Taji is not a bad dog. Well, not inherently. He was just badly brought up. He jumps up at people, we still can’t trust him around joggers and other dogs so he has to be on lead all the time, and he just doesn’t understand the concept of not being allowed to take things off surfaces. This is something you have to teach a puppy at an early age or they just won’t ever grok it, and his previous owners clearly didn’t teach him this valuable distinction. They taught him to wrestle, though, and to drink alcohol, which is nice.
(Our next dog, after a rescue dog that barks at any black dog, ever, and another rescue dog that takes things off tables and likes to drink out of Cleodhna’s wine glass? Definitely a puppy from a reputable breeder, that we can train properly. I think we’re due that.)
A case in point: yesterday I wandered into the kitchen to find a) Taji busy licking at something on the floor, and b) torn fragments of the wrapper to a pack of butter I’d bought only earlier that day. Meaning that not only had Taji wandered into the kitchen and grabbed an almost entire pack of butter off the counter, he’d also eaten half of the wrapper in his eagerness to ingest far too much fat than is good for anyone.
Earlier this evening, the inevitable second act of this cautionary tale occurred. Summoned by cries from the other room along the lines of “Get away from that!”, I hastened to the living room to find Cleodhna fending Taji off from a repulsive yellow pool of slightly butter-smelling dog vomit.
This is the sort of situation where human and dog psychology deviate. Most of the time we can agree on a few basic principles: sun, food, warmth, comfy beds good; rain, cold, annoying other people / dogs, pain bad; people stabbing needles into you bad if you know it’s coming. Cleodhna successfully distracted Fat Petunia at the vet’s the other day by feeding him very small treats very slowly (so he had to nibble), and he only bucked once, right at the end, when he suddenly realised “Oh my God, you’ve had a needle in me for how long now?” Similarly, I remember as a 10-year-old child suffering agony while a travelling nurse injected some evil substance in my arm, millilitre by millilitre, to check whether I need a BCG vaccine; when, a week later, it turned out I needed it, and we went to our family doctor, he had the needle in and out of my arm so quickly that I didn’t notice he was doing it while he was talking to me about other things.
At other times, though, dogs just think differently from us. We think “that smells foul”, they think “that smells lots!” and proceed to roll in fox shit, dead pigeon, rotting fish or whatever. We think “damn, that pile of yellow goop that Taji just threw up makes me want to throw up in turn, it’s so foul”; Taji thinks “hey, look, I threw up a bunch of stuff; I should eat it up again just in case it stays down this time”.
Which is why, while Cleodhna found a handkerchief, doused it with strong-smelling menthol oil of some kind, and proceeded to clean up the area of the living room bombarded with yellow fatty dog vomit, my job was to make hot water available to souse dog puke disposal utensils, hold bin liners open so Cleodhna could get rid of barf-infused newspapers, and most importantly physically drag Taji away from the living room and lock him in the bedroom to forestall any further valiant attempts at Operation Dog Chunder Plunder.
Taji is currently very happily sat on the sofa in the living room as if nothing traumatic happened - which, from his perspective, may well be true. He may well have forgotten all about it.
Sigh.
(Despite all of that, we’re still pretty lucky. See, for example, fucking sweet potatoes and dogs in elk. We got off lightly.)
Leave a comment