Good Reasons to Train Pet Dogs

When I was in university, I rented a room in a shared house in Cairns, Australia.  The landlady, Sam, lived there with her two Jack Russell terriers.  Let me be clear that before this event, I had no problem with dogs whatsoever.  If I had to choose, I would have said I was a cat person, but I’d always held a deep desire for a nice big friendly dog to go running and hiking with and to have sitting sedately at my feet when I was working or reading.  This household changed all of that.

There were two dogs there, one female and one male, named Tess and Bates.  Of the two, Tess was definitely the ringleader; she was faster, healthier and smart enough to come up with mischief.  When I first moved in, Sam immediately took a 3-week working vacation south in Rockhampton, leaving me in charge of them both.  I was thinking how great it would be to get to live with pets again, and how helpful it would be to have hyper-energetic running partners that would force me to train harder than my usual lazy jogging.  Before Sam left, she gave me all their care and feeding instructions, including a peculiar directive that they were to be kept inside every night, no matter what.  When I asked why, she said it was because Bates had a bad habit of catching and eating cane toads—which are ridiculously poisonous—and thus costing her a pretty penny at the vet’s every time he spent a night outside.

Honestly, I find them hard to resist myself.

 Did he learn from eating these toads?  No.  He would eat one and almost immediately begin to convulse and vomit, but this never stopped him from going for another toad, just to see if they’d gotten any tastier this time.

 Furthermore, if I kept him inside but let Tess out (since presumably she’d figured out not to eat toads ages ago), they would stand at the doors and howl at each other.   Or yap.  These dogs were champion yappers.   And keeping Bates on a chain outside would have been equally pointless, since the cane toads are at such ridiculous numbers that he could have eaten half a dozen of them without even moving.

So okay, I thought.  If they always stay inside at night, they must be used to that.  No problem.   Except it was, because Tess turned out not to be housebroken.

Every night for a week I would wake up to find a puddle and a small pile of turds waiting for me in the kitchen.  Based on the fact that it was always Bates yapping to be let out for a pee in the morning, I eventually pinned the blame on Tess.  I tried turning her out the night before, to the same result.  I tried walking her right before going to bed.   More poop.  I tried changing her feeding time to the morning.  Craptastic mounds of dog poopiness.  At this point I was singlehandedly contributing to deforestation all around Australia and keeping the paper towel industry in the black.

Eventually, in desperation, I asked an older friend about how to train dogs.  I’d never owned one and training cats is easy—you just pick them up and put them in the litter box every time it looks like they might want to crap, and then they realize, oh yes, crap here.  This friend suggested obedience school, but I reminded her that (a) I was a university student and therefore broke, and (b) they weren’t actually my dogs so why the hell would I pay for obedience school.  Then she suggested a bit of punishment, and I hesitated.

Now, I have cried after killing a wasp in the past.  I feel horrible if I do anything more violent than trap a spider under a cup and put it outside to live another day.  One time, I was eating lunch in a city square and a blind, quiet dog wandered past scavenging from the cobblestones, and I burst into tears.  And, I was a strict vegetarian and had been for nearly ten years.  So understand that this is the anti-animal-suffering  background upon which my friend was suggesting I start using corporal punishment on a pet.  Specifically, she said to push Tess’s nose into her turd pile or puddle, and give her a (gentle) whack.  I fretted and hesitated through three more days of cleaning up Tess’s morning contributions before I finally got exasperated enough to give it a try.

The result:  Tess pissed the floor again the next night, and left another turd pile.  Only this time, when I approached her to reprimand her, she squatted and peed some more, then ran away.

Next night: same again.

Next night: same, plus then Tess decided that she was going to take revenge for my trying to discipline her.  This time, while I was making dinner, she broke into my room and peed on my bed.  I gritted my teeth and cleaned up after her.  The following morning, I discovered that not only had she left me a Bed Surprise, she’d left me a Clean Laundry Surprise.

