Dear Goddamned Beagle,
Congratulations on surviving your first Thanksgiving.
And all it took were five adult humans, two and a half adult dogs (one of them basically lay around hoping you’d evaporate, but she did serve as a literal hurdle to your rapid access to things occasionally), a wire crate, two soft crates, six frozen, stuff Kongs, a waist leash, and three other leashes strategically placed around the house and tied to chairs and cabinet doors.
That you’d pull open and empty.
That I’d refill with the same contents you’d emptied.
That you’d re-empty.
That I’d re-refill.
And so on.
In my defense, managing and housetraining a puppy while trying to cook and serve three turkeys; cranberry, maple, pumpkin, apple, and blueberry pies; baked baby squash; mashed potatoes; sweet potatoes; collard salad; vegan stuffed mushrooms; roasted Brussels sprouts; bread and herb stuffing; butter rolls; gravy; and corn pudding bread is not as easy as you’d think.
To be honest, the emptied cabinets didn’t upset me as much as the time I was checking something in the oven, looked over at the cabinet you were supposed to be tied to, and found you and the cabinet knob both gone.
Housetraining you is bringing me to my knees. And by “housetraining you” I mean “failing to house train you,” because we’re more than two weeks into our life together and so far only one of us thinks it important to eliminate in appropriate locations in the home. Or in your case, outside of it.
Because of your refusal to be civilized about your toileting, I’m keeping you tethered to me at all times except when you’re crated or carefully supervised. Not everyone knows how they will meet their doom, Beagle, but I can say with certainty that a person with vestibular disease keeping a beagle puppy on a waist leash knows exactly how they will die. Maybe not when or where, but absolutely how.
I do not wear the waist leash coming down the stairs the two or three times a night I must take you out, in a robe, in the cold. I don’t have a death wish. At those times I hold the leash in my hand as you hesitate, back up, rush me from behind, grab the hem of my robe with your teeth to play 2:00 am mid-stair tug, rush down a few steps ahead of me, stop suddenly, switch sides, change your mind, head back up the stairs, change your mind again and rush back down, wrapping my legs in the leash before leaping for the ground floor.
In lieu of flowers I’d like donations sent to PuppiesAreHorrible.org, a nonprofit I’ll be starting to help prevent this kind of tragedy in the future.
When I need a break I put you in your crate if I can’t keep an eye on you, or what I call Puppy Guantanamo if I’m around. The problem with Puppy Guantanamo is that, unlike the US government, I don’t seem to be able to successfully torture and deprive sentient beings of all basic rights and the ability to escape. I now line the gates with kettle bell weights to keep you from bull-heading your way through them, but this morning I saw you climbing, so that won’t work for long.
I have a call in to the state department for pointers.
The number and type of toys in PG have been winnowed down drastically because of your ability to destroy—and consume—toys that the Swissies did not. Last night a new selection from a shipment of “indestructible toys for tough chewers” took you seven minutes to disembowel. Thus you are forced to make due with a mere six or seven items, none of which are nearly as interesting as the mail on the shelves above you.
Also, your crate sarcasm is not subtle.
All of the Things have now gone home, leaving me desperately outnumbered and alone with you. While they were here you showed a disturbing pattern of hours of hard play followed by not nearly as many hours of restorative sleep. Then you’d wake up ready to go again.
You wore out the big dogs, and we had to keep telling them that they were once puppies and did this to other dogs who did not kill them. The looks in their eyes seemed unconvinced.
Still, they were good natured about it, and between them and the Things themselves you had plenty of entertainment and almost enough eyes on you to prevent catastrophe throughout the day. My step count was reduced by thousands just by others taking you out sometimes.
Your predecessor was a correctly-sized beagle. She could not reach the kitchen counter. You, however, are a moose-sized beagle, and this is a problem.
Air jail. You seemed to take it pretty well, I will say. Probably because it gave you the opportunity to take inventory of items you might steal in the future.
I’m looking forward to the “there’s hope” stage of this youth thing, Beagle.
Love,
Your Person