I have three beasts and love them dearly but there are some things that drive me bonkers.
Zebadiah (German Shepherd) - The shedding is ridiculous. I could vacuum twice a day. It seems like when I brush him, it loosens the hair making it worse. There is no amount of time I could brush him that would get most of his loose hair out. It just keeps coming. And it’s not seasonal, it’s a year-round issue. He has self-appointed himself as my guardian. He follows me everywhere. While I’m vacuuming, he’s standing on the cord behind me, when I sweep the stairs and am working my way down the stairs backwards, he’s on the next step behind me, if I don’t close the door quickly enough, he’ll come in the bathroom with me, as I’m walking I can feel his nose hit the back of my leg. When he sits on the couch with me, he hovers over me like a vulture. Sometimes I yell - give me some space!
Huckleberry (Great Dane) - Have you ever had to scrub slobber mixed with hair and food off of your… CEILING? I have to do it all the time along with the walls, fridge, tv screen, mirrors, etc. Every time he shakes slobber flies out of his big “mud flaps” in every direction. When we hear him drinking my husband or I grab the old towel we have for this purpose and wait to hear him stop lapping then rush to mop up the long strings of drool mixed with water that are hanging precariously from his mouth.
Rigatoni (Boxer) - Rigatoni is our PITA (pain in the ass) dog. When he isn’t sleeping he’s looking for something naughty to do. He’s chewed up ink pens, my husband’s glasses, ate my Valentine candy, digs holes, chewed up a hard plastic picture frame, chewed/mushed up 2 bananas and ate one whole, peeling and all, using his nose he pushed a ceramic Easter bunny off of a shelf onto the floor where it shattered. I’m still finding pieces of that. I have a set of hard metal decorative covered tins that have candles in them. He managed to actually chew and dent them so I can’t even get the lids off of some of them and others don’t sit flat because they’re all wonky. I can’t have anything within his reach. It’s like having a two year old wandering around my house. AND I have never heard a bark like this dog has. Actually it’s two different barks. One is when he’s playing with the other dogs or sassing me. It’s the sharpest bark I’ve ever heard. It pierces my ear drums. His other bark is for when he sees a deer or other creature on the other side of his fence. It starts out as a hoarse bark and then turns into a shrill combo of bark and howl. He also has other weird sounds he makes. If I reprimand him, he’ll sass back with his sharp bark or a sound that is like Chewbacca. He is the weirdest boxer of all of the boxers we’ve had.
Some days I think - why did we ever get 3 dogs??!! It’s not 3 times the work. It’s 300 times the work. I think of how easy and simpler my life would be without them or with just one or even two. But they keep me moving and I truly love them and they love me. It would be a quiet dull life without them.
Sorry, I’m on Rigatoni’s side on this one. I checked with my two perfectly normal dogs, and they said that’s just how a normal dog behaves all the time starting at 4 a.m.
Thank you for confirming a theory of mine: if you have three dogs, two of them will keep you and/or hubby busy while the third plans and/or carries out The Caper.
We lost our best boy early this year. He was a challenging dog to manage as he was both exceptionally high-energy and mobility limited due to the loss of a front leg early in his life. Some combination of his anxiety and my wife’s anxiety about his anxiety made it difficult to leave him with any but a small handful of dogsitters of limited availability.
After he was gone, we talked about sad as the event was, maybe this was our opportunity to live a little less tethered and travel more, even day trips.
So of course, three weeks later when we were told about a rescue pup by our dogsitter, well…
I’ve found that brushing, then bathing, then brushing again is a way to remove tons of hair in a controlled manner. There will still be shedding, but less.
We have three dogs, too, and they are all problem dogs.
Buddy is a Chocolate Lab, and he sheds constantly. He’s also been blind since he was a puppy, and that makes him very needy - he wants to be up against you all the time. Oh, and - he’s a chewer. He ate a piece of his supposedly “chew-proof” bed (K9 Ballistics), and that ended up costing us a summer vacation to Europe.
