Troubledoodles

Do these dogs think they own the joint or what?

No explanation needed

Happy Thanksgiving from Jack-Jack and Trout

It was a modest day of destruction and annoyance today -- some plastic cups, empty pepperoni packages, popcorn-ball package, Wendy's bag, etc.

The prize of the day, though was a pair of Bennett's underwear -- not eaten, just dragged outside for no reason. As previously stated, Trout isn't into underwear and Jack-Jack only swallows girl's underwear. Bennett's undies therefore were unceremoniously discarded.

They did all of this while Dawn and I were putting up Christmas lights today. Happy Thanksgiving, y'all.

Dawn's List: a quick memoir of doggie destruction

Dawn reminded me about a whole bunch more stuff that Jack-Jack and Trout have demolished. Here is her list:

• Every pair of sunglasses or swim goggles ever left in or out of their reach.
• Ditto baby bottles and sippy cups
• two flotation vests
• 6 pairs of prescription glasses (4 within three particularly nasty weeks two Christmases ago, but Jack was a baby then)  All of us wear lenses with teeth marks in them.
• Ditto all baseball caps.
• comforter and matching shams, bullion trim chewed off so sides seams all opened (11 months old)
• seat cushion from 1 of pair of matching leather chairs
• any candle left below 6 feet
• soda cans whenever they can reach them
• 4 bicycle helmets
• 4 hairbrushes
• all tennis balls, gone in 60 seconds.  ditto any stuffed or rope dog toys.  It took longer to completely eliminate the toys we found made from 3/4 inch thick recycled tractor tires but they eventually decimated these too.  
• 2 bars of soap, that must have been yummy but they ate them 'til they were gone, only wrappers left  ???
• Gracie's entire bag of Halloween candy, upstairs in her room past the gate on the stairs, which has been modified 10 different way to prevent this but STILL can't deter Trout.
• shampoo x 3
• antlers only from an outdoor decorative deer (2 weeks old) maybe that's another gender thing.
• 2 large styrofoam pumpkins
• Bennett's entire bag of DS games (some survived)
• bag of night-light bulbs
• 5 library books
• 4 Webkins
• 15 pound bag of insecticide (at least it appears they just tasted that, they just rolled around in the rest)
• ditto the bag of grass seed
• package of 8 glue sticks
• Grace's homework x 3, really.
• 2 purses and one backpack dragged out the dog door.  Sunglasses toast, credit cards and cash strewn through the mud.  YES these belonged to guests in our home.  ; /
• All of our slippers and one of each pair of flip flops ever purchased.  I figure these and the Barbies, stuffed animals etc. really go without saying and fit into the 'stuff dogs usually devour' category. 
• Most of the time I just avoid looking in the back yard.  Perhaps if we don't know, it might never be missed.

Can we get through Thanksgiving?

OK, this might be more work than it's worth. I woke up this morning and looked out my bedroom window at a beautiful fall morning. Then I looked down at the ground. It don't even know what that stuff was, but I'm ticked because it was in perfectly good Tupperware. Note the past tense.

Also note that our yard is beginning to resemble a mud pit where once it was gorgeous emerald-green grass. That is a post unto itself -- but I might need therapy before I can write that one.

Tough photo subjects, those labradoodles

You have no idea how hard it is to get a good photo of Jack and Trout together. Because one is so light, the other so dark, it's almost impossible. Here, on the left, is a rare example of a shot that almost pulls it off.

Below is a more typical shot in which Jack-Jack all but disappears.

Jack-Jack and Trout: Labradoodles, litter bugs

Both Jack-Jack and Trout are grocery swipers and trash junkies. If we don't remember to put them in the bedroom when we are bringing in groceries, they inevitably will grab a raw steak or a box of cookies when no one is looking and bolt out the dog door with it, where they have a doggy picnic out in the woods.

Sometimes we absentmindedly leave food stuffs on the counter or don't close the cupboard doors properly and they will snag canned goods or drink pouches or anything else they can manage to hold in their mouths and drag through the dog door.

Once, they got a bag of flour. I came downstairs and saw that the kitchen was covered in white dust, and there was a white dusty trail leading down the hall to the dog door. The flour trail went out onto the deck, down the stairs and out into the woods in the back yard. There was some shredded paper left. The dogs were just hanging out in the back yard, happy, with white flour all over their faces and paws.

