Dogs are like children - they take over your lives, they demand constant attention and activity (feed them, take them out to pee, take them out for a walk - which also, I understand, involves shitting - and fill up their water bowl. I occasionally do this last one.) I was vaguely thinking tonight about how it would be good to train dogs to use the toilet.
Note that ours are not allowed in the bathroom because Laszlo, in particular, will take the toilet roll, in its entirety - he's an unsubtle dog - and sit down happily in either the hall or, frequently, our bed, and then proceed to rip the toilet roll to shreds.
In case you haven't experienced this sort of thing yet, here's some information you'll get for free that you don't need to experience yourself: once an Alsation-Malamute cross has ripped up an entire toilet roll, you end up with a lot of shreds. We're talking about explosion-in-a-chicken-coop type volume of shreds of thin paper. Some of which (people with delicate sensitivities may want to look away at this point) is, well, moist.
Anyway, I mentioned to Cleodhna that I thought it would be potentially interesting to train the dogs to pee in the toilet. She then pointed out that, when Laszlo is actively trying to aim at the exact same spot that Berkeley peed on - because Laszlo is dominant, and has to have his pee on top of Berkeley's pee, so when other dogs come along they'll realise that Laszlo Woz Here, rather than some other subordinate dog - then well, Laszlo may occasionally miss by up to 10 inches.
Readers with bathrooms may at this point mentally envisage a blast radius of 10 inches from the toilet bowl, and imagine anything within that range slightly dowsed with dog piss.
