My dogs can be jerks

I never want them to stop being annoying.

My dogs can be jerks.

I never want them to stop being annoying.

My girl Tess was an angel since the day she first came to us.  I never needed to ask her to do anything because she always did the right thing before being asked.  We had her for 8 great years until she died of cancer.  In that time, she made life better in every way.  Especially, she made life with Porter so much better.  Porter was a handful, often destroying things.  Once we got Tess, his problem behaviors were reduced 90%.  Having two dogs was so much easier than having one.  (If that logic applied to all dogs, the five dogs I have now should be so easy to manage that I could ask them to go out and wash and wax the car, but sadly that is not the case.) While Tess was in every way an angel, she had one annoying habit.  When I went to prepare dinner, she would bump the closet door with her nose and it would bang into me from behind.  I always thought this was funny and I didn’t mind.  Then one night, I was exhausted, and when Tess banged the door into me, I snapped at her.  “Could you not do that?”  It’s probably the only time I ever asked Tess to not do something.  She definitely looked like her feelings were hurt.  The next night, she didn’t bang the door into me.  The night after that, she still wouldn’t bang the door into me.  I asked her to please push the door into me, and I even demonstrated how she could do it.  After that day that I scolded her, she never did it again.  I really missed her playing her little joke on me while she was alive, and I especially missed it after she died.

Valentino is not an angel.  Or he is an angel with demonic tendencies.  Although he never intends any harm, he is painful to live with.  He barks super loud, right next to me, and it hurts my ears.  He pulls too hard, and he hurts my knees and back.  He knocks me down regularly, and one of these incidents was probably why I suffered a detached retina, requiring surgery and months of recovery.  Tino tripped me and caused me to slam into the car.  I was very sore and missed a couple of weeks of work.  Tino’s tail is always knocking things off of tables and shelves.  He bites my fingers every single time I give him a treat.  If anyone else gives him a treat, he takes it gently and sweetly, but when I give him treats, which is all the time, he makes sure to give me a painful nip.  One day, Tino stopped wagging his tail.  He also stopped most of his other annoying, dangerous behaviors.  I called the vet right away and reported that I needed to bring my dog in because he wasn’t wagging his tail and he wasn’t as annoying as he should be.  Although that sounds like a ridiculous reason to take your dog to the vet, it turned out I was right.  Something was wrong with my baby.  He had a bruised tail, probably from when he went under a fence on a search.  It took months for his tail to return to it’s normal destructiveness.

Fozzie, who everyone thinks is a darling angel, is really a little hell-beast.  At dinner time, he finds a piece of cardboard from the recycling bin, and he kills it, ripping it to shreds.  Then, as I start putting the food bowls out for the dogs, he barks, sharp and loud, as loud as Tino.  As I set down Sky’s food bowl, Fozzie jumps up and shoves me from behind.  He’s only 14 pounds, and I’m expecting it, so it doesn’t knock me over or anything.  Then I put his bowl down in his spot and he devours his meal in seconds, faster than I can get the rest of the bowls distributed to the pack.  One evening when I was tired and frustrated, Fozzie started in with his hellhound barking, and I told him to shut up.  Instead of his usual barks, he started barking with his mouth closed, saying, “Murph, murph, murph.”  This made me laugh, of course.  Since then, I have been careful not to try to silence him during his evening rampage because I know I would miss it if he wasn’t such an annoying little jerk.  Fortunately, he is not an angel like Tess was, and he had no troubling returning to his terrorist ways.

Mu barks at me to get his pills in the morning.  I put each pill in a piece of hotdog.  As I’m preparing the pills for Mu and Tino, and sometimes Viktor, Mu barks at me, sometimes throwing in muttering and funny little words.  It’s very loud, especially first thing in the morning.  I have told Mu, “I’m standing right here, so you don’t need to yell.  Also, I’m going as fast as I can, and yelling at me isn’t going to speed things up.”  Sometimes I have told him to shut up, but this hasn’t fazed him at all.  He’s like, “You’re yelling and I’m yelling! Let’s yell together! This is fun!”  A couple of mornings ago, Mu didn’t bark at me.  He just took his pills quietly and gently.  He often bites my fingers, but this time he just took his treat gently.  He walked slowly on our morning walk, and just sprawled on the couch all day, hardly moving.  When I came home, he didn’t get up to see me.  Although I couldn’t find anything specifically wrong with him, he just wasn’t his usual obnoxious self.  I called the vet and made an appointment.  This morning, he seems much better.  He did talk to me about getting his pills, whining and saying funny words.  It wasn’t a full blown bark fest, but he was talkative at least.  If he continues to improve, I may cancel his doctor’s appointment.

I have about 30% hearing loss in my right ear.  I’m pretty sure this is because of Kelsy.  We used to go to off leash parks all the time, and Kelsy had a mental map of where all the off leash parks were.  She could smell a particular area, and as we would drive around for whatever reason, Kelsy would always have her nose plugged into the air vent.  If we started to get close to Magnuson Park, or Luther Burbank or Grandview or Marymoor, Kelsy would start going nuts, barking her head off and jumping around, making the truck bounce as we rolled down the road.  I can’t prove Kelsy caused my hearing loss, but she is the most likely suspect.  What I wouldn’t give to have Kelsy bark in my ear again.  Now, when Tino barks right in my ear, even when I’m standing right next to him, it reminds me of my Kelsy.  I know one day Tino will stop barking in my ear, and that will be a terrible day.