Lots of things are evil, especially puppies
It’s time to mention The Jeffrey. If you’ve checked out Frinklin’s blog, you can get the story of how we got Jeffrey. I’ll summarize the story here: Blah, blah…25th birthday…blah, blah…stopped to buy cat food…blah, blah…puppy adoption day at PetSmart.” Need I say more? You animal people know how it is. You see the big eyes, notice the giant bat-wing ears (in this case)—once you see the bulging little puppy tummy and smell that puppy breath, it’s over. To make the picture of this 12 pound bundle of scraggly hair complete, the adoption organization, Baja Animal Sanctuary, had found him at the Tijuana dog pound just a few weeks earlier, where dogs are given three days to be rescued or they’re electrocuted(!!!). How could we pass up a story like that? Well, we didn’t.
We’ll forget the part of the story where both Frinklin and I lived in apartment complexes that didn’t accept dogs, or that I was a student and working, and that we lived 70 miles apart at the time and did a lot of traveling. Both Frinklin and I were in love, and we convinced ourselves that it would all work out in the end. Well, we convinced the apartment complex to let us keep him, and when I say “convinced”, I mean “used my knowledge of various obscure laws to get his waggy butt in the door”. I also managed to bribe my (ever so generous and lovely) sister to come and take care of the new baby during my working and schooling hours. The Jeffery learned to love the car, and kept me company on the lonely drives up and down the Southern California coast. He was so dang cute, I’d do anything for him.
That trend has continued to this day. Our mangy (we found out a month and several medicated baths later) little fur person is now 70 pounds of very large pit bull mix. He sleeps at the foot of our bed, and when I say “foot” I mean “under the covers and stretched out to cover the maximum square footage of the bottom half of the bed”. He tortures our previously pampered feline family members. He has contests with our Amazon parrot, Chicken; Jeffrey barks, Chicken screams, repeat 500 times a day. We have changed his food several times at the advice of our vet, hoping to find one that doesn’t cause his stomach to erupt out his back end a wave of noxious fumes that are used to power those new Daisycutter bombs—his gas sucks the very air you breath from the room. Not a day goes by that I don’t lose some possession to The Jeffery, and when he rips my __________ (choose from the following list: trash can, DVDs, books, CDs, side of the couch, bathtub drain stopper, pillow, various leashes, pens, antique chair from my late grandmother’s house, underwear, socks, many remote controls, etc.) apart, he does it for the sheer joy of destruction, he never eats any of it.
That’s not to say that we haven’t attempted to fix his quirks. We’ve purchased spray bottles, muzzles, and a couple anti-bark collars to attempt to mend his ways. Each one of these behavior correction devices met its doom on the jagged molars of The Jeffery.
All this is not to say that The Jeffrey isn’t smart. He knows all his doggie commands. His butt hits the floor the second I give him a look. He lies down and rolls over when I flick my eyes a certain direction. He shakes both paws quite happily. He can give the perfect impression of a Canine Good Citizen, as long as no one is watching.
As bad as he can be, one moment of having him trustfully climb up next to me on the couch and relax into a puddle of brindle warmth reminds me why we adopted him in the first place.
I just have to remember that when I’m picking up shredded pieces of (yet another) paper bag distributed over the entire house in a fit of destructive glee.
