HOT DIGGITY DOG REVISITED (FROM FEBRUARY 3) – WHOSE HOUSE IS THIS ANYWAY?

(Hawkeye's note: My dad wrote this. He is a columnist for the Key West Citizen)

Well, we finally did it! We got a dog! Not just a dog like old Blue who’s been around a while and just lies there … a puppy! When you get a puppy, and I speak from great experience here, your whole life changes. When you see them comfortably nestled at the breast of their mother as a little ball of fur, you think, “Awwww, he’s so cute!” In reality, I’m not sure whether they are born Zen masters or the devil incarnate.

In any event, your life and everything that went before bringing the puppy home changes much the same way it does when you bring home your first child from the hospital. The major difference is, of course, that a puppy has been endowed by its creator, who must surely have a great sense of humor, with teeth as sharp as needles, a manic energy level on the order of a burlap bag full of alley cats and a curiosity to match.

One day you find yourself coming home from a day at the office, pouring a nice glass of red wine and sitting down comfortably to enjoy the evening air and a calm discussion of the day’s events. The next day, this changes to coming home to an immediate need of putting aside your own comfort and taking the little monster for a walk, feeding him and then making sure he is played with sufficiently so he doesn’t chew the leg off your dining room table. The rest of your evening is spent with one nervous eye on preparations for your own dinner and the other making sure your new tennis shoes don’t get chewed into a pair of sandals, or watching that the rug from the foyer isn’t dragged into some surreptitious corner of the house and ripped to shreds, or if he is leaving you a love present on the living room rug.

You can always tell someone who has a new puppy from the healing bite and cut marks from the elbows down. In the first several months of owning a puppy, never wear anything you don’t want to eventually use as a rag for washing the car because it will surely go that way with the slightest bit of inattention to the newfound joy of your puppy who will leap and snag a tooth on pants, shirts and dresses. If you have grandchildren (as I do), they should be seen in alternate, undisclosed places other than your house, otherwise they will be emotionally scarred for life as they are just the right height and temperament for a puppy to terrorize.

Of course the object in this masochistic exercise is to get a well-mannered companion who ultimately delivers on the intended promise of the relationship. While I am sure at some point (well, maybe cautiously optimistic) this will eventually happen, at the present time there is very little that the little beast will do without the bribe of a cookie. “Sit, down, stay, come,” and the like are interpreted by Hawkeye, the name of the dog in question, as “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I have a cookie for you.” Somehow, though, the message gets through and he is starting to do some of these things, even though he thinks his name is “No!”.

If there was ever a quid pro quo relationship, this has to be it. We think we are teaching the dog to do things when actually, he is reminding us of the greatest lessons in life. You don’t teach anybody anything good or lasting by yelling at them or beating them into submission. You get out of your endeavors what you put into them. Patience is a lot more difficult than it’s cracked up to be and is a lesson in itself. You learn that puppies and young children are remarkably similar in that they want to know what the boundaries are. When they are not established, the result is an unhappy youth and an even unhappier parent. You learn, in no uncertain terms, that unconditional love is one of the greatest miracles of life. Dogs, more than any other animal on the planet (that I know of), do not hold grudges, seek revenge or do things out of spite. They forgive instantaneously and always give you another chance.

Finally, you can always pretty much tell a dog’s personality from the moment you first meet them. Their lack of guile and abundant desire to please, usually causes the extreme end of their body to go frantically back and forth. When you see this and they approach you, you know he is glad to see you and, if you’re smart, you will return the affection. Like Mark Twain said, “Men and dogs are different. When you take a dog in and feed him, he will not bite you.”

In any event, the lessons being learned by both animal and parents are not what they seem. All you have to do is remind yourself of who is picking up whose poop.