Urine in trouble now!

It’s morning, I’m late, as usual, and hopping around trying to brush my shoes and tie my teeth and round up the books I need to return to the library (where I work) when I notice something. A noise. Something drumming softly in another room. It’s an odd noise, and out of place in my morning routine. It sounds like...water running, no, splattering.

I cock my head trying to place the location of the noise. I creep from doorway to doorway and follow the sound into the dining room. Liquid is splashing onto the dining room table. From the table it bounces up and flies in thousands of tiny droplets out into the room, spraying the floor, the walls, the piano, me. My eyes follow the stream of liquid up, up, up to the ceiling where it is pouring through the exposed lath. My brain is exceedingly slow to puzzle this out. Why is there liquid up there? Above this area of the dining room, there is only the hallway and my bedroom door. No plumbing. No pipes.

A dog brushes against my legs. A lightbulb goes off in my head – it’s one of those jarring, noisy warning bulbs that lights up and honks when nuclear power plant protocol has been breached. Wonk! Wonk! Wonk!

I race up the stairs, all six dogs scrambling up with me, bumping into me, nearly knocking me all the way down the stairs again. I turn the corner at the hallway and slide to a stop in front of my bedroom door. Where there is a rapidly disappearing pool of dog pee. Rapidly disappearing because it is draining through the cracks of the old wood floor and through the broken plaster and exposed lath of the dining room ceiling and onto the dining room table (did I mention that this is a dining room table – people eat food from this table!)

Cursing at the dogs, I slosh a mop through the mess and finish it off with a towel – a towel, I might add, that I had just laundered the night before. A clean towel that has been folded on the bathroom shelf for a mere 8 hours, before being used to wipe up dog piss.

Downstairs (where each dog is now cowering in its own corner, trying to look small and vulnerable and innocent), I rapidly clean up the table, chairs, floor, piano, then realize I need to change my clothes as well. I am late for work.

This is my morning. This is not an unusual morning.

I have six dogs, obviously untrained, and every morning when I wake up I have six dogs with full bladders. My own bladder is also full. I used to drag myself out of bed and to the back door to let dogs out to pee before I had used the bathroom myself. But since our yard is not fenced, and there is a leash law, I can only let one dog out at a time. Have you ever watched a dog choose a spot to pee? They can be interminably slow. Sniff the rock, hmm, no, maybe the garbage can, hmm, no, not there, oh, a stick of wood. Nope. “Just go potty, damn you!” I yell, startling some early morning joggers passing by the house. Times that by six, and you can see my problem. After I’d peed in my pajamas a few times, I made an executive decision: the one who buys the dog food gets to pee first.

But a dog whose bladder has been filling up all night long is a worried dog and an anxious dog. There are mornings I can hear the dogs milling about outside the bathroom door, almost hear their fretting, almost see them squeezing their furry legs together, pinching their doggy lips together in an attempt to tighten all bodily sphincter muscles. Some mornings, such as this one, somebody failed. Or, I suspect, somebody didn’t try hard enough.

My life is clearly out of control. I am not living up to my potential. And I am late to work again, thinking, how did I get here? Why do I have so many dogs? Why are there holes in my ceiling? How do I sanitize the dining room table? How do I get the odor of dog pee out of my unfinished wood floors? And how do I escape?? But then I arrive at work, and must think about other things, like earning enough money to feed my dogs, repair my ceiling, buy a new table, finish my floors and book a one way ticket to Tahiti.

Dog Scents

I swept and mopped my house today, no small feat, with six dogs insisting that the floor is their toilet. But finally, I had gotten ahead of the pee puddles. I started to make dinner, then had to stop to kick the dogs out of the kitchen, since they can't be trusted not to steal food from the counter every time I turn to another part of the kitchen. For some reason, I let Rocky stay in the kitchen with me. He was off in a corner on a dog bed, minding his own business and not bothering me.


I turned back to the pizza dough I was kneading, but soon became aware of a very non-bread like odor. Ewwwww. Smelled like cat musk. Ewwww. The odor was stronger next to the refrigerator. I stuck my nose in various places around the fridge, but couldn't figure it out. Had the cats peed on the floor? Guess I didn't mop very well, I told myself, and figured I'd be in for another bout of mopping after dinner.


Soon kids started wandering into the kitchen drawn by the lovely aroma of pizza dough on the griddle. Their noses quickly wrinkled after a couple of good sniffs. "Ewwww," they said, "why does it smell like cat piss?" My 18 year old daughter lit a coffee scented candle, but it just added coffee scent to the aroma of cat.


Eventually, overcome by hunger, we all ate. As she was putting her plate in the sink, my daughter stopped to pet Rocky, and then screeched, "It's him! It's Rocky!!
He stinks!! Aaaaaagggghhhh - my hands!! I touched him!! My hands stink!!!"


