Some misguided people believe that the internet was created so that academic institutions could share their research and build on the universal body of knowledge by publishing it in an internationally accessible forum. Others believe the internet was invented as a mutual pet appreciation platform. Obviously the latter is correct because there is an abundance of unsubstantiated, nonacademic and unreferenced rubbish on the web but few blogs entitled, “I hate my cat.” This is why I have avoided blogging about my dogs. They are a cause of great stress in my life, but I realize that if I admit this, my blog readership will fall into the negative and people I don’t really know will unfriend me on facebook.
It’s really the second dog that is a problem. The first one, Marzipan, remains a big yellow goofball, but he is placid and obedient and loving and only steals high fat dairy such as butter and cheese. My husband trained him and according to the dog psychologist we were forced to employ, he came from a good breeder. My husband however refused to take the second dog for training. He was concerned that the trainer would pick up how little rapport he has with the puppy and throw him out of the class.
The second dog is a little bitch. She has the mark of the devil on the back of her neck in the form of a small tuft of black fur on an otherwise blonde body. The vet looked at it and raised his eyebrows and said something like, “I wonder what the breeder was thinking?”
“Good Riddance,” would be my guess.
We get the impression she is quite bright, but in all the wrong ways. Shortly after we got her, she managed to ingest 36 Turbovite vitamin capsules. The pharmacy had delivered them to our house and we had left them, in the brown paper bag, on the dining room table. The next morning I found the 3 empty blister packs in the dog’s bed. No packaging except for the insert listing the ingredients, which came in handy during my frantic conversation to the emergency vet at 6:00am. Apparently vitamin B has no effect on dogs, but the caffeine, taurine, ginseng and guarana could give the dog heart palpitations. I go off to find the dog and see my daughter staring out the window with a bemused expression on her face.
“Mummy,” she said, “The puppy has just jumped off the patio table, across the flower beds and landed over there, on the other side of the lawn.”
Ha, big deal. If I had just eaten 36 Turbovite capsules I would also believe I could fly. I catch the dog, no mean feat since she is doing performance drug induced laps around the garden, and feel her heartbeat. Then I cancel my day to take her to the vet. “Best you come back later,” the vet tells me when I drop her off. “This is not going to be pretty.”
I go back many hours later to find the dog has been washed and groomed and brushed. I get cross about this, because I brought the dog in to have it’s stomach pumped, not to have a spa treatment. “Oh, but we had to do that,” says the receptionist, “It really wasn’t pretty.”
According to the dog psychologist, it is ALL my fault. It is NOT OK to be a sensitive, creatively gifted person. Although I am gratified that the dogs see me for what I really am, whereas others only see my sharp and brittle shell, it would be nice if they didn’t see it as a weakness and take advantage of it every time they come near me. According to the dog shrink I have allowed the dog to believe that she is the Queen Bitch. As a consequence she feels that she can come and go as she pleases. Leaving the territory is apparently a pack leader behaviour, so taking herself for a walk to the doggy park is quite reasonable if her minion owner refuses to accompany her. We had a problem with our automatic gate, which would open and close randomly throughout the day, allowing Queen Bitch out to go exploring by herself. I arrived home one day to find 42 messages on my cell phone from my husband who had been phoned in an important meeting by a the Wendywood vet to say that our dog had been found and would we like to pick her up, please. The vet had scanned her neck for the microchip and my husband’s number had come up first. He was furious that I hadn’t noticed that the dog was missing. Maybe I had, but was enjoying the sensation of owning my own house for a change. I drive to Wendywood in the rush hour traffic and the vet’s assistant brings her out and down the long passage to reception. Halfway down the dog spots me and drops to her stomach and leopard crawls the last 15m to where I am standing. All the people in the vet looked horribly shocked at this reaction, obviously the dog is terrified of me. Only I know that she is being manipulative, she knows I won’t strangle her in front of a sympathetic audience.
On another great escape occasion, I am on the other side of town with the SUV and it is only my husband and the Mercedes Benz available to look for both dogs and bring them home. He finds them about a kilometer away, happily cavorting in the middle of the road. Rather than put them onto the leather interior he tossed them both into the boot, closed the lid and drove home. On yet another occasion, a gardener from down the road brought her back and then tried to extort money from us for her return. This was when we phoned our local dog whisperer and implored him to intervene, before we did something unmentionable, like say to the dog’s kidnapper, “keep her until you are begging to give her back to us for free.”
The dog whisperer tells us to take the dogs for a walk every day. Anybody can walk the dogs as long as they walk them until they are tired. The other day I was reading our local paper, the Sandton Chronicle, also known as the Sandton Chronic due to the low levels of unremitting pain it causes the reader. One of the letters to the editor was a spitting tirade about Sandton dog owners. In a world of economic collapse, corruption, murder, rape and climate change this vituperative person chose to complain, not about Sandton dog owners who abuse their dogs, or about Sandton dog owners who don’t walk their dogs at all but wait for it: Sandton dog owners who make their domestic workers and gardeners walk the dogs! He called them irresponsible and selfish and unworthy to own pets. Pity the thousands of Sandton dogs who are never, ever walked, but no, it is better not to exercise your dog at all than let someone else do it! Now my dogs are sluts for a good walk, they would go for a walk with a suicide bomber if it meant a ten minute sniffaround in the dog park.
The two luckiest dogs in Sandton, a pair of freshly brushed husky style pooches, walk down West Road South every morning with their gardener. (I’m assuming it is the gardener, he wears Wellington boots and blue overalls, which could just be a clever disguise by their black owner not wanting to lose face.) For those who don’t follow South African farce, go here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/southafrica/9767644/Jacob-Zuma-says-owning-a-dog-is-not-African.html We know exactly how late we are for school depending on how far down the road they are.
Another irritating habit adopted by Queen Bitch is to hide the food bowls. For a dog as obsessed with food as she is, this is baffling behaviour, but according to the doggy shrink this is a “claiming” behaviour which must be stopped by removing the food bowls 20 minutes after feeding. “Why 20 minutes,” I ask, thinking this is some sort of magic number in dog psychology. “To ensure that they have had a chance to eat enough,” he replies. My husband and I fall about laughing, our dogs inhale their food in about 4.5 seconds, then spend the next 19 minutes and 55.5 seconds relicking the bowl to ensure that no molecules of food remain. I once watched in amazement as the real dog whisperer on TV tried to cure a dog of anorexia. This emaciated dog refused to eat and the frustrated owner was spending 45 minutes, twice a day hand feeding his pet walking skeleton single dog cubes one at a time.
However, we are making progress. I have now trained the dogs so that, instead of taking my arm off at the elbow every time I feed them, they now sit and wait quietly while I put the food in front of them and take a step back. They wait and watch until I give them the signal to eat, then they dive into their bowls and eat their way through to China.
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