Puppy Follies

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260 – February, 2015

By Chris Robinson

Eight years is a considerable stretch. Just ask anyone doing time in a federal or state prison. Among the problems associated with incarceration are such issues as anxiety, hypervigilance, confusion–questioning what is real and what isn’t, losing touch with what’s happening in the outside world and frustration. I can personally attest that these issues occur having once been the unwilling guest of the government in my real job as a journalist when I and my reporting partner on a story declined to obey a judge’s order to reveal the source of our information and the judge found our refusal to be contemptible.

Strangely enough, I find myself experiencing deja vu with some of these same issues surfacing now that I’m again dealing with a puppy after having enjoyed an eight year hiatus with my house populated by sensible grown-up dogs. It goes without saying that I’ve had to relearn a LOT of things and along the way have become anxious, hypervigilant, confused, found myself losing touch with just about anything not having something to do with puppy raising and experiencing some serious frustration.

Part of the pup’s fancy name includes the Latin phrase in law, pro bono. The definition of this phrase includes the words “work undertaken voluntarily without charge or expectation of payment.” It would be difficult indeed to write a more perfect description of getting a puppy.

It was clear from the wails of outrage coming from Delta Airlines’ Dash facility the day that young Bo arrived from Florida that he was more than a little displeased with his plebeian accommodations. Even though he had made the trip in what passes for the first class cabin for dogs–a brand new travel crate–it was obvious he did not consider either his dog box or the means by which he was transported to be worthy of one born to the purple. That he knows he’s a blue-blood has been unambiguous from the moment his travel crate door was opened and he insisted upon being carried, petted and cuddled en route to the truck. Once there, it was equally clear that he was having no more of the crate. It was on the seat inside the cab or else snuggled between my dog-loving priest pal and I where he could be petted and fussed over whenever he felt the need for such attention. That was also the start of my “reeducation.”

For one thing, I had forgotten how many similarities there are between young children and puppies. It does no good to explain either to little kids or pups why you want them to do something. Simple orders–“eat,” “come,” “bedtime/kennel,” “go potty”–are about all they can handle. They both also require a trainload of patience. Ask anyone who has ever spent an interminable time in the bathroom with a toddler waiting for the light bulb to go on in the child’s head as to the purpose served by a potty chair. Or, in the case of a pup, standing around for a similar interminable period in sub-zero temperatures cowering behind anything able to deflect even slightly the teeth of a screaming northeast wind that started somewhere north of Hudson’s Bay and picked up steam and additional frigidity crossing the Great Lakes, while the pup surveys a significant portion of the North American Continent looking for just the right place to poop.

You’d think that after more years of dog ownership than I care to count and living in a northern tier state, I would know better than to get a pup in November. Winter housebreaking, at best, is not fun and at worst is downright painful, not for the pup, of course, because he’s wrapped in a fur coat but for the poor dimwit standing around waiting for him to complete his toilet duties. What’s worse, if the urgency to get him outside happens to be so great that you neglect to don practically every piece of winter clothing you own, you can bet he won’t take care of his business until your core temperature has reached that of an icicle.

Adding to the difficulty of the initial housebreaking was that five days after he arrived from sunny Florida, a blizzard dumped a foot or more of snow on his new home. It is a daunting task to get around in a foot of snow when your legs are only eight inches long. Several times he had to be rescued from snow drifts which meant that not only was I cold, I was also wet. I’m not sure what Bo thought of the snow but a friend of mine, who claims he can read a dog’s mind, said the pup was thinking, “Put me back on that plane and get me the hell back to Florida!”

A frequent entertainment method of young children is emptying the toy box or taking all the kettles out of the kitchen cupboards. Bo doesn’t do kettles but one of his great delights is to take every toy out of his toy box, one by one, and scatter them throughout the living and dining room. It goes without saying that, like toddlers, he has no interest in picking them up after he has hauled them out of the toy box. As a result, for much of the time, my living and dining room carpets are in total chaos, littered with dog toys, most of which add considerable amounts of dog spit to the carpet fiber and increase the frequency with which the carpets have to be shampooed. What with puppy potty accidents and digestive upsets and dog spit from the toys, since Bo’s arrival, I’ve become one of Servicemaster’s® favored customers.

