Our one-dogpower machine

I fondly remember the days when we didn’t have a pet. I used to be one of those people who disdained “pet talk;” in fact I thought I would never begin a conversation with a sentence like this: “Guess what our dog did today?” Well, I also remember doing just that. It was back in the days when our first dog was a pup.

The sad part of it is that I didn’t have anything to brag about. Our dog, Steve, had not done one cute thing in his life. He was too big and awkward to be adorable. He was too stubborn to get smart. He was too uninhibited to be dignified. He had no sense and he couldn’t see past the end of his nose, which, I admit, was quite far.

So when I stooped to “pet talking,” you can be sure that I was complaining.

First of all, this dog dug holes. He made craters in Father’s lawn; he dug under the neighbor’s fence to let their dogs out to play, and once he got a friend to play with he was prone to run off with him. (Once we found him a few blocks away from home, and he had to ride home in the truck with Mr. B. after an earnest lecture that ended with, “…and your friend can walk home.”)

And he dug up the flowers in the garden. Now if I could have taught him to dig weeds, I could run bragging to my “smart-pet” friends, but he only dug up valuable things. He didn’t even dig to bury things like nice normal dogs do. Why, my nephew’s dog once buried a whole loaf of bread, wrapper and all. Now that’s remarkable. Something to tell others about.

Secondly, he chewed. He chewed the neighbor’s sprinkler heads to bits. He chewed up baseballs, shoes, socks and big sticks. He could turn an aluminum can into crinkled confetti which he used for scattering around during dog conventions.

He ate those big rawhide bones for dinner—just chewed them up and swallowed them. (Expensive meal.) He methodically removed and chewed up the shingles from the roof of his own dog house. He also chewed up his own doggie rug leaving himself nothing to lie on but cold concrete. That’s what I mean when I said he couldn’t see beyond the end of his nose.

You would think that he would have known that he might want that bedding later, like the next time he needed to rest from his labors. Instead he was diligently working on pushing the limits of a dog’s endurance to new heights—like never resting.

What a waste of horsepower—or dogpower. I used to try to think of ways to harness all of that energy and find something useful that he could do.

I couldn’t send him to take out the garbage. That would have been like leaving the cat to tend the canary. I couldn’t trust him to guard the house. He stole more things than any thief would.

He was big enough to pull a plow, but I didn’t need any more plowing done. He had already turned up most of the back yard.

I wondered if he could push the lawn mower if I got it started, but he was afraid of vacuum cleaners, and they aren’t nearly as vicious as lawn mowers. Let me see…

It just seemed like we ought to have gotten something besides confetti in return for our investments of food, sprinkler heads, shoes, new lawn, shingles, etc.

Well, we were seriously working on getting him to dig in a designated spot. If he got that figured out, he was going to be digging post holes for his own fence. That I could tell the neighbors about.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Steve’s behavior was directly related to his age. Like everyone else he finally grew up and became a nice normal dog with a few behaviors worth mentioning in conversation—he could fetch and hunt birds.