 Another problem I had with these dogs was that they didn’t give a damn about their names or any other dog commands like come, sit, or stay.  This meant that another cherished hope I had about dogs—namely that I would be able to take them running—was shattered.  You couldn’t order them to run with you properly.  They couldn’t be off-leash for any moment, because once Tess had caught a whiff of freedom, she was away, and there was no calling her back.   Bates was the same, but he at least tended to follow her.  If Tess got loose, there was nothing you could do about it except to physically retrieve her after an exhausting half hour of chasing and cornering and recruiting backup from neighbors and bystanders.  If I tried to run with them on a leash, they were never coordinated enough to get into a rhythm; instead, they would scramble all over the place and wind up my legs, or abruptly stop to scratch up the ground and pee on some territory, or twist their leashes so tightly round one another until they couldn’t move in the same direction.  That meant I had to go running and then go walking with the dogs, in succession.  I felt I had gotten way more than I’d bargained for with these two.

Fortunately, at the end of three weeks, Sam returned, and I could go back to letting her deal with Tess’s morning poops.  I continued to find turds in my laundry, however.

It was usually Tess who got up to vindictive stuff like that.  I think Bates was a little bit too dumb, though it was hard to tell with Tess egging him on all the time.  She was always doing stuff like digging up the garden and chasing venomous snakes at higher speed than he could, and because he had a lame hind leg from a puppyhood injury, he couldn’t move as quickly to get himself out of trouble.  So she tended to lead him into mischief and then run away from it as fast as she could, leaving him with the consequences.  Years later, when I read about Allie Brosh’s dog on Hyperbole and a Half, I thought “That’s Bates!  That's EXACTLY what he was like!” but at the time, I never thought to Google ways to tell if Bates was actually subnormal.

I put up with their shit—literally—for a few more months, particularly when I could just leave the door to my room closed and give Sam the job of dealing with her disobedient yappy dogs.   Unfortunately, it all came to a disastrous conclusion one morning when I got up at 7 a.m. to go running.

Our screen door sometimes didn’t latch properly when it shut.  Usually it did, but this time, it failed.  And since it opened outward, if it didn’t latch, that meant it was basically a dog flap door waiting for an opportunistic Jack Russell.  This morning, I’d run about 200 yards from the house when I heard a snap-bang that signaled our door opening and shutting quickly.  I’d barely managed to turn around and look behind me when the dogs came racing past at roughly the speed of sound.

At this point, I knew I was screwed.  They’d already cleared our cul-de-sac and were flying down the road out of the neighborhood.  I was in good triathlon shape at the time, but not very fast sprinter; besides, I reckon Usain Bolt would have struggled to catch these bastards.  I also didn’t have any leashes, treats, or other dog-related paraphernalia with me.  Furthermore, because this was tropical Queensland in March, I had nothing on except a teeny sports top , my running shoes, and some ridiculous little shorts.  This meant I didn’t have any pockets for stuff like a phone or keys, so I’d gone without them and just assumed people would still be home when I returned.   Reflecting on this, I looked after the dogs and briefly considered going back to the house to get some equipment, but decided against it on the grounds of not losing sight of them.

So I chased them—not closely, but at a distance where they wouldn’t maintain a heart-popping sprint.  The best I managed was to herd them along one of my shorter running routes near enough to home.  I knew I could catch Bates without much of a problem, because of his lameness, but I knew Tess would then ignore him and keep on running.  However, Tess was in heat at the time—if I caught her, not only Bates’ dependence on her but the power of hormones would make him follow us.   And since I could only carry one dog at a time, this sounded like a reasonable plan.  Resolutely, I looked out for my chance to make my move. 

 I finally managed it after about three miles of herding.  Tess let her guard down while sniffing something near a tall fence, and I pounced—success!  I gathered 20 pounds of squirming, sweaty terrier into my arms and started walking toward my house about a mile away.  On the main road, I ran into a neighbour who chided, “You know, you’re supposed to have your dogs on leashes.”  I growled to myself and kept going.  Tess got heavier and heavier, but I was NOT going to chase her again, so I just held on tightly and pretended I liked snuggling with a stinky canine in the tropics.  Bates, as predicted, frisked in circles around me feet, jumping up and down with his tongue lolling out at Tess.

Then disaster struck.  Or more accurately, a 1995 Saab struck.

Only about 400 yards from home, Bates, in his circuitous frisking, went frisking out into the middle of the road—just as  the car came zooming up.  I heard the bang and a dragging noise and then as the car passed, saw him on his back with his legs slowly keeling over.

