Does this dog look like the face of evil? Didn't think you'd say so.
This was our dog, Maggie. We gave her away donated her to an unsuspecting a lovely retired gentleman when she was about two years old. We warned him, but he didn't listen. And, frankly, I'm sure he had better luck with her than we did as he was around more. Look how much she loved Anna. Unfortunately, sweet as Maggie could be she was also an absolute beast.
What brings this up?
I just finished Marley and Me which opens in movie theatres on Christmas day, a fact I am not looking forward to because I'm thinking they probably Disney'd it up a whole bunch.
If you haven't read the book, it's about a couple's experience raising a dog and a family and about their marriage through it all. The dog in the book, a lab, is dubbed by the owners "the worst dog in the world". Hmmm. Not so fast... See if you think we topped it...
Early in our marriage, Super Husband and I bought a yellow lab in a pet store... Maggie. Actually, I called SH from the pet store and begged him to agree to let me bring her home. We didn't have kids yet, but did discover I was pregnant with our first about three weeks after we got Maggie. (Ya' think I maybe wanted a baby?)
She was cute and cuddle, but Maggie was, to say the least, a bit high strung. Super Husband and I were both working full time, of course, so we were having a boy come and let her out in the afternoons after school. Clearly, we hadn't thought everything through. We felt terrible because she spent her days in a big crate which she would regularly escape from. We called her Hoodini Dog.
One fateful day, when I was five months pregnant Super Husband was away on business, and I made a mistake to beat all mistakes.
I knew that I was going to have a long day at work, and I felt bad for Maggie. Plus the young boy who normally walked her in the afternoons was not going to be available that day.
As I got ready to go to work, I got to feeling really guilty about leaving Miss Maggie in her crate all day. So I devised a plan: I'd use a gate to block Maggie from leaving the kitchen/family room area, and I'd leave her out of the crate. After all, she was getting older and was more trustworthy when I left the room. She was getting better by day. What could go wrong?
As it turns out, when you leave a hyper lab puppy out of her crate for nearly ten hours unattended a whole heck of a lot can go wrong.
When I made the long trek home, worrying all the way, I couldn't possibly have imagined what waited for me there.
Exhausted from work, the drive and being pregnant, I walked into the house through the garage door, and shouted for Maggie. What hit me first though, was the stench. I knew I was in trouble.
I turned on the lights to witness a horror. Maggie, cowering guiltily in the corner, had apparently suffered from separation anxiety. And she took her anxiety out on the leather couch... it had a foot wide hole in it and the stuffing from it was all over the room. It also had the distinct smell of urine... and poop.
She also took her anxiety out on the 8 x10 area rug. Which she chewed to bits, plus pooped, peed and vomited on. There was poop everywhere. There was a hole in the wall. The door jam was slaughtered from her chewing...apparently trying to escape.
But the centerpiece of her destruction was in the living room which I didn't think she could gain access to... because I had put up a 3' gate. Surely she couldn't get around that.
Of course she did get around it. However she first went to the fireplace and got a charred log out of it. She dragged it across the family room, throughout the kitchen and straight into the living room with it's brand new white carpet. It was there she proceeded to spread the charcoal from end to end and then eat it in it's entirety.
Did you know that charcoal is the exact thing that vets use to get a dog to vomit something it shouldn't have eaten? I found that out the hard way. Because Maggie proceeded to vomit profusely all over the house. Up the stairs, in the kitchen, in the living room, in the family room. Absolutely everywhere.
As I took all of this in, I began to shake. And then I began to cry. I called Super Husband. He couldn't understand a word I was saying as I was by then sobbing so hard I couldn't stop. He did get that it was something about the dog, but what, he wasn't sure. So, he got off the phone with me, and called my mother and told her she had to call me immediately. He wasn't sure what was wrong, but he knew it couldn't be good.
Sobbing and wailing, I told my mother what had happened. Again, she couldn't understand a word I was saying. However, my mother thought I said someone killed the dog. What I really said was that I was going to kill the dog. Hypothetically... don't get in an uproar. She tried in vain to calm me down, and said she'd be there right away.
My mother must have drove like a maniac because before I could process much else she was there to witness the crime scene first hand. And of course, the crime scene wasn't what she imagined at all. No dead dog, thank goodness, but an unbelievable horror spilled all over my new house.
And what does she do? She begins to laugh. Hrrrmpppfffff. But Mom helped me clean it all up to the best of our ability and called she Service Master to come and clean the carpets. She also waited for them while I was at work the next day.
Even after this event, we didn't give up on Maggie. We kept trying. At one point Super Husband built a carpeted shelter for her in the basement enclosed by a "custom" wood fence and gate made of two by fours (6 feet high) which I swear to you looked like Fort Knox. We put a radio down there, lighting, the works. But Maggie would have none of it.
When we got home from work, curiously, Maggie was at the top of the basements steps... Blood stains all the way up the stairs as she clawed and chewed her way out of her enclosure ripping her dew claw out along the way. Hello to a $250 vet bill (a drop in the bucket compared to what we spent on drywall those two years we had her.)
Need-less-to-say... after Anna was born, Maggie became more than I could handle. And like Jenny in the book, I had a post-partum meltdown and insisted that we give Maggie away. Only unlike John Groban, the author of Marley and Me, Super Husband listened to me. And we swore off dogs forever...
That's why these two characters are living with us now.
On the left, Max (5 years old and the most perfect dog in the world). On the right, Isabelle, Max's sister from another litter (3 years old, a little dumb, but has never ever chewed up anything in her life but the rail of one chair and thousands of dog bones.) Good dogs!
You've stopped at the online journal of Bari Ackerman (the J. is for Jill, my middle name). I am a fabric, sewing pattern and surface designer. I love to create. And, I love to share ideas and dreams with other creative people. I hope you'll stay for a visit. And, feel free to chime in on the conversation. You know, so I don't think I'm talking to myself. Thanks for stopping by!
