Life With the Dogs
May 9, 2008 by richfletch
Our canine companions are wonderful company. Val, the 14-year old yellow lab has seen her better days as a duck retriever, but her loyalty has never been more endearing. Lola our 18-month old yellow lab has energy without bounds and never ceases to impress me with her enthusiasm.
Val has lost some of her senses, primarily hearing, but her general awareness has gone way downhill from her youth. In fact, she is nearly deaf, but does pretty well with hand signals.
Each morning she wakes us up at first light with a couple light woofs, which increase in volume until we open the bedroom door and then the back door to let her out. With increasing frequency, she has failed to reach the exterior door before relieving herself -the resulting dog bombs rolling on the carpet or tile floor waiting for us to dispose of.
Linda was first out of bed today and she made it to the back door before the inevitable poop. She fed Val and headed back to bed as I arrived to throw the ball to Val a few times before Lola’s release which always signals the end of Val’s opportunities to retrieve.
Exercise done, we headed indoors and I cooked a couple eggs. About the time I finished I noticed Val standing at the door – standing in dog poop. As I reached for the door handle, she stepped forward and back a couple times, grinding the brown mess into the small carpet by the door.
I let her out and, cleaning up the obvious mess, I routinely took the carpet out for a wash. Wash complete I finished my breakfast and settled in for a newspaper read. Linda arrived and we had a brief discussion. I briefed her on the Val action.
“Is Lola still in her kennel?” I asked.
“Yes,” Linda replied.
Feeling a little uncomfortable about Lola being in her kennel at 7:30 AM, I made a suggestive comment, but didn’t raise a response from Linda.
After a few more minutes passed and Linda arose and headed towards the stairway.
“Did Val poop again?” asked Linda.
“I don’t know, I replied, rising from the chair and following my nose around the downstairs portion of the house.
Entering the living room near the base of the stairway, I could smell the distinct odor of dog poop. Looking up the stairs I thought, “Oh no.”
Quickly climbing the stairs, I detected increasing odor of dog poop or worse – diarrhea!
There stood Lola in a pile of her own excrement. What to do now? Should I pick her up? Carry her to the back door?
No, I opened the cage and out she ran leaving a trail of brown dog tracks across the light colored carpet all the way to the back door.
“So much for the morning plans,” I thought to myself.
Oh the joys of house dogs!
I love yellow labs - we had one when I was a kid and she went the same way. Started getting pretty stiff, then lost her hearing, and her eye sight was not real great, but she was a wonderful dog. But she lived outside, so she never had the chance to poop on the carpet.