Ahhhhhh - the source of the stink. The famous dog roll in smelly stuff outside. Apparently Rocky had found an outdoor cat toilet and had enjoyed a good romp in it.


I gave Rocky a bath - a rare event in his life. My dogs don't usually stink. I stick my nose in their fur all the time, and honest, they don't stink. They smell like dogs, but a clean dog does not have an unpleasant smell. Which leads me to the question - why do dogs roll in disgusting, smelly junk? Donkey doo, cat mounds, dead birds and squirrels, rotting fish - it's all yummy and irresistible to a dog.


The popular wisdom is that the dog is trying to disguise his smell so he can sneak up on prey. And that makes sense, sort of, except when you remember that dogs don't generally stalk their prey, they run it down. I think it was dog trainer and writer Patricia McConnell who offered an alternative reason. Dogs immerse themselves in strong aromas for the same reason humans do - it's perfume to them. They simply like the way it smells. She goes on to write that most of the things that dogs roll in are food-like for a dog - rotten meat, and the feces of prey animals, which often smell like the animals themselves (after all, you are what you eat). We humans, she reminds us, use plant-based scents, fruity, flowery, herbal scents - also things we like to eat. When she encouraged one of her dogs to sniff her perfumed wrist, the dog wrinkled its nose and turned its head ---"Ewwwww, why does my human roll in such stinky stuff?!"


For whatever reason, dogs will occasionally shock our senses with fragrances repugnant to us. What's great about dogs is that they forgive us so readily after we have bathed them with a shampoo they find equally repugnant.

Woof!

Are you Hungary?

Recently my husband & I were relaxing in the living room with Reo the black lab nestled on the floor at my feet, and my daughter came in asking about Gypsies and Transylvania. "Where is Transylvania?" she wanted to know. "I think it's in Hungary," I said. All of a sudden Reo's big head popped up, his eyes huge with hope, his ears pricked up. We looked at Reo, wondering what had excited him so. He leapt to his feet and dashed off into the kitchen, prancing back a few seconds later carrying his food bowl in his mouth. We all started laughing - "oh, he heard the word Hungary!" (At every meal time I ask my dogs, "Are you hungry?") Reo danced around the living room, smacking each of us in turn with his happy tail, swaying like a shark, weaving his big, glossy black body around chairs and legs, & jerking the bowl away from us as we pretended to try to snatch it from him.

Reo knows several English words, but "hungry" is his favorite. "Walk" and "ride" are up high on his list too. "Sit", "down", "wait" and "bye-bye", are way down at the bottom, as shown by his drooping ears, head and tail. And the eyebrows - the expressive eyebrows- that twitch and rise and fall with his moods.


PS - since I posted this my 18 year old daughter has informed me that "Transylvania is in Romania" (rolling her eyes).

Being adopted by a dog

1974
I had wanted a dog for a while. I went to an animal shelter called Pets Unlimited, in San Francisco and walked past many kennels. All of the kennels contained big black dogs and all of the big black dogs were throwing themselves against the kennel doors and barking ferociously. I continued walking. Close to the end of my tour I stopped in front of a kennel with a quiet dog inside. He was sitting very politely and with very good posture, one ear up and one ear down. He was smiling. He was white with big brown patches, like a pinto pony. "Hello," I said. He wagged his tail. I looked at his info card. His name was Cisco. He was 9 months old. He was a Shepherd X. I started to walk on to look at the next dog, when something touched my arm. I looked back. Cisco had reached a paw through the chain link and placed it on my arm. He was still smiling, still wagging his tail. "All right," I said, "you've got me."

How did your dog choose you?

PS - Cynthia has left a comment about the needs of big black dogs. When I picked out Cisco in 1974 , I was a novice with dogs, and not aware of the bias against big black dogs. In recent years, especially after REO, our black lab, joined our family, I have learned a lot more. Five big black dogs now are part of our family (& one non-black dog, too!) Big black dogs are the least likely dogs to be adopted from a shelter - they need our help. Check out this very cool website about Big Black Dogs: http://www.blackpearldogs.com/ to learn what you can do.

Something smells good....

Our dog Rocky doesn't beg at the table. Instead, he just snatches the food from the fork as it travels from the plate to your mouth. It's like a frog or lizard snapping up a fly - zap!

What's the most spectacular act of food thievery your dog has committed?
(In dog-speak, that would be a "bold and clever survival tactic".)

Dog names

I once read a short story about a vicar who, when he was drunk, told stories about his previous life as a dog. He had a dog friend, and every night the two dogs would go roaming. The two dogs had names of course, names their humans had bestowed on them, but dogs have their own names, names they give themselves. These two dogs had named themselves Moon Chaser and Lion Hunter (or was it Moon Hunter and Lion Chaser?)

What name do you think your dog would call himself or herself, and why?

(and has anybody else ever read this story and remember the title or author?)