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Dec 26th, 2011 @ 12:10 pm
How Not to Train a Dog
Booger’s creepy-hot vet has informed me that the best way to make sure a puppy is well-behaved is to be consistent and to only praise good behavior. Unlike how I was raised, I am not supposed to guilt the puppy into being good by making passive-aggressive comments, or to scream and blame her for ruining my life when she does something unconscionable, like tell me she’s bisexual or dyeing her hair blue. Bad behavior is to be ignored, but good behavior should be exuberantly praised, creepy-hot vet said. This seemed simple enough. Low-maintenance, even.
So far this has been going fine, more or less. I praise her when she lays down on her bed, which startles her, so she’s developed a bit of a complex about her sleeping quarters. And, in general, if I so much as look at her, she thinks she’s going to get attention, so now she’s so tightly wound that if I so much as clear my throat it leads to an interpretive dance that concludes with the dog whining and jumping around my shins as though she’s being tased by an overzealous police force.
Being the product of negligent parenting, I am wholly self-involved, and don’t want to pay attention to her as much as she’d like for me to, therefore I am forced to act oblivious when she attempts to get my gaze to divert away from, say, Tumblr. But I am to ignore bad behavior, and only praise good. I remember this. I keep it in mind pretty much constantly. It’s basically clearance to rationalize staring at my computer for hours on end. Don’t look at the dog, no matter what she does. It’s like she’s a Gorgon.
As you’d imagine, her attempts at making me look down involve a lot of ignore-worthy behavior. She will peel off ribbons of my skin with her nails, I ignore it. She will leap around my ankles, slamming her toys into my feet until they bruise and she develops puppy whiplash, I ignore it. She will eat her own poop in a flagrant display that is a perverse canine equivalent of a hunger strike, I ignore it and reason with myself that my puppy is better than other puppies because it has a self-cleaning option.
Dog training, as you can tell, is easy if you have the same vet as me. Except I think she has just figured out a way to exploit a glitch in the system.
Booger is four pounds. That’s a small animal, even to me, a ridiculously small human. Four pounds, with everything being to scale, means that her eyes are the size of peas, her paws are the size of pennies, and her brain is the size of a grain of rice. Her larynx, and all that’s associated with it, is also teeny-tiny. When the dog growls, it sounds like a poor recording of Al Jourgensen from early-era Ministry mixed with the sound of a malfunctioning blender submerged in a pool of butterscotch. It is pathetic and non-threatening. If anyone breaks into my apartment, at least I know it will take the burglar a little longer to steal my shit, ‘cause it’ll require at least a minute for them to bend down and pet my desperate, stupid-sounding dog.
You remember cassettes? How they’d short-out and play really fast and then vomit out yards of black, stringy guts? The sound of the tape just before it is destroyed is eerily similar to Booger’s growl. And the look on her face when she does it is of utter and complete frustration. From a Chihuahua, this expression is like constipation and bewilderment, along with the look a drunk person gives you when they can’t find their car. It’s hilarious.
This morning, when she couldn’t get my attention, this is what came to pass.
grrrrrroooowwwwllll….
I instinctively looked down, then remembered that I’m supposed to ignore the undesirable action in order to prevent it from becoming a habit.
Sensibly, Booger figured that my fleeting glance meant that that she would get picked up. The growling, in her mind, was a rousing success in the making.
GRRRROOOOOWWWLLLLL
My reaction was to try to keep a straight face. Try. Try. Try.
GRRROWLGROOOWLGRRRRROOOWwwwl
…and then, the crescendo….
growlygrowlygrowlwhiiiiineeee…And it was then that she simultaneously dragged her ass across the floor while letting loose the torrent of ridiculous noise, thus forcing me to explode into laughter so hard, it strained every muscle from my nipples to my cunt.
And now she won’t stop. Both the movement and the sound. And I can’t stop laughing.
I broke my dog. Or, rather, she broke me. I give her a year before she’s reduced Cesar Milan to a trembling, drooling patient at a sanatorium.
