It’s Easy to Misplace a Dog When He’s Hardly Bigger Than a Remote Control

I’ll be totally honest here and admit that if I had a chance to do things over again, I would not have gotten three dogs. (Sorry, Flacko!)

When the dogs outnumber the humans in the household, you run into trouble. It’s hard to give each dog enough individual attention, and it’s nearly impossible to walk 3 dogs by yourself. I still have a scar on my arm from the time when I tried to open the screen door while holding all three dog leashes, and Mina bolted outside, yelling and happily chasing after a squirrel she’d spotted. She dragged my arm against the door handle, and after I’d walked the dogs down the street, I noticed I was dripping blood.

We initially got three dogs because after a year of living with Paco and Pedro, I suddenly decided we needed a little girl. I dragged Chris to the shelter, and there we found our Mina Bean. Sadly, Miss de Mina apparently didn’t get the memo about which parent chose her, and even now greatly prefers Chris to myself.

Then Pedro died. Two dogs were surprisingly much easier to care for than three dogs, but every time I looked at Paco and Mina, all I saw was the empty space where a third dog should be. And so we eventually adopted Flacko.

Flacko is…well, Flacko is insane. He came to us with his own unique set of issues. The Rules of the Flacko are as follows:

1. You do not pick up the Flacko unless he is standing on his hind legs and obviously wants to be picked up.
2. You do not try to put on his harness or collar. If you persist, you should also hold some yummy scrumptious delicious food in the other hand.
3. You do not leave the Flacko. If you do so, you will be subjected to repeated scratchings on the door, numerous escape attempts, and incessant whining.
4. You do not talk about the Flacko. (Oops.)

Unlike Paco, whose issues stem from being raised by ignorant and naive first-time dog owners (us), Flacko’s issues seem to come from having abusive owners (not us) and being abandoned on the streets of New Jersey, and then having to be in foster care for some time. Whatever the reasons, Flacko is a highly nervous dog, and really only seems comfortable when he’s snuggled into the lap (all right, the crotch, if you want to get specific) under a blanket.

With three dogs and two humans, sometimes it’s hard to keep track of who’s where. One of our houses had the furnace and water heater located in a short hallway that led between the family room and the garage. We once accidentally closed Paco into that hallway, and didn’t realize it until we got home a couple of hours later. We found Paco dancing happily at our arrival, and two other quite angry dogs on the other side of the door to the family room wondering who had been hiding in the furnace hallway the whole time.

I don’t remember if we had put down the laminate tile in the hallway by that time, or if the floor was still cold cement, but I can never forget the sight of one of Chris’s slippers in the hallway, squashed down flat in a perfectly Paco-shaped oval where Mr. Paco had lain in an attempt to get comfortable until someone finally came to release him.

Since that time, I’ve made it a habit to frequently count the dogs and make sure they’re all accounted for. What makes my job harder is that the dogs don’t seem to mind when we forget them somewhere, and often they don’t bother to bark or whine to let us know where they are. I can’t count the number of times Chris or I have gone into the basement for something, walked up upstairs, shut the basement door, and then realized Mina was missing. When we open the basement door, little Mina is usually standing on the top step, wagging her tail, before she scampers past us into the house.

Mina is the dog most frequently left in the wrong place, as she’s a dawdler. When we take the dogs outside to do their business, the other two almost always run back inside before she’s ready.

Now that it’s winter, we go out the door to the garage and then out the door from the garage to the back yard. One of us always has to stand guard to watch for coyotes while the dogs are outside. After the boys finish and go back inside, we stand outside shivering while Mina pokes around the shrubbery, sniffs a few rocks, and maybe condescends to poop. Eventually she wanders back into the garage and we can lock the back door and go into the main part of the house.

Several times now we’ve come back inside, started to settle down, and then realized that one of the dogs didn’t make it back inside. One time after Chris had taken the dogs outside, I noticed Mina was missing. I walked around the entire house calling for her and checking under every blanket. Then it occurred to me to try the garage door. Of course Mina was standing in the garage, just waiting. Apparently she had felt no need to bark or respond to my calls, as she had such confidence that her presence wouldn’t be missed for too long.

This morning Chris took the dogs out as usual. I didn’t see Mina at all, but Flacko and Paco ran around me while I brushed my teeth. After a while, though, I didn’t see Flacko either.

“Have you seen Flacko?” I yelled to Chris. Chris was about to leave for work, and I was still putting my lunch together for the day.

“He’s probably just under a blanket,” he said.

“I haven’t seen Mina, either,” I mentioned.

“I’m sure she’s back in bed.”

“Are you sure all of them came back inside after you took them out?” I said.

“Yes, positive! Gotta go now, bye!!”

I went downstairs and put my lunch into my work bag. I was about to leave when I remembered I had forgotten to email a document from my laptop to myself. I had just finished emailing myself and shutting down the computer when I heard a strange, scrabbling noise.

I assumed it was Mina, getting into some kind of food. With her background in street living, Mina has frequently stolen food off our dinner plates during the rare moments when we leave dinner unguarded. On one memorable occasion, we returned home to find that she had pulled a container of Pupperoni Naw Somes off a counter, wrestled the lid off the container, and eaten approximately 4 Naw Somes. Given that the normal serving size we gave the dogs was about 1/6 of a Naw Some, it was no wonder that she threw them all up later in the day.

I had been ready to leave for work, but now I headed upstairs to see what was going on. I didn’t see any dogs in the kitchen, so I thought maybe something had dropped on the floor and made a weird noise. I didn’t see anything out of place. I checked the blankets in the living room just in case a dog had crept away with some kind of forbidden treat, but there was no one on that level at all.

I went upstairs where Paco was sitting on the futon, cleaning his ears with his paws. I found Mina on a puff bed, her butt hanging out of a blanket, but no Flacko. I lifted all the blankets and moved all the beds, but still couldn’t find Flacko.

As I walked out of the dog room, my eyes fell upon the bathroom door. The bathroom door which I had carefully shut after brushing my teeth, to prevent the dogs from going into the room while we were at work. The bathroom door which, I remembered now, led to the room where Flacko had followed me in when I brushed my teeth.

I opened the door and Flacko ran out.

“I’m so sorry, buddy,” I told him. I offered him a salmon treat, but he was so demoralized by his experience that he only sniffed it and then ran downstairs. Just to be fair, I gave Paco a tiny treat, and popped another treat under the blanket which currently held Mina’s bum.

Flacko ran back into the room and I offered him the treat again. This time he took it, but he ran away with it before I could lock him somewhere again.

At least Flacko knew enough to kick up a fuss when he was locked up. If it had been Mina or Paco in there, they would have quietly stayed there all day until someone happened to open that door to find them trying to nap on a package of paper towels.

Posted by: ssjane | December 29, 2005 | 3:37 pm
Posted in: Dogs