Dog Days, minus the Nostalgia

I live in a doghouse. While this is an aforementioned fact, it’s worth revisiting, for the fact that, most people don’t really understand what it’s like to live in a dog house. It holds thirty-plus dogs. The reason it is able to do this is because it was once a real house, for people. It’s one story, spread out in the southwestern way, where the floor plan goes horizontal instead of vertical. Now that the previous owners—Deb and Steve who finance the place—have moved out, the house, minus my bedroom and bathroom—is completely devoted to them. The old furniture is adorned with fluffy blankets to make their recline in them more comfortable. Dog beds fill the area of the living room, previous master bedroom, study, and back porch, so the dogs can congregate with ease. Dog bowls—the dogs are fed via free feed, which means the bowls have a container above them filled with more food to keep them fat and happy whenever they might desire to have food—are sprinkled against the walls everywhere. The dogs live mostly in the front yard or the backyard, as the doors between those yards are the only thing barring them—although they’re free to saunter through whenever a human scampers through for one reason or another. The house is open to the dogs who live in the front yard, and the backyard dogs get the back porch. That is the territory mostly of the younger dogs, who are staying on this side of the road either for space reasons, or because they get along better here. I am the trespasser, apparently, which is reinforced each morning as I wake up to barking dogs—if all goes well not earlier than 5am, when my alarm is set. I stumble from the bedroom, careful to put on shoes with soles, and peer down the dark hallway. I can then generally avoid the piles of dog poop, but the pee puddles are far more tricky. Often I look back, once I have the light on (it’s at the other end of the hallway) only to see glistening puddles that I have to assume I trekked through, unknowingly.
Breakfast occurs amidst the dogs who I couldn’t persuade to run out in the general rush that I herd out when I get to the kitchen and the back door. The dogs who stay are either too old to bother getting up when I turn on the lights, or are far more interested in the prospect of a dropped crumb than they are in the cool and dark of the backyard. After leaving the house, sometimes the chaos, sometimes sleepy dogs, I go to work, where the work with goats, sheep, and horses (thank god for the horses) commences. At lunch, the next dog encounter begins.
In the middle of the day, most dogs are passed out. My entrance, however, heralds another slim possibility of scraps for them (yes, their feed bowls are all still very full, and no, I don’t feed them because that = dogfights). The dogs get up and crowd around in their pecking order, sometimes barking, sometimes just looking. If Deb and Rory come in with me we sit at the table, where the bigger dogs like to stick their noses up, just to see if they can get to our plates. When we ignore most of them, they eventually pass back out, stirring only if they hear the sound of something drop or if I get up, which apparently is enough of a signal of “more food!”
I come in sometime, done with work for the day, between two and four. Often most are still passed out, but this changes if I a) get a snack, b) open something, c) walk to the sink, d) heaven forbid, turn on the microwave. Whenever it’s time that I eat, the hordes are back again. And thus they remain wakeful until feeding time for them, for which I attempt to already be hiding in my room, to avoid the barking and squeals and chaos that is “medicine time”—given to them in much-coveted canned dog food. Hopefully none get into my room, which is another story, as Zeke especially likes to ransack and pee in it. More on that later.
Because now, it’s time for dog specifics. These are the dogs who have some sort of relatively sizeable impact on my life, ones who either have a constant present inside the house, or have done notable things while on this side. I couldn’t decide what order to describe them in. I was thinking, in order of most-homicidal-impulses-I-experience-towards-them, level of annoyance (this is almost the same though not quite), noise-level-of-bark, relative age, although so many of them are just “old” that I couldn’t do it. So I suppose I’ll go with the most democratic and do by order of size.
That means Curly comes first:

Curly is a giant black dog with somewhat curly hair. Apart from his tussled appearance, he is most noticeable by virtue of being huge. Not terribly tall, although probably the tallest on the “old dog side”, but his breadth is most impressive. He’s wide and really fat and solid. And old. So fat and old he sometimes can barely get up and he has sores on his elbows from using them to struggle to his feet. He has an asthmatic bark/whine that is fairly loud, although this could be because most often, it is magnified by the fact he is vocalizing directly outside my bedroom door. He loves to wedge himself there between my bedroom and the bathroom. This means that often times, in the mornings, there is pee there because he probably didn’t bother getting up, at least not all the way. This morning there was barf. Occasionally he gets confused and barks, usually around 3am, until I walk outside my bedroom, and if he can get up, I let him out the backyard. Though he is annoying and huge, he is not as high up on the homicidal-urges list, simply because he’s too old to do much and he looks really cute when he’s carrying around a stuffed animal in his mouth, as he likes to do (picture a giant, cumbersome, senile old man, in dog-form, and that’s Curly)

