What's Wrong with Bentley?

Yesterday we took the dogs out for a nice hike in the snow. Peanut seemed to do a little better in the snow than Bentley. She’s one tough cookie. We didn’t put boots on them and Bentley insisted on sitting in the snow to lick his paws. In order to warm his paws he had to freeze his rear end. Poor dog.

So we cut the hike short and brought them back into the nice warm house. I was keeping a close eye on Bentley and cuddling with him. I noticed that he was shaking pretty bad. This makes me so nervous. I hate it when the dogs shake for no good reason. Peanut does a lot of shaking, but it’s only when she’s scared. There was no reason for Bentley to be scared so why was he shaking? I thought he must be in pain. Maybe his paws were acting up again and really hurting him. That made me watch him even closer and give him even more tender caresses. My poor baby. What was wrong? After several minutes of this, I alerted Karlo that something was wrong with Bentley. I explained that his whole body was shaking and no matter how much I pet him and reassured him that everything was OK, he just kept right on shaking.

Karlo went over to investigate Bentley’s behavior. He grabbed a toy to see if Bentley would respond. He did and he acted as if everything was fine in front of Karlo. OK, so now he’s making a liar out of me. I went back to pet him and there he goes . . . shaking again. Then Karlo grabbed my hand and realized that my hands were like blocks of ice. Now they are always cold, but after our hike they were much colder than normal. I think we just figured out what is wrong with Bentley. Every time I touched him, he shook. I think he started shaking as I got close to him – just the thought of me touching him was frightening. Here I thought the dog was sick or hurt and he was just being tortured by my cold hands!