Matt would be very upset that I referred to our dog as a moron. Chances are, Cesar Millan would be too. I suppose it's my fault that my dog still cannot handle having visitors to the house. He becomes positively apoplectic whenever someone breaches our threshhold.
I suppose it's my fault that my dog cannot handle seeing, hearing or smelling other dogs. He becomes positively apoplectic when we pass another dog on a walk -- whining, jumping, barking, pulling on the leash. At all other times he's very well leash-trained and heels well. No dog owner whose dog has ever been within Charlie's line of sight on a walk would believe that.
I suppose it's my fault that my dog cannot process the word "no." Actually, I take that back. He can process it, and if it comes from me, his favorite thing to do is keep doing whatever he's doing. Case in point: our new gardens. The lady who lived here before had lovely gardens and kept them up well. At our old house, I had some lillies that I kept behind one of those little sectioned metal fences so that Charlie would leave them alone. They were interspersed among the rose of sharon, so he couldn't jump the little fences without braining himself on a tree trunk. (Come to think of it, I'm not sure we'd have notice a difference in his behavior had such a misfortune befallen him.) When we moved here, the previous owners' scottie dogs were apparently well-behaved enough not to bother her garden beds (or she was laid back enough not to care). [NB: The scottie dog reference will *definitely* require another post. My dear friend Missey will no doubt be most unhappy with me for saying it, but scotties have earned a special place in my heart -- the coldest, darkest, dankest place where black widow spiders lurk and guillotines are sharpened.]
I DIGRESS. The garden beds. These lovely beds were completely unprotected by any fencing. I knew immediately that this would not be uncomplicated. Sure enough, the first morning I let Charlie out, I couldn't find him after a little while when I looked out the kitchen window. And then a yellow flash caught my eye. It looked like just another branch of a large bush in our back yard, which had yellowish leaves on long stems. But it wasn't. It was Charlie's tail poking out from behind said bush, where he was doing heaven knows what. That soon became his favorite spot. I would frequently look out and see him lurking behind that bush. It is, of course, the spot farthest from the edge of the garden beds, giving him ample opportunity to trample completely the largest number of plants between him and his objective.
So I bought fencing. Cute little rounded sectioned white garden fencing. And I painstakingly put it up all around the biggest bed in the back yard. And I sneered triumphantly at him as I put it up. And as I rounded the last corner of the bed with the fencing, I looked over my shoulder at my finished product, over which -- at that very moment -- Charlie was daintily stepping on his way to his favorite yellow bush.
I didn't realize how much shorter than my original fencing this new fencing was. Too short for our wildebeest, apparently.
But when I look at him and tell him "no," no matter how emphatically, he takes it as encouragement to continue doing what he is doing. And once he has cleared the fencing, he looks over his shoulder at me as if to say, "HA! *Now* whatcha gonna do about it?" So I order him out, post haste. And he comes to the inside edge of the fencing, looks down at it, looks up at me, and visibly struggles to "find a way out."
Never mind the fact that he found a way in without batting an eyelash.
So I suppose it's possible he's not a moron, and he's playing me. But we're not going to discuss that possibility.
Instead, I'm going to post this picture:
Remember that part about becoming apoplectic when strangers came over, and how he doesn't even *hear* the word "no"? The estimator came from the moving company (while BC was sleeping peacefully and not causing any trouble) and I put Charlie out in the entryway while she was there. We walked the entire upstairs while Charlie barked in the entryway. I thought that was the worst of his bad behavior. But then we started to go to the basement, for which you have to pass through the entryway. To my horror, I realized that Charlie had split his tail open as a result of his frenetic, nervous tail-wagging, and had painted our entryway in blood. I'm afraid the estimator thought this was some sort of house of horrors because I loudly exclaimed, "Oh no! Not again!" Indeed, this was not the first time Charlie had accomplished such a feat (though not in the entryway, or I would clearly be the moron for putting him in there). And it will doubtless not be the last.
In fact, he has repeatedly re-opened the old wound. Suffice it to say that he is not fit for company, and seldom sees any!
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