Earlier my dog snuck downstairs to have a pee. One the carpet. It wasn’t as if he had to go. He’d been out before that doing his business and hadn’t struck out towards the water in hours. No, this was malicious intent. This was calculated vengeance for a bath or some other perceived slight. This was a classic case of an old dog up to his new(er) tricks.
I considered all the possible repercussions for such behavior and found myself caught in the old trap: What do you do to a dog who so blatantly wants to screw with your lifestyle as, apparently, a vengeful stand vs. perceived mistreatment? The answer came quickly: Murder. No, not that one. Nothing? Yeah, that one. I did nothing. I cleaned up the spot, thought about kicking him, stared him down a good one, and watched him scamper off to likely piss somewhere else.
See, the dog, Chopper, is an old Yorkie who has the run of the place when I am gone. I don’t crate him, because I have a cat who isn’t crated who will torture him. I know this because he was once a crate dog and the previous cat did indeed torture him, wagging her butt at him in sheer mockery of his situation. Then she would scamper out the doggie door–his door–to prove how much of a bad ass she really was.
So I don’t crate him. Notice he has a doggie door, so the pee is a choice. Bad choice–for me at least. No, instead I rant-blog about a situation that remains far out of my understandable control. At least Buddhism teaches me that this too is impermanent.
Some Thoughts:
- For reasons I do not pretend to understand my post from yesterday apparently did not publish. There it was sitting on my screen with the big old publish button, though I am quite certain I’d hit that button before. Maybe the blog didn’t want to go out. Shy blog.