Whenever I Start Wondering Why I'm Spending Hundreds Of Dollars On Professional Dog Training, I Think About The Following Things:
1) the surprisingly barrel-chested, neck like a cement truck "lab" that my semi-estranged grandfather donated as a Christmas gift when I was nine. Yeah. If you're picturing Grandpa driving over to carefully deliver a warm and wiggly, thoroughly vet-checked, de-liced and de-ticked puppy with a widdle wed bow awound his widdle neck, THAT WOULD HAVE BEEN GREAT. Actually the whole family got bribed into driving out to Grandpa's 100 acre tree farm in the middle of Phoenix City, Alabama to pick
up said pup. We didn't like to do this for a variety of reasons. First, Step-grandma kept insisting that the swarming hives of yellow jackets that hovered around the eaves had been "saved by Jesus" and that they therefore posed no threat to my fatally allergic father who on these rare visits was forced to pretend like he made an everyday habit out of clenching multiple loaded epinephrine syringes in his sweaty fists while swathed in a poncho, locked in the bathroom.
Second, mmmm...
chiggers.
Third, the pit bulls out there roam and hunt in wild packs. Grandpa and Step-grandma both carried .22s with them to check the mail on the off-chance that, despite Step-grandma's no-doubt reliable yet ne'er tested Pentecostal intervention, a pit bull made for the jugular.
I think you see where I'm going.
We were led to believe that Grandpa's lab-mix "Happy" had spontaneously gestated a litter of adorable and not at all fucking crazy and/or lethal pups. Not true. Now I don't know if Happy got sucked into a gang, or if she couldn't pay the rent and resorted to turning tricks or if-- God forbid-- she got cornered against the barn late one night after second shift at the Denny's. All I'm saying is that these puppies were half "mix" and half "completely unbelievable that this is a dog". My brother and I wrassled our way under the house to "git ourselves a pup" and what we unearthed, blinking and drooling, was a clamp-jawed, wall-eyed disaster that we then drove six hours home with so that he could relentlessly eat his own shit and then gnaw a hole through the garage door. Our parents had to shame us into playing with him;
that game was a little like "tag", only the dog was always "it" and if he caught you the chances were pretty good that you would bleed out before the other sibling could get to a parent. We were fast, fast, fast little runners. Anyway. The vet advised us to donate him to someone who had no children, no other pets, a barbed wire fence and a bunch of dead bodies buried in the backyard that required a diligent-to-the-point-of-gangrene guard dog. So that's what we did.
2) the fact that I totally thought that R would call my bluff when I insisted that "it was just important enough to me" to shell out Student Loan Sugar Daddy cash for it. He didn't. He shrugged. Bad call on my part. Well, we'll see who's laughing when I have Jake trained to tell R he looks bloated. And to not laugh at any of his stupid jokes. Meanwhile, I'll be over here in the "well-behaved dog / no car insurance" line. It's right next to the "new Armani suit / no electricity" people. We get along okay. They drive us around and we tell them what happened on "Survivor".
