Category Archives: Dogs

Jessie is about twelve and a half years old now, which is starting to be “old” for her breed(s). She can still take off with some speed if there’s a squirrel, but she’s more likely to just stroll back into the house than take her signature flying leap across the front porch.

In the past she was always an “outdoors-during-the-day” dog since both Ronnie and I would be at work all day. Since I’ve been at home most days for a while, she’s now gotten very used to being in the house all day instead. She’ll lie on the couch or on the bed or under my desk, but the bottom line is that she’s gotten used to being a comfortable, “inside” dog all day long.

When she does have to go outside for a few hours while I’m off running errands or doing some job hunt thing, she fights it. She never did this before – outside was just the way it was, no big deal. Now she knows that she would very much prefer to stay inside (she’s old, it’s comfy inside!), so when the call comes to go outside, she now finds a place to hide. Even with a handful of doggie bones or treats to lure her out into the back, she’s not buying it, hunkering down on the bed or in the bathroom instead. When I have to drag her off to the back door, her ears back, her tail between her legs, it can really be a hassle.

I like to think that I’m smarter than she is. (Others have their own opinions…) This morning I was short on time and didn’t want to fight with her, so my logic went like this:

• She hates going out in back.
• She loves going out in front.
• She loves taking out the trash.
• I’ll take her out front, take her over to the gate to the back yard, open the gate, she’ll run in to go by the trash cans, I’ll shut the gate (and make sure it’s closed tight), problem solved!

It worked like a charm. Except…

What I hadn’t counted on was that horribly sad, hurt, and betrayed look she gave me as I walked away to the car. She pushed on the gate a couple of times, testing it, then just hung her head and looked at me from underneath her eyebrows with those huge, brown, anime-like eyes. What a horrible human being I was! What a cruel, sadistic monster!

My plan may have worked, but I’ll be going to hell for it. And not that fun one where all of my friends are, either.

For the record, when I got home, she was blissfully asleep in the shade under her favorite tree, so zonked that I walked halfway across the yard hollering her name before she woke up. Of course, all of the dog treats that I had left out for her were gone. If she remembered that I had “done this to her”, she was not upset enough to turn down the dog treats she got when she came inside. In short, it might have been just a bit less horrible and cruel than she had let on. (But we all knew that, right?)

Jessie gave us a bit of a scare this afternoon when she went walkabout while we were off doing errands. We had ended up coming home in two cars and when I got home I heard The Long-Suffering Wife out in the back yard calling for Jessie. The puppy princess was nowhere to be found.

(A picture from 2007)

In the old days, when she was a younger pup, we had all kinds of issues with her being an escape artist. In particular there was an incident when she took off on one of the girls and was last seen heading for parts unknown. We did the whole thing where we were driving around the neighborhood until after dark looking for her and resigning ourselves to starting the calls to the local shelters and putting up “Lost Dog” posters the next morning. When we got up, we found her somehow in the back yard, wondering when breakfast was. She’s a smart dog.

For many years when we would all be at work and school for the day, we would find her out in the front yard when we got home even though we had left her locked up in the back yard. With the usual 6′ cinder block walls, we thought it was unlikely that she was jumping out. At least we thought it was unlikely until we caught her doing it. Repeatedly.

We ended up with a system where she would spend the day on a lead connected to a rope suspended about eight feet over the length of the backyard between two trees. She could run from end to end and had plenty of room to get to her food, water, and shade, but not enough slack to get tangled up into the bushes or to get to the wall to jump over.

We haven’t had to do that for a while. She’s about twelve and a half years old now and not quite as spry as she was as a pup. (Neither am I.) She can still take off like a bat out of hell when she sees a squirrel, but she also sometimes has to try a couple of times to get up onto the bed, so we figure her wall jumping days are behind her. (So are mine.)

When we couldn’t find her in the back yard today, we checked the gate and found it unlatched. I suspect that the gardeners didn’t latch it tight when they were here yesterday afternoon and I hadn’t double checked it, so Jessie just had to push on it to get it to swing open. We had gone on our errands and she had taken the opportunity to go looking for adventure.

I figured that I would start driving around to look for her, checking the few local parks that we walk her to and so on. I didn’t think she would have gone too far. But just as I opened the front door, she trotted across the yard and into the house, looking for snacks.

A few minutes later a neighbor and her daughter checked in to make sure that she was ours and had gotten home safely. They said that they had seen her just going around the block a couple of times but she always came back to our yard to rest (and guard the house from the front porch) before going off on another trip. No worries, all’s well that ends well.

Tomorrow I’ll have to remember to adjust and oil the gate so it closes on its own. At least we know that Jessie’s still a smart dog when it comes to getting home. Home is where all of the food is and she’s really fond of her food!