Nothing is Safe!!!

 

See him up there?  The black dog with the soulful eyes chewing his toy basket and not his toys?  That’s Walter.  He’s cute, isn’t he? Walter is full of deviltry.  He is most definitely the Devil’s spawn.  Due to his exceptional size for an 11-month-old dog, this is concerning.  He weighs 130 pounds and has at least another six months of growth ahead of him.  He’s a demon now.  When he grows up he’s going to be a monster.

 

Some of you may remember the time Walter ate chocolate and we gave him something to make him purge it.  Up came the chocolate AND an SOS pad.  Steel wool is not good for the insides of a puppy.  Walter doesn’t care.  It was there so he ate it.  Even SOS pads aren’t safe.  Nothing is safe!

For the past two days, I have come home to find houseplants all over the floor with wet dirt decorating my rugs.  Walter!!!  He even took a couple of them and dissected them in the tub.  The bathroom floor was covered, as was the living room floor.  The next day I knew I had thwarted him.  I was jubilant as I left the house.  There was no way he was going to get those plants again!  I was wrong.  He grabbed them from a shelf that is over 5 feet tall.  This dog is not fooling around!  Nothing is safe on the top shelf of tall bookcases!

I’ve started putting things on the top of the fridge, but I fear for them there as well.  He can reach the cabinet above the counter.  He can climb and reach anywhere.  I swear he’s part goat.  Wait, doesn’t the Devil have horns like a goat?  There’s something to think about right there!

I pondered the possibility of hanging things from the ceiling, but then I remembered that they are tin and I really didn’t want to see the big holes that would surely be made when Walter was big enough to grab things up there and pull them down for his own amusement.  You think I’m kidding?  I’m not.  I am sure that nothing is safe, even on the ceiling!

Not long ago, I came home from a day away to find yarn all over the floor.  This was puzzling because the only place I had yarn was in my yarn bag and that was zipped.  He’s eaten my yarn bag!  No, the yarn bag was intact but unzipped.  Walter has learned how to unzip things!  It must be a fluke!  How does a dog unzip anything?  I continued to clean up the mess that he had created in the living room.  It looked like a tornado had come through and then returned to finish off what it missed the first time around.   Then I saw it, there was my mini knapsack ALSO UNZIPPED!!!  I wasn’t sure what I was going to do about this.  How do you teach a dog to stop unzipping things?  Nothing is safe even behind a zipper!

Then I remembered another of Walter’s indiscretions. A few weeks before the unzip fiasco I found a book on the floor. I thought to myself “Oh great, Walter got another one of my books.”  Then I looked a little more closely and saw that it was a book about Great Danes.  Of the thousands of books in this house, he picked that one.  Maybe he was trying to do his family tree, I don’t know.  He certainly enjoyed the paper that came from trees when he chewed the pages of the book!

I noticed that he left the part of the cover extolling a special chapter called “Understanding the Great Dane.”  Perhaps I should read that again.  Maybe I should memorize it.

The next book I found that had been “de-covered” was “The Only Dog Training Book You’ll Ever Need.”   There couldn’t have been a better choice.  Had he learned to read, as well?  The cover was gone and the pages were dog-toothed, as opposed to dog-eared.

My only hope is that he absorbed some of the information in that book while he digested it.  Maybe he did.  Today I walked in the door and there was a dustpan brush in the middle of the kitchen floor.  I like to think that he has observed me using that dustpan brush every time I come home…due to his indiscretions.  He was trying to be helpful and retrieved it for me so I wouldn’t have to grab it.  That has to be it!  Yes, I’m hallucinating.  Yes, I’ve lost my mind.  Nothing is safe!