Of course, after eight puppy-free years, there were no dog toys remaining on the numerous shelves occupied by dog stuff so a major investment has been required to keep the princeling entertained and that doesn’t include all the toys that have already been destroyed and had to be replaced. I wonder what the IRS would say about the size of my deduction next year for dog toys. On second thought, I better lump that sum into the category of “training supplies” just in case I wind up facing another cat-loving IRS agent at some time in the future. He/she would never believe such a princely sum was spent on puppy toys and it probably would do no good to explain that princes demand toys that require a king’s ransom to purchase.

Many toddlers are fascinated by house plants. They like to pull leaves from them and, as is the usual case with just about anything a tot can get his or her hands on, put it in their mouths. Bo has become enamored with a huge, more than 200-year-old Christmas cactus that occupies the entire east window exposure in the dining room. He can’t resist grabbing its “arms” and pulling on them which causes them to break as it would require a tough cactus indeed to resist the pulling power of a 40 pound pup as they seem to generate about the same horsepower as a diesel locomotive. I will admit that this particular cactus probably could have used some serious pruning but Bo has taken that need to the extreme. In fact, there have been times the dining room carpet has closely resembled a hayfield. Fortunately, it is only the cactus that fascinates him and he completely ignores the hibiscus on the sun porch. The cactus is pretty well sheared these days but since it has survived everything humans, squirrels or the weather could throw at it for more than 200 years, the odds are good it can also survive Bo and if its past history is any indication, it will thrive on the adversity. I and my housekeeper, on the other hand, may require extensive medical attention and physical therapy to relieve the pain from all the bending we’ve had to do picking up cactus debris. Unlike tree services these days, Bo doesn’t bring along a shredder for his pruning activities and, in fact, is totally unconcerned about how it looks when he leaves pieces of cactus scattered everywhere in the dining room.

No experience with a child would be complete without having them run off and hide to escape punishment when they get in trouble. Puppies exhibit the same behavior, only in Bo’s case his sudden refusal to obey a recall command and his flight to escape being held accountable for that sin took place a couple of weeks after his arrival on a very foggy afternoon. As is often the case with children, his attempt to avoid having to atone for his transgression didn’t turn out exactly as he had hoped. Convinced, at best, that he was facing the loss of his freedom until he grew too big to squeeze through the squares in the fence panels that encompass the dog yard, he ran past the yard into the trees that constitute a shelterbelt north of the house and he had never, ever been that far away from home. In a strange place and enveloped in fog, he was scared silly knowing for an absolute certainty that he was surrounded by puppy-eating trolls. In full-bore panic, he would flee every time I loomed up in the fog in my attempt to recapture him. Finally, as is frequently the case with lost children, it became necessary to resort to a dog to find him and give him enough confidence to emerge from the trolls’ lairs. I returned to the house, got my most motherly female and sent her into the fog-shrouded shelterbelt with orders to find Bo. Less than a minute later, she returned with the pup in tow. While he was getting to the age where pups either sass back when they get scolded or when given an order they don’t like or they give you that phony sad puppy-eyes look which says, “I’ll make you think I’m penitent but as soon as your back is turned, I’ll do it again,” in this instance, at least, his contrition was real. Where only a short time earlier he had been defiant when called, he was now very happy come to me and have a leash clipped on to his collar so he could be led to safety having narrowly escaped being the evening meal for a shelterbelt ogre.

Bo is fast approaching the age when, like rebellious teens, pups test their independence and they start to question your authority. It’s a time when any command which happens to demand an action they don’t particularly want to do at that time is met with “What for,” “You and who else are going to make me” or even more often “What’s in it for me?” Seemingly overnight, when kids reach the magic age of 13 and pups about six months, they turn into total brats. However, like a parent with vast experience coping with rebelling teenagers, I have a wealth of knowledge accumulated over many years of coping with puppy mutinies. Bo may not yet realize it but I will settle for nothing less than living happily ever after, part of which means that since I buy the dog food and pay the vet bills, I get to be the boss.

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Posted by ralbee on Feb 18 2015. Filed under Current Articles, Editorial, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.