Finally Home-Lessons on Life from a Free-Spirited Dog (10 page)

Things went on like that for a while
until Buddy pushed her to the point of intense frustration.
He was playing and playing and enticing her to play a little more.
She was growing kind of tired of this and just wanted to have some downtime.

Buddy obstinately pressed on as he always did.
This time, however, Brandi decided to teach him a valuable lesson.
She grabbed onto his ear and held on tight. She held on with so much force that Buddy
screamed
in pain, but Brandi refused to relent.
I yelled at her and yelled some more, but
she wouldn’t let
go.

Finally, though I am not proud of this, I threw my cell phone down in an attempt to scare her with the loud noise
,
and it accidentally
bounced and
hit her.
It did not hit her
hard, but
it was
enough t
o make me feel guilty and
get her off
of
Buddy.
After that,
I put her in her crate and made some
loud
noise to kind of scare her
,
and she never bit him like that again.
Luckily, she
had been
gentle enough not to
draw any blood. She did succeed
in teaching Buddy a lesson
,
too.
She
had become the
new Alpha dog.

We were well on our way to having one very
obedient
dog and
another
that
still
would not calm down.
Despite their initial meeting, these two dogs quickly grew fond of each other.
Brandi looked up to Buddy
,
and Buddy secretly loved his new playmate.
They would play all day and look out for each other. It was beautiful to watch.
After the one episode of the ear biting, they never hurt each other.
Not once. They would play, nip, growl
,
and enjoy every minute of it. Brandi would entice Buddy to play by stealing his toys
,
and Buddy would
always
take the bait.

When she
wanted to, Brandi
intimidate
d
Buddy by standing over him
and
staring intensely as he gnawed on his Nyla-Bones.
Eventually
,
Buddy would give it up and Brandi would take over.
The same
behavior
took place when they were at the
water bowl.
Buddy could be extremely parched with thirst
, but when
Brandi
came
over he would
allow
her
to
have first dibs, patiently waiting until she finished.
He was genuinely a sweetheart.
This was all done on his own.
I wish we could take the credit, but we never once taught him manners.
That was one thing he most likely picked up from his biological mom.

Not everything was perfect.
We did encounter some minor issues with Brandi.
Since we
were learning as we went along
, it took us about
a
year
before
Brandi was fully housebroken. We did not have any previous
experience housebreaking a dog, so we were
practicing
all of the wrong
techniques
.
Allowing
her
to roam freely in
the fully carpeted living room after she drank a bowl of water may not have been on
our
list of
the
smartest thing
s we
ever d
id
.

Soon
after
, we learned what to do and what not to do.
For instance,
we did not
feed
her
before bedtime
, and we re
move
d
her water bowl a couple of hours before going to sleep
. We also mad
e sure she
urinated
a few times prior
to bedtime
.
In addition, it was important to d
ivide the crate into two sections
,
giving her only enough room to turn around, increasing her living space as she g
ot
older.

This last piece of advice was
a
funny one because we did not have a real divider, so we used a piece of wood that
sectioned
off
the entire width of the crate, but not so much the height
. Brandi realized
she
c
ould jump into the second section to take care of business and then back
into the clean side for the remainder
of the night.

That was another
lesson we learned and promptly resolved
.
We bought a real crate divider that actually extended both the full width and height of the crate.
We were slowly learning.

Other than
those small issues,
she was very well behaved.
Shy amongst strangers, she would literally climb to the back of her crate upon meeting new people, but once comfortable,
she
would come out and
be happy to
socialize.

T
ypically
, she
never chewed anything other than her toys, which
she instinctively
knew were hers to play with.
We thought she was perfe
ct, and for the most part she was. That is,
if you d
id
n’t
consider
coming home to a half-eaten couch a bad thing.

