Yep, I hate my girlfriend’s poodle. Hate, hate, hate him. He’s the only living thing I’ve ever seriously considered murdering in secret and trying to get away with it.
The damn thing still barks at me every time I come in the door, even after 4 years. Admittedly, I only get to see her for a couple of weekends a month most of the time, but he should damn well know me by now. He sometimes barks or growls at me when I hug or kiss her. I constantly have to show dominance behavior toward him so that he isn’t so aggressive. That lasts for about an hour or so before he starts giving me shit again.
He starts whining and barking every. Single. Fucking. Time. We get close to her apartment. Even if we get him to shut up earlier, he still lets out a loud yap when we go through the front entrance to the building. He barks at just about anything. He tries to attack dogs that could eat him in a few bites. He barks at random strangers when we’re walking. He especially barks at bicycles and scooters. It would be impossible to count the number of people he’s unpleasantly surprised this way.
He goes apeshit if there’s a stranger at the door, no matter what we say or do about it. One of us always has to restrain him if we’re taking a delivery. A couple of my friends came to visit and he barked and growled until I had to pick him up and hold his mouth shut. Just picking him up didn’t calm him down or reassure him that the new people were welcome. They were there for twenty minutes and every time I let him go he’d start in again. He snapped at them when they tried to make friends, even though their body language was right and they let him smell them before trying to pet him.
He doesn’t play, he abuses. I’d be happy to keep throwing whatever toy he feels like savaging for quite a long time, if he just brought it back to me to throw again. He’ll retrieve like nobody’s business, but no amount of training has gotten him to give up the toy. If you don’t grab his head and strip the toy from his jaws, you won’t get it back from him. And if you don’t get ahold of the toy, he’ll drop it just out of reach and BARK at you until you try for it again. Then he grabs it and runs. Ignoring him doesn’t work, yelling doesn’t work, positive rewards don’t work, the only thing that keeps him quiet once he starts this is stealing the toy and holding on to it.
If he wants to start playing, he’ll either bark at you until you start throwing it for him to chase, or he’ll sneak up on you and shove it under your ass, or behind your back, especially if you’re lying on your side, naked, in bed. That’s always a very pleasant surprise; rolling over onto a disgustingly dirty, wet-with-slobber dog toy. If he’s not barking his head off to annoy you into pinning him down and taking the toy away, he’ll often shove the toy under the couch, behind the couch, under the desk, under the kitchen cabinet, or anyplace else that’s inaccessible to him. Then he’ll scratch at the gap. And bark. And what makes it worse is that I’ve seen him look at one of us before he does this.
He seems to crave only negative attention. If you try to pet him, he’ll stay there for a few seconds and then go away. He’ll ignore you until you try to do something. Five minutes after starting a movie, he’ll want to “play,” and he’ll do his barking routine. If you’d tried playing with him a few minutes before that, he’d ignore you. If you try to include him by inviting him up to sit with you, so that he’s getting some attention, he’ll come up for about a minute, then jump down and find some other way to piss you off.
He pisses inside. Not all the time, but randomly, and not always in the same place. He’s got a pet door so that he can go outside whenever he wants, but he still pisses inside sometimes. He pissed on my backpack when I left it on the floor about a month after I started dating my girlfriend. I don’t dare leave anything that might smell too much like me lying around the place because he might mark it. The only thing she’s found that (mostly) keeps him from peeing inside, is to barricade half of her studio apartment so that his perceived territory is halved. We have to do this every night, not just when we leave him home alone for a while, so we have to step over this barricade if we wake up in the middle of the night.
He gets sick. I think she’s spent at least $1500 every year in vet bills for the stupid neurotic aggressive asshole of a dog. He’s had several fevers bad enough to require short-term hospitalization and last year he had to have anal-gland surgery to get rid of chronic impaction problems.
He used to go crazy when she and I had sex, now he mostly shuts up. The first few times I stayed at her place, I couldn’t finish when we had sex because he would start barking whenever I got close to coming. That, and he used to jump up on the bed and interfere. I had to acquire the skill of blindly kicking him off the bed while still having sex whenever I felt him jump up because the first few times I didn’t, he’d start trying to lick my ass or around the area where we were connected. Nothing kills an orgasm faster than a cold nose in the balls.
His timing was impeccable. I swear to all the gods, I don’t know how I managed to restrain myself from throwing him off the 8th floor balcony of her apartment when he kept me from coming for the fifth fucking time one weekend. I had lots of sex, but didn’t finish one single time. I ended up jerking off in the bathroom after I gave up so that my balls wouldn’t hurt so much.
The scary part: he’s better than he was when I first started dating her. She’s got more time to spend with him now that she’s a Flamenco teacher than when she was working at an office. I think that at least part of his problems were because he was under-socialized when he was younger.
I’ve spent years with animals. My parents used to have a dog grooming shop and did obedience training. Some people I’ve visited have expressed surprise that that their pets, who don’t usually get along with visitors, will treat me like I’m part of their pack after a few minutes. The only other pet I’ve ever had a problem with was a parrot that bit the hell out of my finger while I was kissing his owner; he bit her brother too, so I think he was just a really mean bird.
This dog made me seriously consider not asking my girlfriend to marry me, even though I love her very much. I think he’s a major part of why I waited so long to ask her. I went so far as to price rings when we’d been dating for two years. I do not look forward to living with the damn thing.
