Stupid or Sneaky...You Decide!

If three days ago you’d asked me to describe my dog, I’d have commented as follows:

“Dumb as a box of rocks, thick as a submarine door and mad as a fork lift truck.”

If you asked me today, I’d only utter a single word.

“Sneaky.”

Every night, we lock Buddy in the laundry room to sleep. While he’s now completely house trained, he has a certain affinity for eating garbage.

(That’s something I don’t understand. What makes a dog look at a bag of week old trash, starting to rot and covered in old coffee grounds and think “Hmm, screw that highly nutritious dog food, now trash, that’s good eatin’!”)

In other words, if we leave him out and unattended, we get up to trash dragged through the house.

Well, anyway, Buddy doesn’t mind sleeping in the laundry room, in fact, if he gets tired he’ll wander in there and put himself to bed. However, you try and put him to bed when he’s not ready, he becomes the poster-boy for ‘passive resistance’.

You call him, he comes running…then he sees you standing by the door and slowly backs away, trying to pretend he didn’t hear you, and just happened to enter the room just as you called him. Then you get behind him and shepherd him to the door…and he’ll walk straight past it down the hallway.

Eventually, he acts like “Oh, you want me to go in here? Well why didn’t you just say so!”

Anyway, for the past few nights, I noticed that he was more than willing to go into the laundry room at bedtime. I mean he’d saunter in like he owned the place.

I thought he’d finally admitted defeat and understood that I was the boss, and he had to do as he was told.

Not so.

Let me describe out laundry room. On the one side is the door we put him to bed through. At the other end of the room is a doorway, with no door. Usually we have an old baby gate to block it off. If you walk through the doorway, you’re in our main hallway, with access to the rest of the house.

Can you guess what was missing from that doorway?

Well, last night I put him to bed and closed the door. I turned all the lights off, and headed to the bedroom. Then, I realized I was thirsty, and went to get something to drink.

Because our house is almost entirely open-plan, in the summer we have curtains up over the archway into the living room to keep the air-conditioning in. As I reached the curtains, I saw the bottom of them move.

Buddy was moseying into the living room, not a care in the world.

He saw my feet. He stopped dead. He stared at my feet for a good 20 seconds…then slowly his eyes looked upwards.

His eyes locked on mine, and I actually saw his shoulders slump in an “Awwwww, Dammit!” gesture.  

Then came the funniest part. Without breaking eye contact, he walked backwards as slowly as he could back through the curtain. I head his claws clacking on the linoleum in the laundry room.

I guess he figured if he could get back in there, I wouldn’t notice.

Then, as I put the baby gate back across the doorway…he let out a gigantic doggy sigh.

“Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.”