I wish I had pictures of that one. These are more mundane but are very representative of what you will see almost anytime you go out into our back yard. We're always picking up trash and other debris out there.

The first photo (above) is from Saturday -- it shows a foil wrapper from a cereal box, which had been in the trash can in the kitchen, and a box of instant oatmeal packs, which they got out of the pantry. In the left hand corner of the picture above you can see uncooked oatmeal powdering the ground, along with a torn packet, and the torn box, at right. I never did find the rest of the packets -- I guess they ate them whole.

The last three photos here on the right are from Sunday, discovered during my leaf-raking. The Nilla wafer box was stolen off the kitchen counter, we think -- there were a lot of cookies in there.

Then there was this decaf coffee pack (plastic wrapper only, no sign of the coffee pouch itself) and a soda-bottle cap, slightly chewed.

Finally, there was an Atkins-shake box, which was pulled from the kitchen trash (and yes, it is covered -- they can open it).

At least I got to drink the shake, but I'm still fat. And the dogs are getting fat, too, eating all that people food and garbage in addition to their two squares of vet-approved "brown rocks" a day.

Trout: Eaten any good books lately?

As noted, Trout is a notorious book shredder. Here are a couple examples of books that were "rescued." Many others looked like they had been through a blender. I was especially miffed about the World Series book because I got it right after my beloved Cardinals took the 2006 World Series. I left this out on the night stand one day and Trout got it as soon as no one was looking. The other book pictured here is about the Cardinals too, so I have concluded, also taking into account the three Bibles that Trout has destroyed, that our cute yellow labradoodle is in fact a Satanic Cubs' fan.

Jack-Jack and Trout: appetite for destruction

The main reason I started this blog is so that I can learn to laugh about all the dumb and expensive things my dogs do, instead of just getting ticked off.

When I tell stories about Jack-Jack and Trout to friends and colleagues, they laugh, sometimes in disbelief. But I decided it might be even funnier if they had photographic evidence of some of the mayhem.

So I resolved to takes snap shots of some of the dog crimes and post them. Hopefully I won't have too many good shots, because every time I do it means something I bought just got ripped up, swallowed or carted off into the woods.

Just in general, you should know that Jack-Jack and Trout have very different tastes when it comes to destruction.

Jack-Jack is a pillow wrecker, glass eater and undie swallower.

Trout is a book shredder and an electronics chomper.

And they are both notorious grocery thieves and trash fiends.

Trout has destroyed three or four DIrectTV remote controls. He just pulverizes them with his teeth and leaves the debris in a neat little pile. He also has crunched to bits a couple cells phones, and when we bought a Playstation 3, Trout sneaked in somehow and chewed up the wireless game controller before we even even got to use it once. Anything that is plastic and has batteries in it is irresistable to Trout. We are ridiculously vigilant about putting things up high, but once in a while one of us will forget and leave the remote (or whatever) sitting out. And he finds it every time.

Trout also has destroyed too many books to count -- including three study Bibles. He gnaws on the bindery edges to start and, if given enough time, rips the pages out with his teeth. Sometimes we find books merely ruined, but other times he really goes to town and the books look like a bunch of chicken feathers. He has even figured out how to pull books off of a book shelf, fairly high up. Now all of our books are either on top shelves, in bookcases with glass doors, or inside cabinets with doors. You ask me what is on my nightstand reading pile? The answer is nothing. If I want to read I have to bring out one book or magazine at a time and then make sure to put it away securely before I go to sleep. Otherwise I may wake up with confetti all around me.

But really, Trout is an amateur  compared to the bizarre destruction stylings of Jack-Jack. Numerous times we have come home to find pillow fluff strewn all over the bedroom or family room. We've caught Jack in the act. Trout never goes for the pillows. Jack gets them and shakes them violently until fluff is exploding everywhere. Oftentimes we catch Jack trying to make a lover of a pillow or a couch cushion, or maybe a carnival-sized stuffed animal, even as he tears at it with his teeth. Scary, huh?

More strangely, Jack-Jack swallows things -- dangerous things. As a puppy he ate glass Christmas ornaments right off the tree. Crunched them up, ate them like kibble. On two occasions Jack ate pin cushions with pins in them. All that was left was some saw dust and a few stray pins. And he eats girl's underwear -- never boys' -- out of the dirty-laundry basket or even off of piles of clean, folded clothes.

