know
Carolina is five, almost six. And she still acts like she's six months.
I know there will come a day when that changes. I can feel the shape of it already — the specific absence that will exist when she isn't here, even though she is completely, fully, loudly here right now.
My life will be easier when she's gone.
And so much of the richness will go with her.
The chaos and the tenderness are the same dog. The exasperation and the love are not opposites. The 4 AM drive and the gas station formula and the tube fed in the car and the dog who cannot stay and will not stop and has dug up the okra seven times and is the first one on your chest when you need her — that is all one thing. That is Carolina.
I photograph a lot of dogs like Carolina. The ones their people describe apologetically, the ones who are a lot, the ones who jump and wiggle and have never in their life held a stay.
The thing that makes them hard to photograph is always the thing that makes them extraordinary to document. And the specific, maddening, irreplaceable details — the ones you describe to people at dinner parties with that particular mix of exhaustion and absolute love — are the ones you will want to have on your wall forever.
If your dog is a Carolina, book the session anyway. Maybe especially because of that.
→ Inquire about a Signature Session
→ Read next:
