The Musings of a Former Dog Owner

Well, it didn't take me long to slack off on that whole "I'm going to write in this at least every two weeks" thing. But at least I didn't go months and months this time either.

Life has been somewhat hectic these past several weeks. Many things have happened, such as:

• We got a dog
• The dog bit Riley
• We gave the dog back
• The kids started school
• Tyler has begun potty training again
• Paul has begun studying for his next CPA exam

And more things will be happening in the near future, such as:

• I will get two of my wisdom teeth removed
• We will celebrate our 11th anniversary
• We will go out on a date this weekend because the oral surgery will interfere with the weekend of our actual anniversary
• Paul's parents will be visiting

I could go on into the rest of the year but I'm sure you get the drift by now. I'll elaborate on the dog fiasco and the kids starting school today though so that those things don't get overlooked.

So, we got a dog...yeah, never thought that would actually happen. It's my fault mostly. My cousin, who goes to our church, recently got a dog off of craigslist and for some reason (probably boredom) I decided a few weeks ago to look at dogs on craigslist just to see what was out there. My kids, especially Riley, regularly beg for a pet, and most recently have focused on a dog as the pet of choice. It started out as a cat, but became a dog when my parents got dogs. I have been known in the past to look with smug superiority out of the window during the winter and watch a neighbor walk by bundled to their eyebrows, taking their dog on a walk. Or watched as a neighbor stood shivering in their backyard as their dog used the outdoors for their own personal toilet. And I shook my head and declared that I would NEVER want a dog, especially not in a place where winter is actually cold. Other times, Paul and I would say to each other that if we ever did get a dog it would have to be an indoor one that was already potty trained or no way would we get one. No puppies for us, thankyouverymuch.

So, in my safe little bubble of dog-free land, I looked on craigslist at the cute canines that other people are trying to shove out of their homes. Now I admit to being a person who isn't a huge animal lover (I mean I love them from a distance but have never craved an animal of my own. That's what I had kids for.) but I am also a person who thinks dogs are cuter and have nicer personalities than cats. However, cats come with their own indoor toilet (or you provide them with one anyway) and a built in instinct to go to the bathroom there, AND they come with a lack of desire for regular exercise that doesn't involve chasing a disembodied laser light or a piece of string around. Put a cat on a leash and try to take it for a walk, and in most cases I bet you are going to regret it. So while dogs are cuter and more fun to be around, cats are lower maintenance. So I always figured that when the day came that we would get a pet, it would be a cat. I wasn't counting on my husband paying quite so much attention to what I was rambling about when I talked about my day during those days when I was looking at dogs on craigslist. I figured he was just listening politely but not really retaining what I was saying, but apparently not because not many days into my craigslist viewing enterprise, Paul took Jake out one Saturday and they ended up in Petsmart parking lot on adoption day looking at a cute little dachshund named Turbo. Jake is our kid who we have thought would benefit from having a dog because he has been scared of them. This little dog and Jake did well together walking around the parking lot and Paul suddenly decided that if we were going to get a dog, this breed would probably do well for our family, with it being a smaller dog who doesn't have a ton of fur to shed off and wouldn't need miles of walking to burn off excess energy. So he came home talking about this dog and all of a sudden, all of our reasons for not wanting a dog were forgotten. I took Riley and Jake back to Petsmart and we arrived just in time to see Turbo being adopted by a nice young couple. Oh crushing disappointment! Honestly even Paul and I had gotten caught up in the excitement and were disappointed at the loss of this dog. So I continued looking for dogs on craigslist hoping to find another dachshund that we could adopt who was already potty trained and wasn't going to bark our house down. A few days later, I hit pay dirt. A five year old dachshund named Popcorn was available not far away. So we went to visit him. I had, by this point, begun to come to my senses and started thinking "Do I really want a dog? Really?" I recognized the fact that I was going to be the one taking care of it the most, especially when school started again, but after meeting him and seeing how well he did with our kids, he didn't bark at us at all, he loved Tyler and let him poke around on his face even from that first meeting, I just couldn't say no. I thought hey, even I had a dog when I was a kid. I mean, they were all family dogs and never lasted longer than it took for them to grow out of the cute puppy stage (not that we killed them, we just gave them to someone else), and they were all outdoor dogs but, we had them nonetheless. Could I really in good conscience deny my own children the opportunity to experience having a dog of their own? At that point I couldn't do that.