We think Jack may have the stomach of a goat, because seems to eat these things with impunity. Oh, once in a while he will politely regurgitate at pair of undies on the living room rug, but usually I just find the evidence out in the back yard when it's time to scoop the poop. Aside from pins and underwear, maybe the strangest thing I ever found in a Jack-Jack poop was a Hot Wheels metal car.

Of course, there was the one time when Jack-Jack almost did himself in. It was about a year ago, when we first moved to Huntersville, N.C., from McKinney, Texas. We put the dogs in the kennel while we were staying in a corporate apartment for a couple weeks, and one day the boarders called saying Jack-Jack seemed really sick -- so sick, in fact, that they were rushing him to the vet. An X-ray revealed a foreign object in his small intestine. So they performed emergency surgery and removed -- a McDonald's Happy Meal toy teddy bear. We recalled getting that Happey Meal right before we left Texas. Jack nearly died and wasn't out of the woods for a few days after the surgery.

I asked the vet if dogs learned their lessons from such incidents. He said, no, then recounted numerous tales about dogs on which he had performed two or even three "emergency obstruction" surgeries. My friend Riis had a black lab who twice ate golf balls and needed surgery. Lovable and dumb as dirt. That's what they are.

The tab for Jack's teddy-bear fiasco was $1,200.

We try to keep him from eating other foreign objects, but it's hard. So far, so good, though: He has steered clear of teddy bears, and nothing else seems to give his goat stomach any trouble at all.

Trout, the early bloomer

After a few months with Jack-Jack, we just about had him house trained. So of course it was time to get another puppy so that we could go back to cleaning up pee off the floor.

Dawn went back out to the same breeder and picked out this little yellow-and-white fuzzy guy (seen above with our youngest daughter, Gracie, in Dec. 2006). He was already a three months old -- a lot older than Jack when we bought him -- but he was still plenty young enough to pee and poop on the floor all the time.

When we took Trout to the vet for shots -- the same vet who said Jack-Jack would probably die after a couple months -- she looked Trout over suspiciously. She asked a lot of questions about the breeder and seemed displeased. Finally she told us that there was no way Trout was only three months old -- that she could tell from his teeth that he was already at least six moths old. She said breeders often lie about a dog's age just to unload them, because everyone prefers the younger ones. She said we had been scammed and she wondered what else might be wrong with the dog.

I expressed disbelief in the idea that Trout was already six months old because he was so small. "Yes," the vet said dryly, "it appears he is going to be somewhat petite."

Well, that vet was wrong again. Trout was definitely only three months old. We know because he grew like crazy for nine or 10 months after we bought him, and he now weighs more than 80 pounds and there ain't nothing petite about him. I don't know what the deal was with his teeth, but it wouldn't surprise me if he got adult teeth months earlier than other dogs, because Trout's teeth have already destroyed a lifetime's worth of expensive goods and personal property. Most dogs would need 10 years to wreck all the stuff Trout has demolished with those early-bloomer teeth.

Jack-Jack, the no-tail wonder dog

This was Jack-Jack when he was a puppy.

Dawn picked him out at the breeder's farm in East Texas. It was my suggestion that we get a labradoodle but I didn't go on the trip with her. She found the breeder online and drove out there by herself.

Jack wasn't the runt, per se, but he was -- how to say it? -- the freak of the litter.

He was born without a tail. He seemed OK otherwise and Dawn thought that was cute, so she got him.

Back home, the vet said Jack not only was missing his tail, but part of his spine, too, and she suspected that Jack might have improperly developed organs as well. She said he was a special needs dog and might only live a couple months.

Dawn cried. To this day, the sheer idiocy and wrongness of that diagnosis have shaken my faith in veterinary medicine. Jack just grew and kept growing, and near as we can tell, the only special need he has is for a miracle cure to stop him from eating large foreign objects that are not dog food. Oh, that and the fact that, due to his lack of a tail and slightly-shorter-than-ideal spine, his No. 2 torpedo hole kinda sits on a shelf and sometimes doesn't fully expel its waste cargo, if you get my drift.

If any of you would ever like to come over and help us chase down a 75-pound labradoodle with a baby wipe, you are most welcome here.