My Dog Has Road Rage

Maggie was a rescue dog. We rescued her from Petland and they rescued us from spending $900 on something MORE PRACTICAL!!!

Don't get me wrong, she serves a great purpose. And in spite of being a caprophogous, not-quite-but-(we pray to God) almost-house-trained mutt, the boys love her. Skye loves having someone younger and smaller than him to boss around when he walks in the door from a hard day at kindergarten and Alex loves her because "When you look into Maggie's face, it's therapy." I enjoy Maggie for both those things as well.

Big Skye likes to come home to Maggie, after managing engineers all day, because she is smart and trainable. He likes to unwind with Maggie every evening at the dog park. It's their ritual.

My rituals usually are around the children and their rituals, and Maggie has found her way to fit in there. From Maggie's perspective, the ritual goes like this:

"Every morning before the sun comes up they start turning on lights and banging around in the kitchen, interrupting the dreams I have where I'm JUST ABOUT TO CATCH, actually CATCH, a squirrel and wrestle it to the ground. They let me out to pee if they feel like it. They feed me breakfast if they remember. They let me out to poop as if I have leprocy. They give me a bisquit everytime I come back in and they talk baby talk in goofy voices, leaving out prepositions, verbs, pronouns. I have no idea what they're saying. It's as if they've just learned how to talk: "good outside Maggie!". It doesn't matter what the weather is like. It's always good outside Maggie to them. It could be 20 degrees and windy as hell and still, "Good Outside, Maggie!" When I hear that baby talk weather report I know I get a bisquit. When I don't, I won't. I have no idea how to make them stop using that baby talk but if it gets me a bisquit I guess I'll put up with it."

Maggie has still not made the connection: Pee/Poop Outside -> Baby Talk -> Bisquit. She hasn't noticed this: Pee/Poop Inside -> No Baby Talk -> No bisquit -> Put in Crate. We have no idea how long the process will take. Pavlov left no instructions for dogs that have been in pet stores too long.

But long after it works, even after she's wider than she is long, we'll make sure to always reward her with compliments "Good Girl! Good Outside!" and so far it seems to be working. So far, that is, if we keep the half of the house that she preferred to use as her toilet off limits and no one takes their eyes off her after the crunch, crunch, crunch noise from under the table ceases. Soon as she saunters off to a quiet place and starts sniffing we shew her outside and beg her repeatedly to poop outside. I think she's finally understanding "C'mon, Maggie. It's freezing out here!"

Other than this behavioral problem that we blame on Petland for not teaching her to go OUTSIDE during her first three months of life, we just adore her and more and more she has become a member of the family who wants to go everywhere we go.

When it's the time of day for the "get Skye to afternoon kindergarten" ritual Maggie sees this as an opportunity to make it a "dog park" ritual. Skye's kindergarten is the same direction as the dog park. But Maggie can't understand that the playground at the school, even though there are lots of little people running all around like dogs, it is not a dog park and she can not get out of the car. More specifically, I will not be made a fool of if she gets out of the car and runs and chases all the kids with me running after her screaming "MAGGIE COME! MAGGIE COME!", changing my voice to sound more "I really mean it!", more "in command", more "there will be consequences!" if she doesn't. Besides when she finally does come, after the 20th COME MAGGIE, she'll army crawl the last three or four feet and then roll over onto her back, showing me her submissive side. You can't beat your dog when they're doing the right behavior and you can't catch them to beat them when they're doing the wrong behavior. (No, I don't really beat her!) If I can't get my dog to listen then what kind of a parent am I!? Bringing an untrained dog to school can only seal my reputation as a "bad parent".

The other morning, Maggie made it very clear that she was going to be part of the afternoon "get Skye to kindergarten" ritual. While we were putting on our coats, she kept jumping up and biting at our sleeves, trying to tell us something. She didn't just do it to me, she did it to Skye too. So we said "Okay, Maggie. You can come."

She hopped in the car and we began driving toward the school. Maggie was hyperventilating. This was too good to be true! It was a gorgeous sunny day and she was going to get to run around and play! Or so she thought. I was playing it forward in my mind how we were going to get Skye out of the car while keeping Maggie in and I began to strategize out loud. I said "Little Skye, when we get there. Don't open your sliding door because Maggie will jump out and start chasing kids all over the playground and then I'll have to chase her all over the playground and it will be a nightmare. Don't open your door until I have her nice and tight. Okay?"

"Okay. But she's on me and she won't move."

"Well, let go of her so she can come up here."

"I'm not holding her. She's sitting on my shoulder."

I cocked the rearview mirror and sure enough, she overheard us and she did some strategizing of her own! But I was saved by the bus.

If we leave the house at noon exactly we can get ahead of the special needs bus but any later and we get stuck behind it when it stops to pick up a special needs child three houses away from the school driveway.

This unexpected traffic jam foiled Maggie's plans. She couldn't contain herself anymore and jumped down from Skye's shoulder and up to the front seat to see "WHAT'S THE HOLD UP, HERE!!!" She anxiously pounded her front paws on the dashboard. There didn't appear to be any logical reason for this inconvenience. Maggie didn't see the little boy walking two inch steps down his driveway ever so slowly toward the bus. Cars were backed up, four or five, behind us. This kid was taking tiny steps and Maggie was pounding on that dashboard, testing the limits of the airbag deployment until she couldn't bare the anticipation any longer and barked at the bus "MOVE IT YOU BIG YELLOW THING!" Oh wait, she can't see colors. "MOVE IT YOU BIG THING!"

Before she continued barking, thus building up an obsession to bark at any and all future busses in her life's path, I talked her down and stroked her fur. She was inconsolable. Three car lengths away from the school playground and here she was STUCK IN TRAFFIC! She was so rattled that she'd forgotten her plan to slip out when the sliding door opened and Skye got out. She burst at the seams when she missed her chance and when we passed dogs whose owners were taking their dogs out, she went over to that side of the car and whined, practically pointing so that I knew what she meant. "You see that dog? How come I can't be with that dog right now, running outside on this gorgeous day?"

I had been in bed the day before with a virus that knocked me out. I didn't have the energy to take her around the block so I got on the bike, held the leash with my curb side hand and she got her chance to run. She ran so hard I didn't have to peddle. Only reason I did was I thought someone would call Animal Control because I was making my dog pull me. I haven't familiarized myself with the puppy labor laws so I fake peddled just to for looks.