Neurotic Dog

A brief history:

We adopted Sake from an animal shelter near Milwaukee. When we brought her home, she had very little hair because of the worst case of fleas the shelter had ever seen, bald patches and scabs on her bottom from being left in a cement kennel all the time, teeth that they considered pulling because of overbite problems, and was highly considered for euthanizing because of a low probability of adoption. She was clearly neglected if not outright abused.

We brought her home anyway when she was around 6 months old. The first weekend after we adopted her, we planned to take her camping with us. She saw us packing up all of her toys, etc. and went and hid behind the dresser upstairs, clearly afraid we were taking her back to the shelter.

Sake is an extremely intelligent dog. We've taught her to ring a bell when she wants to go in or outside and when she wants water. She manipulates Baxter by teasing him with various toys until he drops the one she wants.

Notice Baxter in the background

going "what the hell just happened?"

She goes into the pantry to help herself to bones when we aren't in the kitchen. She spreads newspapers out (or whatever form of paper she can find) herself and poops on them if she can't "hold it" due to tummy upsets during the day and can't get outside. (We now leave a stack of newspapers on the floor for her when she's been showing signs of an upset tummy, just in case.) She has been relatively easy to train despite being completely unmotivated by food, for everything except her overreaction to other dogs and the following...

When we brought her home from the shelter, we immediately began crate training which cause huge amounts of anxiety for her. She learned how to let herself out of her crate while we were at work (we video taped it while we were out... it took her 8 minutes), so we began using a clip on the crate that required opposable thumbs. Problem solved until one day we came home to find blood in her crate and bloody footprints through the house when we let her out. She had bent the metal bars on the crate trying to get out, and put one of them clear through her paw. That was the end of crate training.

Since then, we have restricted Sake's access to certain areas of the house when we aren't home because of her tendency to chew on various plastic things including remote controls, cordless phones, random pens, cd's, and even a dog training video borrowed from an obedience trainer we were attending class with.

When we moved to our home here in louisiana, we restricted her to the front of the house using a bifold door to block one doorway and a baby gate in the other.

She quickly learned how to open the bifold door, so we installed a hook on the opposite side of the door. Then she began jumping the baby gate, so we put a chair in front of it.

Then she started moving the chair and then jumping the baby gate, gracefully landing in the bean bag chair we had placed on the opposite side to prevent her from jumping over.

So we installed another door.

And then a hook to lock it.

And then replaced the hook with one requiring opposable thumbs when she learned how to unhook the door.

This has worked for the last 5 years. We occasionally come home to find her in other parts of the house when we forget to hook the doors, and usually damage is minimal... for a while, she was in the habit of stealing the butter dish off the counter and eating the entire stick of butter.

However, last week, Sake decided she was terrified of the room in the front of the house, as well as her food bowl and water bowl. We don't know why. We've had issues with the water bowl before, having to change from one that refilled automatically because of the gurgling noise as it was refilling, so that's really not new. But I've had to either dump her food onto the carpet several times in the last week, or feed it to her by hand in order to get her to eat without getting spooked. In the mean time, every time we leave the house, it's been a struggle to get her to come into "the dog room".

A couple of days ago, we found a bit of the bifold door had been broken off.

Today we came home to this.

She couldn't manage to unhook the door, so she knocked down the whole damn thing. I found her lounging on the living room couch chewing up one of Cassidy's pacifiers.

WE have decided to let her try having access to the living room and hallway while we are out. We will be installing a hook mechanism on the pantry door as a preventative measure, and blocking off the kitchen with a baby gate. It will definitely take some diligence on our part to see that no phones or remote controls are left out. I'm curious which of Cassidy's toys will be the first to go ....

Damn Dog.