Lucy is a
likable dog. People love her. She’s friendly, loves to play, and has developed
a knack for snuggling. If you walk in
the door, she is so excited to see you that not only does her tail wag, her
whole body wags. Her butt wiggles back
and forth from her ribcage, slapping her tail so hard against any nearby object
that it sounds like it might break off.
She whines and cries and runs back and forth across the apartment as if
you coming home is the best thing that has ever
happened to her.
Lucy wins
people over easily with her smile, floppy ears, and golden eyes. People who are not dog lovers have told me
that Lucy is a great dog. She’s quirky
and loveable with her odd eating habits, her talkative whining and moaning, her
OCD about scooting her bed around and flipping it upside-down before she can
fall asleep in it. Maybe this is a
mother’s naïve pride, but Lucy is a pretty awesome dog.
Sometimes when Lucy does something
that makes my heart explode with love—like when I unfold the towel that allows
her onto the couch and she does a running jump in order to immediately curl up
and start snoring—I tell her “I love you more than words” (yes, I talk to my
dog…I’m sure you could have easily guessed that by now). This phrase, with dogs, takes on a whole new
meaning. Dogs don’t understand
words. So when you tell them you love
them more than words, they already know.
Because you cannot express how much you love them in words. You must show them. They must feel it. Words don’t matter for a dog. It’s all about life and experience and
reality. As much as I love words, both
writing and saying them, none of this matters for Lucy. She only knows what she feels.
Dogs live in the moment. When they are scared, all they feel is
fear. When they are happy, all they feel
is joy. When they are anxious, all they
feel is that horrible itching inside them that makes them think that if you leave
them now, you will never come back.
Knowing this about dogs, I can’t
imagine what Lucy was feeling when I was rendered basically immobile by a
sprained ankle for 8 weeks. Lucy was
about 2 ½ years old, and up until that point in her life, she had never gone
more than a day or two without exercise—whether it was an hour long romp at the
dog park, a 1 ½ hour walk, or a 5-6 mile run.
She was a hyper, active dog and needed a way to release her energy. But when I sprained my ankle, there was no dog
park, certainly no walking, and definitely no running. Sierra would walk her as often as she could,
but it wasn’t as often as she was used to.
Lucy was stuck with energy compounding by the day.
Very quickly, that energy
exploded. I lost count of how many pairs
of socks, underwear, and shoes were destroyed.
She pulled paper out of the recycling bin and ripped it to shreds. She chewed her toys to bits within
minutes. She chewed the handles off a
pair of scissors, got at the end of the screw driver somehow, so if you try to
use it, the teethmarks poke into your palm.
If you caught her with something, she would begin running circles around
the wall that stood separating the kitchen from the dining room, making it
impossible to catch her. Especially with
a sprained ankle.
I felt like there was nothing I
could do. I was stuck with this energetic
dog who wanted to destroy everything with her craziness. The only person who has ever told me they
hate my dog was my boyfriend from this time, who only knew her during this
awful phase. I don’t blame him for
saying that. She was pretty awful. And I felt pretty helpless.
The last straw happened one day
while I was in the shower. I had
recently run out of contacts, which I wore daily. My last contact had ripped in two and I had
yet to make a doctor’s appointment (or to even find an eye doctor in Seattle). I had started wearing the glasses I typically
only wore at night, after my contacts dried out. I had actually started to enjoy wearing my
glasses, which only resulted in putting off a doctor’s appointment even
more. But, somewhere around that time, I
was in the shower one day and placed my glasses up on the bathroom counter
where I always put them. While I was in
the shower, Lucy somehow pulled my glasses off of the bathroom counter and
chewed them apart.
Anyone who knows me, knows that I’m
blind. Without glasses or contacts, I
can’t see my hand in front of my face.
This happened on a weeknight. I
had to work the next day. I had to drive to work. I had to keep my eyes on twenty odd children
all day long. I had to function. I couldn’t do that without glasses or
contacts. This was the first time I
broke down in tears after the ankle spraining downpour. I had absolutely no idea what to do. I called friends, panicked. We problem-solved, and somehow I managed to
find an older pair of glasses I had packed away somewhere in moving boxes (how I find them without being able to
see, I have no idea). The glasses were
nowhere near the correct prescription—stoplights were still fuzzy as I drove to
work the next day—but they tided me over until my frantically-made doctor’s
appointment a day later.
When I stepped out of the shower
and saw my glasses in pieces on the floor, Lucy didn’t have to understand my
words. She could feel my rage in the
sound of my voice, the fact that I would look at her or touch her for the rest
of that night. She knew she’d done
something very wrong. But I felt guilty
because she’s a dog. She didn’t know
that chewing those things on the counter were any worse than all the other
items she’d stolen to chew. She’d been
yelled at for those things too, but the consequences were never clear enough to
make her feel like she needed to stop.
So I made a clear decisions that
day—a “this is the last straw”
decision. From that moment on, there
would be no more chewing. No more chasing
around the apartment. No more
destruction. It was time to lay down the
law. And since I couldn’t explain it to
her logically, Lucy didn’t even know what she had coming…
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