Still clutching Tess for all I was worth, I ran over to him.  The driver of the Saab stopped and ran over as well.  I jumped up and yelled, “You have a phone?”  She stared blankly.  I held up my hand to my ear and said, “PHONE?”  In a thick Indonesian accent, she replied “Uh, no credit!”  Fuckity fuck fuck.  I ran over to her car, opened the back door and threw Tess in.  “Vet!” I yelled. “You take us to vet!”  She mumbled something in a foreign language and then in English about picking up her daughter.  I despaired mentally, but yelled,  “No! Vet, NOW!”, and scooped Bates up off the ground.  I used my arm as a backboard and held his head in hand to make sure his spine stayed stable, then jumped into the car behind Tess and shouted, “DRIVE! That way!”

This scared the driver into turning the car around and heading back down the road to where I knew there was a vet’s, just out of the neighborhood and a mile down the highway.  While we tore down the road, I looked down at Bates.  About an inch of his forehead had been scalped of fur and skin, and one eye was pointing 90 degrees to the other.  But he wasn’t gushing blood anywhere, and his breathing seemed okay, so at least if he were going to die, it was going to happen after I’d handed him off to a professional.

Finally we got to the vet, at which point I jumped out of the car with Bates and ran to their front door.  At this point it was still 7:45 in the morning, and the sign on the door said OPEN 8 A.M. – 6 P.M.  Fuck fuck fuck.  I was going to have to stand out here with a dying dog and one healthy one that would probably run right down to the highway and get even more destroyed.  I banged on the door repeatedly, hoping there would be a janitor there or something, and eventually the vet tech let me in with a look of surprise on her face.

“Oh hi yeah dog car help me dog hit the dog you have to help please um hi!” was roughly what I may have said.

She let me into the main office where the vet helped me put Bates down on a steel table, at which point he started looking up ownership details and totally ignoring this bleeding dog.  I stared for a moment, then answered his question about Sam’s name and address.  Then they whisked Bates into the next room.

At this point I realized that during all the action, the car driver had brought Tess inside and driven off.  Now I was two miles away from home along a highway with no leash or clothing other than what I was wearing, which was covered in dog blood.  Given the moment, I think you will forgive me for not thinking to do something logical and obvious like ask to borrow a leash or use the phone.

Instead, I resourcefully removed my shoelaces and tied them together to make a two-foot tether for Tess, which I tied to her collar.  Then I picked up my shoes and started making my way across four lanes of heavy morning traffic to the footpath on the other side of the highway.  In my socks.

About this time the OH SHIT lurking in the back of my thoughts magnified itself by a factor of about 6 million.  Fuuuuuuuck.  I was sure Bates  was going to die, and Sam was going to blame me for killing him.  Shit shit shit.  What would I SAY to her?  Oh sorry, your dogs pissed me off, by the way one of them just got run over?  Bollocks bollocks bollocks.  Why didn’t I pull the screen door tightly? Damn hell assbarking dog tools.  I’m going to get kicked out of my house.  CRAP fucksocks HELL-BRAINS!

And then I saw a beacon of hope.  My friend Rosie was driving down the highway next to the footpath!  She could give me a ride home and save my from my sore feet and horror-show in my mind!  I jumped up and down, waving my free arm around and throwing my shoes in the air.

She went zooming past, waving gaily out the window and saying to herself, “That Anna!  She’s so dramatic!  Hilarious!”

Resolving to kill her later, I carried on in my socks.  Then another half-mile later, I ran into another friend—on a bicycle.  This was not going to help me, but at least she stopped to look with wonder at the blood-covered, shoeless freak walking a dog with shoelaces.  She continued on her merry way while I continued to disintegrate into a hysterical mess with bloody feet from pebbles and glass shards.  Finally I decided, FUCK THIS, and stopped my friend Vanessa’s door.  She answered wide-eyed and confused and wearing a bathrobe, but agreed to drive me back to my house.  Result!  So I scooped Tess up again and got into Vanessa’s car, where Tess promptly green-shat into my elbow.

Nice.

Once home I faced the deep dark danger of calling Sam, who was at work, to let her know the situation.  This went better than expected—she did not blame me and instead used the whole thing as a springboard for a drama play with her new boyfriend.  I guess if life hands you a lemon, you can always weird it out over the body of your pet.

The dog had to be put down in the end for brain damage.  Privately, I wondered if we would ever have been able to tell the difference anyway.  Ever since, I have been very suspicious about dogs.