The Dog Days of Winter

I heard a story the other day that still has me laughing MAO every time I think about it. And with the week I'd been having, a good laugh was what I was in desperate need of.

It's all about a dog named Bear. My sister, Bec, picked up a dog from the pound last year. A Great Dane/ Lab mix, he was an eight month old puppy that had been abandoned. Bec has four kids and he immediately became attached to both my sister and the kids as well as being fiercely protective of them.

He's a big dog and for the most part, gentle as most large breeds are. And like most dogs, he is a pack animal who suffers from severe separation anxiety when they are gone, as evidenced by the following:

-he ate my sister's Christmas cards last week. They were all ready to go save stamps, but they went another route other than the postal one.
-he has learned how to open doors. Everything is game. He opens the front door and walks outside but then will come back in and do his business. No one wants a dog's mess in the house especially a large one. Especially a large one that just ate a whole bunch of Christmas cards.
-he opened the pantry door one day and ate all the cereal.
-he learned how to open the refrigerator and ate all the ricotta cheese so my sister couldn't make lasagna. She has to bungee cord the refrigerator closed at night. Apparently, Bec has a routine before she goes to bed to protect the house.
-did you say crate? Yeah, she tried crating him while they were gone and they returned to find him out of the crate and the crate itself was a mangled mess.

It's probably a combination of the puppy in him as well as the anxiety. Apparently, my sister is ready to give him his walking papers. After the cost of blood work at the vet -to determine what I don't know- which was normal, they suggested a behavioral specialist. I hope he gets a reprieve if only for the laugh he provided for me. I'm sure that if he were my dog, I wouldn't find this funny, but some day when my sister looks back, she will laugh at this. I hope.

I have my own theory. I think the holidays make dogs nutty. My brother's dog, Champ, ate 7 pounds of Christmas cookies last week which resulted in my sister in law pulling a plastic bag out of his ass. When I had an apartment with my friend Paula, my dog Brody chewed through her gifts to get to the box of chocolates. When we were kids, we returned home on Christmas night to find that our dog, Boots, had eaten a spray painted macaroni wreath. My mother called poison control. The dog lived.

What does a dog do on his day off? He can't lie around- that's his job.

George Carlin