Buy the Book

I adore books.  Fact or fiction, doesn't matter, I buy them all.  The only kind of book that I have never bought is one on owning a pet.  I mean, seriously, instinct and common sense are all you need, right?  After all, you never see a monkey at the library or a lion browsing the child-rearing section at Barnes and Noble.  And if elephants don't stress about something as big as potty training, then who should?

So when we got our dog, I wasn't too worried about raising her.  How hard could it be?  I'd had about ten gazillion cats and they were easy to deal with as long as you understood the ground rules:  1. They are in charge and 2. You live to serve them.  Give them what they want, and nobody gets hurt, see?  Train a cat?  Sure.  And then for your encore, you can walk on water and bring about world peace.

But a dog?  They live to serve you, right?  Common sense says to walk them, feed them, give them a nice, comfy little doggie bed to call their own and you have a devoted friend for life.  Yup.

So, naively, we started with a walk.  Well, I started with a walk, the dog made it about three feet before she decided our lawn was a wonderful smorgasbord of tasty delights:  grass, mulch, leaves, dirt, bugs, acorns, trees, worms, and, hey, was that a scrumptious-looking bit of bird poop on the driveway?  Yuuummmy!

Now, call me crazy, but instinct told me this was bad.  Normal dogs do not eat something that has passed through the intestinal tract of another animal and come out of an opening marked "exit only".  My dog had to be a freak.

And so I spent our first "walk" looming over her like a vulture over roadkill pulling dead, dying, moldering, slimy things that I wouldn't even normally step on while wearing heavy-duty work boots and hip-waders out of her mouth with my bare fingers.  Eeewww.  So much for walking.

Feeding?  Well, after grazing in our yard like a competitive eater at an all-you-can-eat $1.99 buffet, how could she possibly be hungry?  Common sense would say that she should be full, so, on to the bed.

By night, our little darling ambles happily into her comfy little crate and snoozes the hours away while dreaming of eating the poop and the bird.  Finally.  Something that was making sense!

Ah, but it turns out she was only lulling me into a false sense of security, because by the light of day, the mere prospect of a half hour in that cozy haven suddenly sent her into paroxysms of yowling, howling, yipping, yapping, crying, whining and sobbing panic. 

The crate had become puppy prison.  A horrible torture chamber to be avoided at all costs.  Treats, toys and other enticements are placed there to lure poor, unsuspecting puppies into an evil vortex from which they may never return. And mommy?  She makes Cruella DeVille look like Glenda the good witch.  Do not under any circumstances trust her if you even suspect there is a crate somewhere in the vicinity.

So we decided to let her use the doggie bed someone had given her as a gift.  Common sense.  It is open, airy, plush.  She will love it.  Wrong again.

She has peed in it, tried to eat it, kicked it, punched it, tossed it, ripped it, trampled it and cussed it out with what I'm sure is wildly inappropriate language more suitable to some large, burly man with tattoos of skulls on his biceps. 

Nap in the bed?  Fat chance.  She don't need no stinkin' nap.  But if she absolutely, positively cannot keep her eyes open, then the best place for a nap is under a bed, table, couch, chair, or any other small, inaccessible spot where she can peer out with utter contempt while at the same time managing to smile smugly.  Oh, and by the way, the carpet pad is waaaay tastier than anything I have to give her.

Well, since common sense and instinct did not seem to be working too well for me, I decided it couldn't hurt to maybe look up a few general guidelines on the Internet.  Just purely as a matter of interest.  So I maybe browsed a few thousand web sites.  And then I may have taken a trip to the bookstore and bought a book or two.  Okay, maybe three or four.  And I may have highlighted and bookmarked a few dozen little tidbits, just to show Tim, poor guy, since he seemed a bit clueless. 

I found out that it all comes down to this:  Puppies are little bundles of energy who have no common sense and their instinct is to eat everything they see.  Walking?  Don't hold your breath.  You might as well try to juggle jello.  And finally, like kids, the box is always better than what came in it.  Deal with it and nobody gets hurt, see?  At least that is what the book says.