So we went home that night with a little wiener dog whose name quickly changed from Popcorn to Big Poppy to Oscar. I know, quite the little name revolution. But Paul was worried about his (the dog's, that is) street cred with the other dogs in the neighborhood if we called him Poppy. And I, for some reason, stumbled over the name Popcorn too much to call him that. I love popcorn the snack, but that name for my dog just wasn't going to work. Anyway, things started out well, with few barking outbreaks (only when visitors actually were visible in the doorway) and only one initial accident in the house. But other inside accidents were discovered over the course of the next several days and by the end of the first week we had also discovered another quite nasty tendency. He felt the need to guard himself and his territory when he was under a piece of furniture or in a small space of some kind. If you tried to touch him when he was in those places, you better watch out or you might pull back a stump. In fact, he did make actual biting contact with Riley the very first time we discovered this about him. He didn't even break the skin of her finger enough to make it bleed, but man, a dog bite like that is a huge trauma. I'm pretty sure that the whole thing upset me more than it did her. After she got over the initial shock, she was back to loving the dog and never wanting to let him go. I was ready to kick him out the front door and say good riddance.

But we decided (or at least Paul convinced me) to give him another chance. He was still very new to our house, we were still working to establish "pack leadership" over him (did you know that you have to establish yourself as your dogs pack leader or else they are very hyper, barky (especially little dogs) and won't respect your personal space? Yeah, that's another thing you don't have to do with cats...I'm just sayin). The whole biting thing could have been a fluke right? I mean, the kids had been following him around for quite awhile that day. Maybe he just needed some space. But we had two more occurrences of that kind of behavior (directed at me this time) though no contact was made. I started getting pretty nervous. I was nervous around the dog himself, never really knowing for sure if something was going to upset him, but I was also very nervous when Tyler would be around him. And there was no way for me to warn Tyler to stay away from the dog when he is under the bed or under the desk or something like that. Tyler doesn't get that yet and my big fear was that he would decide he needed to pet the dog in one of those circumstances and then we would have a trip to the hospital for stitches on our hands, plus a possible trial or whatever for animal abuse for me for killing the dog. In the midst of all of that, I was finding more and more suspicious yellow spots on our carpet. It went from accidents that he was doing while we weren't in the room every two or three days to every day. I'm sure that with some work we could have stopped that, but by that point I just couldn't do it. I no longer even wanted to be inside my house. The dog was really stressing me out. And after his last time to lash out at me, Paul said enough is enough and we returned him to his previous owner.

The kids handled that surprisingly well. Jake had liked the dog a lot, even with his aggressive issue so we felt like he was in a healthier place dog-wise. Riley was very sad the day we got rid of him, but that was this past Friday and I've not heard her mention him more than three times since then. School is providing her with a good distraction but I think too that she was starting to realize how much work she was actually going to have to put in to this dog. When she was home, she was the one who had to take him out to potty or to go for his evening walk or to brush him or any number of other things that came up with him. So the lack of work involved in a cat is starting to be pretty appealing to her. And she likes cats too so it wasn't a matter of her not wanting one of those and really wanting a dog. She doesn't seem to care much either way unless we have the pet in our house at that very moment.

So our doggy saga came to an end and we are wiser for it. No more dogs for us, at least not until I am working outside the house and the kids really are old enough to be responsible for the dog without reminders from us. We've told Riley that a cat is on our horizon but probably not until Tyler is old enough to handle a kitten without fear of him hurting it. We figure a kitten would be best so we can avoid the unknown past that an older animal in a shelter has hanging over it. Plus if a kitten is raised properly from birth, they'll already know how to use the litter box so no major worries on that front.

Now I don't feel like going into the beginning of the school year. The dog thing overlapped the start of school slightly so I'm just being chronological by starting there. I'll follow up with the start of school later this week.