The next biggest, and really not too much smaller than Curly, is Norman. While I am not too resentful towards him, as he has yet to wake me up, he is the picture of the problem of free-feeding here. (that’s another issue. Fifty dollar, 20lb bags of premium, vegetarian dog food liberally dispensed, and there’s just one of the financial ‘puzzlers’ of the ranch.) But anyways. Norman is a giant dog who probably has some kind of yellow lab in him. But something gave him a roman nose and big wide googly eyes, and his love for weating has made him fat to the point of danger—this is a dog who begins to pant if he walks ten feet around the kitchen—usually this is done to circle to another food bowl. Once he has reached his objective, which is always food, he collapses, panting, in front of the bowl. He proceeds to gorge himself from this lying down position. Eventually, when the bowl is empty or he is sated, he moves himself a few feet to pass out. His biggest crime, in my book, is the fact he is so fat, he generally moves only by rolling a little bit. And this, one day, caused him to knock over my computer as he burrowed further into the space between the counter and my stool, wedging himself there to get at the bowl on the side of the counter, and pulling the cord out of the socket as he did so. He is ridiculous, does not have many cute moments, and would be the fat person in sweats—because normal clothes are no longer an option—sitting at McDonalds with a full tray, double fisting burgers and fries and maybe, just maybe, switching his over-sized Coke to Diet.

Wellington is the next biggest. He’s a pit-lab mix, who’s friendly. He amuses me, because he plays “big dog on campus,” and I took him for a walk once. He got the 4 minutes down to the bigger street, crossed it, freaked out, and demanded to be taken back. Once back inside the house, he once again put on his swagger, as though he’d just climbed a mountain, and strutted for days especially when I came by.

Louie is the next biggest dog who unfortunately plays a role in daily life here. He is tan and white and shaggy, with cataracts in each eye. He is the bane of the kitchen. No one likes him—dogs, people, probably mice. The most obvious reason is his heinous, high-pitched bark. One sounding off and you raise your eyebrows, thinking—really? The next time he barks, you think someone needs to put a muzzle on him. As the sound continues, it is no longer possible to stand. And so, the nearest person inevitably grabs him by his collar and drags him unceremoniously out to the back porch, where he sometimes tries to beg for re-admittance, or sometimes, hopefully, gets distracted by some shiny object, or something. He is also a jerk. He terrorizes dogs, going up to a select few and barking and barking, when he knows they won’t respond in kind. He likes to stick close to whoever is in the kitchen and growl and show his teeth if other dogs come too close. He is the only dog, say the dog-people, who has never been bitten. They say, they don’t know if that’s because his bark is too annoying for other dogs to mess with them, or, more likely, the other dogs know he’s just crazy, so senile they shouldn’t bother because he will do something worse(who knows what) than bark, and they shouldn’t test him.

There are two other dogs who I like, who almost go together—Sasha and Maggie. They didn’t come together, aren’t related, but look alike, some sort of Doberman mix, except smaller. The biggest difference is that Maggie has a bobbed tail, who knows why. Maggie likes to jump through windows. In fact, she likes to so much that she knocked out or destroyed all the screens in the house. Therefore, no windows can be opened, and the only circulation in this place are the few ceiling fans. Sasha is the one with the tail, and she’s sweet. She is probably my favorite older dog. Doesn’t bark, always comes say hi, and is even good on a walk.

Shakespeare is notable only because his name fits him so well. He is a black dog with long wavy hair, who, when sitting, somehow manages to convey an Old-English playwright just by his distinguished presence. He also has the most sonorous bark. This is often a nice change of pace, but can quickly grow old as he is the most likely to start a ‘howling session,’ which is interesting to hear once, as there will be about seven or so dogs all harmoniously howling at different pitches, low voices weaving in and out and higher ones crooning a counterpoint. Then again, this also is not always welcome, chiefly when it begins at three am. At this point I’d like to cut the stage out beneath them, wouldn’t feel so bad if it was kind of a long drop…

Fanny is one of the last who’s around really often. She’s a small, white dog, probably some sort of lab mix. She’s incontinent, responsible for not the piles of dog-shit, but the occasional turd that spread liberally throughout the interior of the house. However, she’s not to blame for this—the dog-people believe that before Fanny came here, her previous “owner” was involved in some sort of bestiality cult, and therefore her incontinence is a result of muscles that no longer have the strength to do what they should. She is also extremely sweet. She loves to lick dogs, often going to dogs who are barking, or laying down, and gives them kisses until they shuttup or nuzzle her back.