It happened o
ne day after a parti
cularly rough afternoon at the office.
I came home
at the same time that I
normally d
id. Once
I walked in
side of
the
house
, I immediately
noticed
what had transpired
during the day.
I knew it was not Buddy because he had never been destructive.
Crazy, yes.
Destructive, no.
Brandi had the word “guilty” written all over her
puppy-dog
face.
My dilemma was
split between
what to deal with first, correcting Brandi
or how to
g
rudgingly tell Michael.

Since Brandi was in front of me at that precise moment, I decided to d
eal with Brandi first. Correcting
her was a tough one.

Most of the training manuals had said
that you cannot successfully reprimand a dog unless they
we
re caught in the act.
Otherwise, they
genuinely
ha
d
no idea why you
we
re correcting them. They live
d
in the moment
,
and something
they’d done
five minutes
before
wa
s long forgotten
and obsolete
in a dog’s mind.
Brandi
got off on a technicality for that one.

I tried to at least point and say no but she looked at me
with a sweet expression on her face
and
just
blinked.
I knew my correction technique
was not working,
as I came home the next day and I had matching couches.
I finally smartened up and purchased Bitter Apple spray, which
wa
s to deter dogs from chewing or licking any objects that they should not
chew,
including furniture
. T
hankfully
, it
never happened again.

Surprisingly,
when
I told Michael the news, he handled
it
quite
well.
It was an old couch
,
and we were about ready for a new one.
Thank
goodness for small favors. I was
glad we hadn’t purchased a new couch
prior
to adopting
Brandi.

Raising two dogs was not without its rewards and we were doing the necessary things to make their life a pleasant one.
Within a few weeks
of her adoption
, it was time to get Brandi spayed.
We decided
that
I would stay at my mom’s with Brandi during her recovery period because Buddy was just too hyper
. We
did not want him accidentally
ripping
any of her stitches by playing too rough.
She was perfect at my mom’s and did not have any accidents.
She did not even pay any attention to the cockatiels.

While we were stay
ing there, I had made a decision
to give
the
cockatiels
away to a better home
(though I feel badly now for doing so).
I felt they were not getting enough attention and
that
they would do better elsewhere, ironically similar to Buddy’s story
with his previous owners
.
During that same time, we thought Buddy and Brandi were missing each other, so Michael brought Buddy over to
visit
.

Buddy
was happy to see Brandi
,
but
after their initial greeting, he
ran directly downstairs to where the cockatiels
had been
.
When he did
not see them, he started whimpering and carrying on. He peeked
behind the door where they
once
were, circl
ed
outside the room, smell
ed
the floor, and
then returned
back to
the location
where the original bird cage was.

He then looked at me with the saddest face imaginable, giving me the worst type of guilt trip
before moping
away.
It was
at that moment
that I realized two important things
. First of all,
I felt terrible for giving away the birds
,
and Buddy
had
magnified that feeling of guilt for me by searching for the
m
.
Secondly,
Buddy (and probably most dogs) d
id
not forget. It had been months since he had seen those birds, and yet he remembered
them and
their exact location.

After the two
-
week recovery period for Brandi, we were finally able to bring her home again.
Thankfully, she was back to her old self and seemed happy to be where she was most comfortable.

She was turning out to be a very easy dog compared to Buddy.
If I were to write a book about Brandi, it would be very short and sweet.
She just listen
ed
to the commands as they
we
re given without giving us any heartache.
Buddy
, on the other hand,
actually th
ought
about the commands, determin
ing
whether or not
they fit with his current mood and then decid
ing
if he is going to follow through or not.
I swear
that
you could actually see him deliberating the outcome of his actions.

He knew what would get him in trouble and then
took the time to contemplate whether
it was worth it or not.
A prime example of this took place after one of our evening walks around the block.
We always walked the
dogs
with a leash, but whenever we got close to our front door, we took them off of the leash
to let them run home. We never had issues with this routine. Well,
one night we
followed the same routine and
were not really paying much attention, but there waiting for us on our doorstep was our neighbor’s skittish cat.
We knew
that Bud would
n
ever harm a cat
,
but a chase is a chase and he was certainly up for
the challenge.