SPECIAL TO THE SOMERS RECORD (09-24-15)
August is behind us, and we are now in the dog days of summer, when Sirius the "Dog Star" rises with the sun, wreaking mischief and mayhem. Or so the legend goes (I looked all this up). In our house the dog star rises with the sun, barks incessantly and then makes a whimper like an expiring Pac-Man until you let her out of her crate. That's when the mischief and mayhem begins. Gidget the dog is now seven months old, and her training is going along great. She has us doing exactly what she wants at just about all times.
We've entered an era of general lawlessness. She is like a supermodel let loose in Europe with a drinking problem and no chaperone. The dog hangs around looking cute, waiting for opportunity. When we let down our guard, she strikes quickly, stealing whatever she thinks she can sell on eBay. Now I understand why dogs chase cars.
Gidget seems to favor underwear, and so far she is at least waiting until we have removed it. If she is secretly trying it on, I'm happy it's a secret. She has been on more panty raids than the 1956 graduating class out of Sigma Tau.
Another canine pastime is pulling paper products out of the garbage and chewing them up into thousands of pieces. So far we've been able to make good use of her talents by shredding my columns, all of our tax documents and Hillary Clinton's emails, which by the way consist mostly of links to cat videos. Once she chewed up an entire novel and scattered it all over the floor, and I'm talking about the dog here, not Hillary Clinton, although she might have also done that. She seems a little gun-shy these days.
Gidget has the "Here!" command down, as long as I accept that "here" is usually somewhere over "there." And if she ever gets lost she has a micro-chip embedded into her. I don't know how many bytes it is, but I do know that she mega-bit me about a hundred times before we got around to it in the training.
But the real test is housebreaking. During the time it takes to get everyone onto the same schedule, your dog is a ticking time bomb and your house is a minefield. So we take the dog out to do her business about every ten minutes, and let me tell you, she is quite a businesswoman. She could be a member of the Small Businesswoman's Association, but for the fact that some of the business is not that small.
To make things even more complicated, When the dog is not creating poops, she is looking for snacks from the cat litter box, which by the way resemble chocolates covered with chopped nuts. You may ask why would a dog want to eat a cat poop? The answer is it's a real time-saver on your dog's digestive system. The input equals the output. It's kind of like the "got-a-penny-leave-a-penny, need-a-penny-take-a-penny" situation at the deli.
So we are still trying to figure out which behaviors are signaling that she has to go to the bathroom. Sometimes she runs around in a circuitous mania about forty-two times in a row, so afterwards we take her outside. She doesn't go to the bathroom but instead runs around another forty-two times outside. Then we bring her in, and BOOM-landmine. Afterward she gives me a look as if to say, "what did you expect- I just ran around the property EIGHTY-FOUR TIMES!"
We have a book called "Dog Training for Dummies," but it doesn't say which one of us is the dummy. The good news is that I think the housebreaking period is finally over. Which only means that there is nothing left to break in our house.
August is behind us, and we are now in the dog days of summer, when Sirius the "Dog Star" rises with the sun, wreaking mischief and mayhem. Or so the legend goes (I looked all this up). In our house the dog star rises with the sun, barks incessantly and then makes a whimper like an expiring Pac-Man until you let her out of her crate. That's when the mischief and mayhem begins. Gidget the dog is now seven months old, and her training is going along great. She has us doing exactly what she wants at just about all times.
We've entered an era of general lawlessness. She is like a supermodel let loose in Europe with a drinking problem and no chaperone. The dog hangs around looking cute, waiting for opportunity. When we let down our guard, she strikes quickly, stealing whatever she thinks she can sell on eBay. Now I understand why dogs chase cars.
Gidget seems to favor underwear, and so far she is at least waiting until we have removed it. If she is secretly trying it on, I'm happy it's a secret. She has been on more panty raids than the 1956 graduating class out of Sigma Tau.
Another canine pastime is pulling paper products out of the garbage and chewing them up into thousands of pieces. So far we've been able to make good use of her talents by shredding my columns, all of our tax documents and Hillary Clinton's emails, which by the way consist mostly of links to cat videos. Once she chewed up an entire novel and scattered it all over the floor, and I'm talking about the dog here, not Hillary Clinton, although she might have also done that. She seems a little gun-shy these days.
Gidget has the "Here!" command down, as long as I accept that "here" is usually somewhere over "there." And if she ever gets lost she has a micro-chip embedded into her. I don't know how many bytes it is, but I do know that she mega-bit me about a hundred times before we got around to it in the training.
But the real test is housebreaking. During the time it takes to get everyone onto the same schedule, your dog is a ticking time bomb and your house is a minefield. So we take the dog out to do her business about every ten minutes, and let me tell you, she is quite a businesswoman. She could be a member of the Small Businesswoman's Association, but for the fact that some of the business is not that small.
To make things even more complicated, When the dog is not creating poops, she is looking for snacks from the cat litter box, which by the way resemble chocolates covered with chopped nuts. You may ask why would a dog want to eat a cat poop? The answer is it's a real time-saver on your dog's digestive system. The input equals the output. It's kind of like the "got-a-penny-leave-a-penny, need-a-penny-take-a-penny" situation at the deli.
So we are still trying to figure out which behaviors are signaling that she has to go to the bathroom. Sometimes she runs around in a circuitous mania about forty-two times in a row, so afterwards we take her outside. She doesn't go to the bathroom but instead runs around another forty-two times outside. Then we bring her in, and BOOM-landmine. Afterward she gives me a look as if to say, "what did you expect- I just ran around the property EIGHTY-FOUR TIMES!"
We have a book called "Dog Training for Dummies," but it doesn't say which one of us is the dummy. The good news is that I think the housebreaking period is finally over. Which only means that there is nothing left to break in our house.
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