My dog bit my wife. On our wedding anniversary. Seriously.
Of course he’s my dog when he bites my wife or barfs on the living room rug. All other times, he’s OUR dog.
And we are HIS people, but only on dog world terms, whose inhabitants view life thusly: 1. food; 2. people; 3. everything else. And that is how he got in trouble.
Wednesday morning, Dec. 3, the third anniversary of the main people (the people who feed him) in Gulliver's life, he and I went down to the street to get the paper. I came back up with the paper, and Gully generally is right behind. Not on this morning. I stood by the front door and called him, then walked back down toward the street and called him again.
He darted past me with something in his jaws. I followed him back to the door. He was standing at the door but as I approached he moved away several feet and turned to face me. In his jaws was clamped a thick wedge of not very tasty looking pizza, probably of the frozen, bake it at home variety. Didn't matter to him. He had a prize.
I called him to come to me. Damned if he didn't, a step at a time, until I could reach out and get my fingers on the crusty rim of the pizza. He tore away and retreated. "Okay, fine, I don’t care if you do eat it," I said. That was true. In the back of my mind I viewed myself later in the day scooping up pizza barf off the floor, but that was okay, compared to actually wrestling him for it.
He was also telling me something in dog language. He hadn't eaten the pizza yet. Why didn't he eat it where he found it on the street? Because he wasn't hungry. He had just had breakfast, before we went out for the paper. He intended to bury the pizza for later. In fact he intended to bury it in the house. When I opened the door, he ran right in. I advised Karen, my lovely bride of three years that very morning, what was happening, then walked back down to the street to find where the pizza came from.
Karen sized up the situation for about one second and decided that Gully was not going to eat the pizza in her house, or bury it, or retain possession, or do anything else with it but give it to her. This of course was the last thing on his mind. Just a couple of days previously, we had watched a show on television featuring a brave man called the "Dog Whisperer," who was able to correct bad dog behavior by a routine of "exercise, discipline and affection." During the show he demonstrated several times. Unfortunately, they didn't include a male Sheltie with pizza clamped in his jaws.
I found no pizza evidence on the street, and when I returned, Karen described what happened. Gully is gentle but skittish when he doesn't approve of what people are doing to him, such as grooming or brushing or scratching him around the tail. He regularly snaps at me when I am trying to brush foxtails out of his coat. So when Karen, dog whisperer style, got him on his side and commenced to relieve him of his pizza, he took umbrage and actually snarled, she reported, as he struck at her hand.
It was over when I got there. Karen showed me a bloody scratch on the back of her wrist and another tooth mark farther up. The pizza was in the sink. Gully was brooding in the hallway. He now knew, as Karen had said to me, dog whisperer style, that he was in her pack, and not the other way around. He laid low for several hours, then was his old self, but I don't think he'll be bringing prizes to the front door any time soon, and never, I hope, on anniversary mornings.
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