 |
| Fancy, age 5 |
Managing Editor
Thanks to my stepson Daniel we now have a new living room rug
after the old one was soiled by our dog Fancy.
The evil deed was perpetrated one evening last week when we were the dinner guests of Daniel and his fiancé Mckayla. By the following day, the rug smelled terrible, and my wife Nancy and I decided to pitch it out.
The rug was old and had previously been used in Nancy’s classroom
for several of her first-grade classes at school. Fortunately, Daniel had given
us his apartment rug when he and Mckayla got together, and it happened to fit
our living room perfectly.
This is not the first time Fancy has been caught ruining our
home furnishings. As a puppy she chewed rat holes on both ends of our sofa and
once while we were at work, she got out of her crate and tore the covers off
several sofa cushions.
When we moved from New Hampshire to Maine, she took a liking
to the taste of the baseboards in our first-floor office resulting in them
having to be covered. We don’t mind her looking out the dining room window in
the summer but learned quickly to keep the window shut as she ripped the screen trying to get at squirrels that
she spotted in the neighbor’s yard across the driveway.
Can’t begin to tell you how many television remotes we went
through before we got the expensive smart TV. Since that smart TV remote is
costly, we now make sure we either take the remote with us or place it higher
than the dog can reach when we get a phone call or are summoned away for a
minute to the kitchen.
The old TV is now in the spare bedroom, but its $16 remotes were an ongoing order for a while from Amazon after Fancy chewed and mangled them. Same thing for the DVD remote ($12). By my estimate, we went through eight TV remotes and four DVD remotes, courtesy of our dog.
She also was caught chewing on one of my wife’s school
yearbooks and has been apprehended numerous times stealing papers from my desk
and frequently from Nancy’s desk in our office. Quite often the papers she
grabs and dashes away with to chew on are student’s school papers that have
been graded, but Fancy is also known to snatch paper clips, rubber bands,
ballpoint pens and pencils.
That usually ensues in a frantic chase around the dining room
table or down the hall into the living room to extract the items from her mouth
before she swallows them.
Early one morning last year, I had toasted a piece of raisin bread
and had just sat down at my desk to eat it when Nancy called out from the
bathroom and asked me to bring her a clean towel. I was only gone for 15
seconds but in that length of time, Fancy had jumped up and grabbed the piece
of toast from my desk and was swallowing it whole when I had arrived back
there.
Because raisins are highly poisonous to dogs, I was advised to
bring her immediately to the 24/7 animal emergency facility and what typically
takes a drive of about 40 minutes was made in half that time. After having her
stomach pumped and being put on an IV, the veterinarians released her after I
paid the $585 bill for treatment. And for the record, since then I have not had
one slice of raisin toast.
This dog is a serial mischief maker. She’s been known to go
through your coat pockets to extract Kleenex placed in them and she will scoop
up leather gloves and race by you at breakneck speed to the other room with her
prize possessions.
Fancy will knock the toilet paper roll off its holder in the
bathroom and strew it all over the house. She’s always vigilant for socks,
napkins and wash cloths fresh out of the dryer awaiting folding before being stored
and put away.
Once in New Hampshire we visited a couple that sold alpaca
merchandise and I purchased Nancy some warm alpaca mittens to wear in the
winter to school. Those lasted less than a month before having a hole torn in
them by our dog.
If you are careless with your food, Fancy is laser-focused and
has been known to grab cheeseburgers, tuna fish sandwiches and an assortment of
snacks and crackers right from your plate at both the kitchen counter and from the
dinner table.
We’ve tried exiling her to her crate during dinner and putting
her on a leash while we’re eating, but nothing so far has worked. I’ve found
that it’s hard to guard your food, cut your meat and pass the potatoes all with
one hand on the leash and one foot stepping on the leash to restrain her
impulses.
The moral of this tale is that new dog owners (like we were at one time) should be rigorous in training their furry friends or else they could create a rascal like we have. But then it’s truly all the dog’s fault. <
No comments:
Post a Comment