How I train our dogs

I don’t do any of the useful things like house-train them, tell them to stay on the right side when we’re crossing the street, or anything like that. Hell no. Instead, I swear at them.

(People who dislike swearwords may want to skip this next bit.)

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t shout at them or beat them - Cleodhna told me once, and I will never forget this, that Laszlo, as a Malamute cross, should never be beaten because he will always remember, and never forget. (You do not want a 40 kg dog to bear a grudge. He will, to mix metaphors outrageously, almost certainly bear that grudge to the ground.) I just use swearwords in lieu of ordinary conversation.

Say Berkeley wanders up to me and sits down, wags his tail as if he was going to try and duplicate the Wright brothers’ experiments but hadn’t, being a dog, got the hang of that aerodynamic thing. I’ll give him a stroke or two, depending on how I’m feeling and how busy I was when he wandered in. After a while, though, I’ll get bored of this.

I guarantee you that, however long it takes me to get bored of stroking Berkeley when he’s in that “pay attention to me now!” mode, I’ll get bored before he does. I mean, even if he gets bored of being patted or stroked or ruffled or any of the other tactile things that dog owners do to their dogs, he’ll go and get a toy and insist that I play with him. Which I often don’t want to do.

So I tell him. “Fuck off, Berkeley,” I say. And he does.

And this, readers, is because I’ve trained him.

This preamble is necessary if I am to properly recount the conversation that happened just recently (and ended with the phrase “I am so blogging this”).

Japanese language MP3 that Cleodhna is listening to: “I am an American tourist, can you help me?”, (pause), (japanese language equivalent)
Me: Easier yet: “Fuck off”. Every Japanese person knows what that means.
Cleodhna: No they wouldn’t. They’d just think it was some random gaijin phrase.
Me: Sure they would. Hell, the dogs know what I mean when I say “fuck off”.
Cleodhna: Of course they do, you trained them.
Me: Did I? Wow. What do most people normally say instead of “fuck off”?
Cleodhna: “Go lie down.”
Me: Hmmm. That’s a bit rubbish. What do you say?
Cleodhna (who, I must point out, is one of Glasgow’s West End’s resident dog experts, by dint of having Done The Reading): “Fuck off.” You trained them, after all.

I rule.