We are terrible, terrible dog owners.
They don’t have many toys. We had to get rid of the Buster Cube because Roxy obsessed over it and her generally mild, easygoing self would fly into hysterics if any other dog looked at it. We can’t have any stuffed toys because GIR and Sophie really like to de-stuff things, including the couch and all pillows, and you can’t teach them to gut one thing and not another. We also can’t have stuffed things because in Sophie’s mind (in which she is Not Right), stuffed things are babies and OH MY GOD DON’T TOUCH MY BABY GAHHHHH. Most pet store toys last about 20 minutes. Really cheap dollar store rope bones will “last” a few weeks or a month, where last = GIR carrying around a filthy bundle of strings.
[From the "This Kills Me" department: Roxy's previous owners said she loved little stuffed animals and would carry them around and sleep with them. They gave us a bag of her little toys. She's never gotten to play with one, because someone else would take it from her, gut it, and then obsess over it. I want so badly to take her in a room by herself and let her have one for a little while, but she freaks out when separated from the other dogs, so it wouldn't exactly be kind.]
But we have two Everlasting Fun Balls, the older and larger of which has lasted over four years (longer than a couch, in other words) and the smaller of which spends most of its time underneath furniture. Green Ball is GIR’s most favorite toy. Green Ball gets put in the food bowl when it is time to eat (or even when it’s not; it’s just generally where he keeps Green Ball, and also Filthy Bundle of Strings, and we have no idea where he picked up the toy-in-bowl maneuver), and oh the whining and crying if Green Ball rolls under the ottoman coffee table (curiously uneaten, though I shouldn’t jinx it).
Well, two nights ago he was whining and crying and crouched down looking under the media cabinet. Only Small Green Ball will fit under there, and I hadn’t seen it lately, so I got down and looked. There was nothing there. He just kept pacing and whining, and I finally got down with a flashlight and he checked all the angles and it was clearly obvious to me that there was nothing under there. But he wouldn’t leave it alone. And so last night, GIR was still at it, and I was all “Look, dog, it is not-” and B said “There it is!”
It was on the bottom shelf beside the DVD player. It’s a neon green jelly ball the size of a softball, you would think that even in our dim living room I would have seen it, but no, I just tortured the dog for two days because he’s too polite to shove the DVD player out of the way and get his toy.
Other ways in which we are evil: The dog door is not large enough for Sophie to carry the throw pillows from the couches outside. And I laugh when she tries. We bought a king size bed, but it still really only holds two dogs. We make GIR sleep in a chair that we specifically put in the bedroom for him to sleep on. Sometimes we make them get off the coffee table.
I have to give them credit, though, because they just recently got cut off from some serious spoilage. Ever since we moved, B had come home at lunch pretty much every single day to let them out for a few minutes. We had a lot of trouble with Sophie’s housebreaking, and they were prone to accidents and rowdiness if left alone too long. We do have a dog door (we bought a storm door with a built-in dog door – love it, highly recommend it), but the dogs don’t get unattended access to outside because they are idiots and freaks. B started a new job that is too far away to come home at lunch right about the time I started travelling for work quite a bit, and so they went from 5 hours alone max to 10 hours, and they’ve done really well. Sophie occasionally leaves us a present, but it’s a solid one that is pretty easy to deal with on a tile floor. We have to cover the couch a little better than before, and B’s side of the couch is a little divot-y at the moment, but it’s not nearly as bad as we’d braced ourselves for, and I am pleased that the little heathens are doing so well.
We’ve had one Emergency Vet visit since we moved, and of all possible suspects it was, surprisingly, Roxy. We don’t have any evidence to prove it, but the vet’s best guess was that she found a tube of Advantix and ate some. Enough to make her real sick, and possibly if we hadn’t been around when she started getting sick she wouldn’t have made it. So store your flea treatments in a dog-free zone. I just recently found out that Xylitol, a common sweetener in sugarless gum, will kill a dog as well – there’s your Public Service Announcement for the day.
And Sophie just brought a small dead tree branch into the house, so there ends the story for the day.
1 Comment | In: Stuff | | #