Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Day 24

Everything that went so well yesterday, well, Bear made up for it this morning. To understand this, I do have to reveal one of the awful things about Bear's past. Before Bear got to the pound, somewhere in the first four months of his life, Bear had his face broken by a human. By best guess, he was kicked in the face. He has scaring on his lower jaw, you can feel the break, now healed, at his stop and if you look really close you will see that his nose, snout and lower teeth are crooked. This is why, whenever you see a picture of Bear, he is panting. His nose doesn't work for breathing very well. Its also why, when he is trying to get the scent of something or someone, he has to get right up onto it and taste it as well.

He's still our Bear and it doesn't really matter to us...except sometimes at night because he breathes really loudly, especially when he is cleaning himself. Last night was such a night and after a couple of hours of taking him out to go hurry and telling him to stop cleaning himself while laying right next to my side of the bed, I put Bear out in the living room with Willie and closed our bedroom door.

This was a mistake.

He did stop the incessant cleaning, but then proceeded to get into my pine cone collection and chew it up all over the floor. He also stole one of my seashells and slobbered all over that and, just for fun, stole one of my slippers and slobbered all over it as well, piled all of this mess up and surrounded it with his favorite toys.

Now the thing about this behavior is that, in my house, this is not appropriate dog behavior. In fact, it is "Bad dog behavior!" But we looked at Bear, who really was proud of entertaining himself through the night, and we looked at the pile of stuff, and looked at that face with the crooked nose and beautiful eyes that really has absolutely no reason to love or trust any human on the planet... and, okay I caved...bigtime, and Dad did the reprimanding on this one while I got the leash to take him out to go "hurry."

I've really got to work on being able to be stern with this guy because he's going to walk all over me if I don't.

Happy wandering!

The Writer...and her dog, Bear

3 comments:

~Marie~ said...

I can't help but laugh... Peanut will sometimes grab dirty laundry from the hamper and run through the house with it, all the while with this triumphant look in his eyes. Like he won the best prize.

It's hard to be tough when they are so funny!

cosmiccowgirl said...

Yeah I remember Scout being the same way. Lucky he was cute cuz otherwise...

Irene said...

It think it was rather ingenious of him. What an interesting dog!