dog

Dogs are strange.

Specifically, the one I'm currently dogsitting. It's a 5-month old female German Shepherd puppy. I'm never quite sure what's going on in her head, but I imagine it's something like this. Here's a typical day…

On waking up (she sleeps in a crate)...

What!? Where am I? What's going on? Oh. I'm in this box again. I like this box… Here's some food. I have to use the washroom (canadian dog)... What should I do? I know, I'll scream uncontrollably

This is when I wake up. I go and open her crate and attempt to get her outside.

She already forgot that she has to go. She's just sitting there by the back patio door, staring at me with her head tilted slightly to one side…

Why's he looking at me like tha… Oh no!

She squirms and sqeals, trying to run away into the house. Eventually I catch her and literally have to throw her out so I can get the door closed before she sticks her head through it and re-starts the whole process.

Crap! I want to go back inside. I want to… Hey GRASS!!!

She takes care of business. I leave for work.

I return from work…

Bored… Bored… Bored… zzzzzzzzz Wha. Wha What's that? HUMAN! bark! scream! squeal! bark! There he is. What's he doing? Where's he going! Squeal!

Eventually I open the door and let her in the house. She proceeds to run away from me, run towards me, jump up as if she were going to claw me, jump up and claw me for real, run a circle around my feed, faux bite my ankle, spin around in a clockwise circle, and then start the whole thing over again. I assume she's thinking somthing like…

Ok, here we go, time to impress. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and run, stop, run, stop, jump, jump, press stop, circle, circle, poke, jump, spin, run, again.

Eventually I try to sit down and she spends about 15 minutes trying to faux bite every part of my body. Then I tell her no and give her a swat, and she goes away. I don't know what she does when she goes away, I don't care.

Then I take her for a walk. She's actually pretty well-behaved on the walk. She's curious about most things, but pays attention to where we're going and follows along nicely.

We return from the walk which results in another round of the "run, jump, bite" game.

By this point I'm exhausted and she's tired too. So I convince her to go back in her crate (honestly if I ever own a dog it's absolutely getting crate trained). Once in her happy space she squeals for about 5 minutes because she wants to play and I'm not there. I don't respond. She shuts up.

And we both go to sleep and the whole thing starts over again.

I know puppies are supposed to be difficult, but I never imagined it would be this much work. For the amount of time and training that goes into raising a dog, I better be able to train to do really cool things, like get my newspaper and attack people on command.