Bad Dog

Those two words were said A LOT last Thursday and Friday...

We have had Rudy for over a year now...about 13 months. He is not quite 2 years old, which means he still might have a tiny bit of excuse for his actions, but he's running out of time to use the excuse that he's still a puppy.

Since we have had him, there have been a couple casualties. Casualty #1: an oversized doggy pillow that we got him for his crate. This was one of our first purchases for him, and it lasted about 2 days. Let's just say I came home to a sea of green foam. However, things like that are to be expected 2 days after you get a dog. He doesn't know the ground rules yet, it's a new place, new stuff, etc. Life went on. Casualty #2: our formal dining room carpet. This happened about 1-2 months after we first got him. We started feeling bad that he had to be in his crate for 10+ hours a day, so we gutted the dining room and bought 2 baby gates to put up in the entryways. Day 1 was a success...Chris came home at lunch and Rudy was a perfect angel the whole day. Day 2, however, was a different story. Chris did not come home at lunch, and when I got home after work I was shocked to see green foam (do we see a theme here?) from the carpet pad and plywood floors. He had torn up about 1/2 of the carpet in that room. Chris wouldn't even look at him for days. I wasn't that mad (not that I was happy, but...) because we are eventually going to replace all our flooring anyways...a year later...we still have plywood floors. Now, in Rudy's defense, we believe the previous owners of this house kept their pets in that room. When we first moved in, there was a terrible odor in there, which we thought we had rid ourselves of by extracting the carpet 2x and using lots of odor eliminator. Apparently not so, because the spot that Rudy began digging/ripping at was where the odor had been the worst. So we couldn't blame him...but kind of we could.

Aside from those two instances, he hasn't had much of a chewing problem. We even got him to a point where he could have a blanket in his crate without chewing. Once we got to that point we decided to start leaving him out short amounts of time (ie when we would go to church or the grocery store or the gym, etc.). Then we started leaving him out half days and I was able to come home for lunch to check on him. We started doing this about mid-November. He was an absolute cherub! We shut the bedroom doors upstairs, but that's it. Other than that, he was free to roam the entire house. And for 2 months we gave him that freedom. Last Thursday I came home at lunch and Chris's Notre Dame hat was in pieces/shreds on the living room floor. One of my boots was in the middle of the floor, unscathed, and the other was upstairs in the loft, again unchewed. He was in his crate the rest of the day and night until Chris got home, and didn't get dinner. The next day we put my boots up on the top of the trashcan and looked around for other things he could potentially get in to (which I thought we had already done...). And unfortunately I was unable to come home for lunch that day...so imagine my surprise when I walked in the door, Rudy is nowhere in sight, but there are tiny shreds of Chris's and my boots all over the living room floor. He had completely ripped one of the tongues and insoles of Chris's boots out (they are heavy boots too!), and chewed the heel off one of my boots (the other one was still on top of the trashcan). Needless to say he was in his crate again all night, even overnight, no dinner again, and is now serving his time in his crate every day until he can earn our trust back.

At least it was nothing irreplaceable, but man, people weren't kidding when they said that owning a dog would prepare you for parenthood!