So I saved the one I hate the most for last. That would be Zeke, the elderly beagle. He is fat, bow-legged, and the most obsessed thing I have ever seen about food. He goes beyond obsession. If a person were this obsessed, they would probably be put in the mental hospital. If I walk into the house, he is immediately present, looking up at me wide-eyed though he knows full well my dislike. And then, he proceeds to walk around me, sniffing, grunting, waiting hopefully for any sort of crumb that might pass through my fingers to fall on the floor. And then, the bow-legs become an obvious disguise, that the other dogs might be fooled for a second that he is some sort of docile. But no—when something drops, he darts with unbelievable speed to the scrap, getting there, eating it, and rooting around for more before most dogs even reacted to the sound of the drop. Then again, no matter their size, the other dogs give him space. This is because Zeke has absolutely no fear. If a dog comes too close merely when he’s sitting near, hoping for a scrap, Zeke doesn’t hesitate to bite, snarl, growl, snap, and show his many yellowed teeth. Inevitably this causes the other dog to snarl, and then some other dog misunderstands, and before you know it, there’s a fight going on. Why not just lock him out of the kitchen, you ask? Well. Put Zeke on the porch and in a minute he is howling, baying, wailing at the door to get back in. He is the loudest dog of all of them, and he probably also is the most persistent. No matter how many times you tell him you hate him, he doesn’t care. Because sometime, maybe, somehow, you’ll drop a crumb of a cracker. And then, the time is worthwhile. Apparently.
Zeke has also desecrated my room. My room, the one room with carpeting, the one thing that is free of dogs, is no longer free of dog smell. This is because, the door occasionally jams not-quite-shut. Zeke-the-monster has learned to check for this, apparently more stringently than I have. When he gets into my room, he rips apart my trash, tracks pee in, and then, as his crowning moment of glee, deposits puddles of pee into the thick shag carpet. These I generally identify first by smell, and finally by stepping in them, which is when I realize to what extent he has once again decided to ruin my night. My bottle of Febreeze (pet febreeze, the “strongest yet”) is almost gone, applied liberally but not quite successfully to quell the smells of the pee. No carpet cleaner can get to the far reaches of this shag. And so my room is a strange mixture of ammonia, weird “fresh” Frebreeze scent, and sometimes Tide, which I employ after the carpet cleaner in a vain attempt to scrub the excrement out. It is possibly the most depressing smell on the ranch, and keep in mind I spend most of my day around shit of various origins.
Yesterday I decided I’d try and kill him by food (he also has heart failure. Did I forget to mention this fact? I try to forget it because all of a sudden I’m feeling sorry for him. I hate when I feel sorry for him, because I am certain he has no feelings. But then he has a coughing fit, and there it goes, I can’t help it, I feel sorry for the ugly beast.) As for killing him, I decided that no one will know, if I just feed him all the stale donuts some guy brought by, he’ll probably keel over from heart failure. Ooh, right, his already-existing condition. Which is much easier to explain than the shoe marks he’d receive, otherwise, when I can’t stand the fact he’s once more drooled over my food in the refrigerator, which he unfailingly tries to climb into.
This is a secret plan. Shhhh, I’d probably be fired for even thinking the thought.

Okay, I’m done with my rant. The last dog I’d talk about would be Lucy, but it’s too soon. The dog I’d adopt if I possibly could. I don’t even LIKE dogs that much, they smell and they drool, etc. Except, I’m pretty sure Lucy’s fur smells like roses and she gives the driest kisses of a dog, ever. As in, she keeps her mouth shut. She is the only dog I have ever kissed. Okay, I promise, I’m not going insane. I’m just upset my favorite dog was adopted out, and they didn’t even tell me (as promised) so I could say goodbye.

That’s all on the dogs for now. They’re barking. They say hi.