Andy is a super-geriatric miniature poodle. We have had him for 17 years, and he wasn’t a puppy when we got him. He is grouchy and incontinent, and has digestive problems, so he’s on a special diet. Which helps sometimes.
Iggy is our latest rescue, he is a min-someting (maybe Chihuahua mixed with some type of Terrier). He’s super smart, and we have to be very, very careful about crating him, because he can figure a way out of almost any cage. He is only friendly to me and my wife (and the other two dogs) - he will bite any other person or animal, so we can’t board him. My wife loves him like nothing else.
So, the only vacations we can take are with all the dogs, which makes travel a bitch.
He’ll be 2 at the end of June. Last summer I was letting him be out and about the house while I was at work. For the most part he did fine. Around Thanksgiving we took down the final crate because everyone was fairly well behaved. Then around this last January he started monkeying around and the crate is now back in use. He sleeps in the bedroom with me and the door is closed so he can’t get into mischief then. He sleeps most of the night anyway. And that’s another thing about him! 80% of the time if I get up to go to the bathroom he gets up too. So I have to let him out in the middle of the night which is another pain. Anyway, now that he’s crated he’s only naughty when I’m not looking!
We lost a boxer and a boxer/mastiff mix within 3 weeks of each other in the fall of 2020. We knew we’d get another dog but wanted to wait until the following spring. But then we saw Huck on the local Animal Allies website in January and that was that. The house was quiet and dog hair free for only 3 months. I have to say I did enjoy not having to cover my couches for a few months!
Oh man. We have four dogs, all with their idiosyncrasies, and feel that only we can handle them. So we’re just never going to travel again.
We’ve got two Dobermans. One is a big tough dog…but can’t handle any kind of storms without trying to shove himself up your ass. He also counter-surfs, and has been known to nip people when he’s stressed.
The other Dobe has a spinal defect. He’s my little crooked angel, always dancing and spinning and getting in the way, and also falling down. He can’t turn himself over when he lays down, but he whines in the night and I turn him.
The other two are Catahoula leopard dogs who came to us as strays. Hank is going to bark at anyone who is not us, and he is not going to stop until they are gone. If you stay at my house for three days, Hank is going to bark at you for three days, non-negotiable. He also taught the other dogs a cool game, where whichever dog gets outside first can turn and bite the others.
Jack is our resident sad sack. He’s got only one eye, he usually has strands of goo dangling from his mouth, and the other dogs despise him. Jack adores our big Dobe, so we have to keep them separated at all times or they wind up at the vet getting stitches.
All of them shed and bark and crash into us and kill little creatures and track dirt into the house. They’re the lights of my life.
Bayliss the magic dog of unknown heritage is perfect. (Shepherd mix??) He wandered up on my deck and right into my heart. Fully housetrained and well mannered. And he somehow stays clean out in these woods.
Betsy the obese Beagle is aging and getting weirder by the day. Anxiety is gonna be the thing that ruins her life. I keep telling her. She was a cheerful, active nose to the ground beagle in her younger days. I worry for her.
The other 2 living in my house are my mid-Daughters Chihuahuas. OMG. They are THE most exasperating dogs I’ve ever experienced. I got them to mind me if I stay on top of it. I potty trained them, if I stay on top of it. They’ll eat THEIR food if I hover on top of them. My daughter can do nothing with them. And she says I ruined them.
And I love them all. And all those that went before.
Yea, that’s pretty much us too. Once in a while I go to my mom’s cabin for the day but can only bring one of the dogs. I feel bad for whomever I’ve left behind but three dogs down there…no one would relax. I’d be calling them all day, reprimanding them, watching them like a hawk, they’d run like banshees knocking kids and old people over in their wake. Way too stressful.
Bartleby is a great dog, but man is he high strung. The pandemic didn’t do him any favors, he was always clingy, but now he gets anxious when one of us go to the bathroom. If he doesn’t get a lot of walks and playtime, he gets nutty. Sometimes, he’s exhausted, but still wants to play, but can’t really do anything.
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