Dog

Dog

Quentin Smeltzer, SmeltzerNation, 7/3/10

Psychologists say you can tell a lot about a person’s character by the way they interact with their dog.  I hate my dog.  She poops and pees all over the place.  She steals our food and destroys our property.  It’s like living with an angry crack addict. 

And I’m confused, because, didn’t we build houses in the first place to keep the animals out?  But now the animal is in the house and the house looks like… well, it looks like a bunch of animals live here.   

Our dog is half Maltese and half Shih Tzu.  My wife calls her a Malshi but I like to refer to her as a Shit-tease. 

For some unknown reason the dog loves carpet.  If it needs to pee or poop, if it needs to destroy a new pair of Birkenstocks, if it needs to chew an entire roll of toilet paper into confetti, it takes care of this business in the carpeted hallway that leads to the master bedroom.  Hardwood floors won’t do for this kind of savagery.  The dog favors plush. 

A great dilemma we face is whether to feed the dog from the table or not.  If we don’t, she whines and jumps up and down on her hind legs and—my personal favorite—she snorts like a whale.  If we do, she takes whatever we give her straight to the carpeted hallway to covet her prize in private.  Once it is gone she comes back for more, repeating her outlandish performance until we give in or not. 

Lately we have given her bones from barbecued ribs and steak.   The result is a hallway strewn with the chewed, cleaned bones of the dead.  The hallway looks like the bone yard from a Stephen King novel.  While our dog may be as cute as the bunny in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, her lair is no less terrifying. 

My wife senses the tension and feels bad about the situation.  She wants me to love the dog and, in an effort to improve relations, she has told me, “But the dog loves you.”

Love?  Really?  Honestly, I don’t think the dog knows me that well.   

Mind you, this is the best dog we have ever had.  The previous dog ate half of the insulation around the sliding door to the rear deck and once tried to escape the house by tunneling through the drywall.  When we put the previous dog on a run outside, he would pull against the rope and bark for forty seven hours without pause, if we left him there that long, digging a half moon trench in the lawn demarcating the limits of his tether.  We never left him there for more than an hour or two.  Still, our lawn showed the semi-circular scars for years afterward. 

We gave that dog to friends who renamed him and loved him and proclaimed him to be the best dog ever—totally without fault or issue.  Talk about things that make you go hmm…

But I am sure they are right.  I am sure our dogs’ behaviors have been nothing more than our own neuroses and family tensions, our own narcissism reflected back upon us with claws and teeth. 

So, in closing, let me give the dog this much: If I was in trouble, if I was trapped in the mountains, say, and we were starving, or maybe a bookcase fell on me, and I was helpless, and I turned to the dog and I said, “Go on girl!  Go get help!  Go on girl!”  Well, I know what the dog would do. 

The dog would eat my face.