A Can Full of Pennies and Couch Bondage

I have two dogs. Rather, I have two four-footed aliens. I say that because I’m absolutely convinced something, somewhere sent these critters to me from another planet to bring me amazing amounts of joy in between the times they make me insane. Mostly so I won’t sell them to gypsies.

Riley

Riley is my first rescue. She’s mostly pit bull, probably part something else, and she’s truly…special. Like, in the kind of way where you can’t really make fun of her or it would be un-PC.

She’s neurotic, and I never really knew that dogs could be that way. In truth, it’s probably because she was mistreated at some point early in her life (I got her when she was just over a year old). But looking at it objectively, the aversion to plastic bags, brooms, the vacuum cleaner, the closet, the plunger, electric toothbruses, my toddler’s talking puppy dog and the pepper mill just seems a little…well…hysterical.

Riley is also maniacal about thunderstorms. Thunder causes her to run around in circles, up and over furniture, barking loudly and aimlessly at The Big Evil Noise That Will Clearly Come And Eat My Face And From Which I Must Protect Myself. If you let her outside, she does a couple of laps barking at the sky before she comes inside with that “What the f*ck is with the rain?!?” look on her face.

Maggie

Maggie is the second rescue. She’s 85 pounds of half Rottweiler, half pit bull, and all doofus. They say puppies calm down and stop being hyper when they’re around two. “They” lie. Maggie is going on four now, and the house is her jungle gym. Nevermind if you’re actually sitting on the couch when she vaults over it chasing one of the cats.

She’s utterly friendly, and utterly clueless. I mean, if dogs had IQs, I don’t think Maggie would have made it past finger painting in school. She’s sweet. She’s happy. Perpetually happy. And an absolute train wreck.

Dog Proofing

Ask any dog person and they’ll tell you that at times, we go to rather extraordinary measures to accommodate our animals. Mine are spoiled in all the typical fashions: they get to sit on the couch, they sleep in the bed with me, they occasionally get the part of the steak I can’t eat and they most certainly get all the attention, toys, and dog treats they can handle.

But when you have “special needs” dogs like I do, accommodating sometimes goes beyond just spoiling. As in engineering ridiculous solutions in order to prevent your house from being single handedly torn apart by two mouths and eight paws.

Especially now that I travel a great deal, I’m out of the house for days at at time. I have wonderful pet sitters that come in and check in on the girls (and the cats, who aren’t delinquent enough to warrant a blog post apparently), but even then I need to be sure that in between visits, my possessions go (almost) unscathed.

Dog proofing is really more a matter of realistic expectations than perfection. You know that no matter how hard you try, you’re going to forget to put away one of the kid’s books or a magnet or, you know, the phone. Something’s going to get eaten. So it’s more a matter of cutting your losses, deciding what casualties are acceptable, and putting your energy into protecting the important things. Like the furniture.

MacGyver Would Be Proud

Not every solution has been a pretty one. There was the failed baby gate experiment, which consisted of attempting to keep the dogs out of the bedroom and other areas of the house by making use of the now-obsolete baby gates. That would be fine if my dogs weren’t accomplished mountain climbers, which apparently they are. They just scaled them. Same with the upgraded solid-barrier system that we actually built and installed between the kitchen and the living room. Solid plywood. They ate it. Then climbed over it again.

It didn’t take me long to realize that keeping them OUT of certain rooms was going to be futile. So instead, I endeavored to make the rooms they were going to be in dog-proof. Ish.

The girls like the living room and the bedroom. They don’t much care about the other rooms of the house. The bedroom and living room are where all the smooshy furniture is, the places where they settle in for hours on end and make groaning noises while they dream doggie dreams and prove once and for all what suckers we humans are. (In fact, I think Riley’s snores are actually saying “dumbassssssss”)

So when I leave, there’s a bit of a production to protect the couches and the bed.

I take my nice, fluffy duvet with my awesome duvet cover, ball it up, and stuff it in the closet like all those in Metropolitan Home certainly do. I take the accent pillows and put them in there too because hey, they’d miss the duvet. So my closet, when I travel, is extraordinarily well appointed.

In the bathroom, I fold up the bath mat and put it in the tub with the bath toys, hoping that Maggie won’t find them.

I just shut the door to Abby’s room. You don’t put a big pile of cocaine in front of an addict. Seriously.

In the kitchen, everything on the counter that might smell remotely like food has to go UP somewhere. (I found the pepper mill in the living room last time. I mean, really). I put a child lock on the lazy susan that has pantry items in it. And I put a tin can full of pennies on top of the trash can. You’ve never seen a blockheaded dog move faster than when a can full of pennies hits a tile floor after an errant sniff at the trash can lid. Trust me.

As for the living room, that’s where the real engineering work happens. For Abby’s playspace, I put everything that CAN be put away in bins with lids that my doofus dogs can’t open. I stuff the couch throw pillows in the front hall closet, and make sure that things like remote controls and telephones are up and out of reach. I leave the television on just in case it makes the dogs thing there’s an authority in the house, though I think by now Law and Order has lost its ominous feeling.

And now, after many failed attempts to save my old couch from the Jaws of the Canines, I’m determined to ensure that my new sofas last more than a month. So I have them wrapped up like Christmas presents, covered in blankets and sheets, and a long length of rope (yes, rope) tied around the base so that the anchored blankets prevent the cushions from being pulled onto the floor and being unstuffed like a turkey at Thanksgiving. It’s kind of like a reverse drawstring sack thrown over my otherwise beautiful sofa and loveseat. My poor furniture is bound and gagged,  just to increase its chances of surviving yet another business trip.

By the time I’m done, my house looks like some kind of bizarre obstacle course. Or a tenement. Or both. Devoid of decorations but chock full of booby traps, failsafes, and the rigors of couch bondage.

But hey, at least the dogs are comfy.