Our daughter has to attend some teaching conference and her husband has chosen to take Monday off and go with her. But what to do with their lovely Boston/Fox Terrier mix "dog"? Well, the other set of "grandparents" met them for lunch and took the dog, and brought her here to grace our home for the next two or three days.
Our dog (the one on the beach, below) is geriatric, comfortably settling into her dotage, and as with many old folk, is happy to be set in her ways. Then this. A visit from a junior version of the ol' Warner Bros. Tasmanian Devil.
There is only one game for this dog, and it is never boring or tiring in her eyes. Bring "Grandpa" some chewed-up, stuffing-long-gone toy, place it on his knee, taunt him until he goes for it, try to beat him to it, play tug-of-war as if your entire future depended on it, and once you inevitably surrender it to the human, bark at the human until the thing is thrown. Retrieve it with absurd speed, often overshooting it if on bare floor, return it, and repeat the process. At least 750 times.
Here is where dog eventually beats human. For every retrieval, the toy in play (currently a formerly stuffed whale) becomes slightly more disgustingly slobbery. The slobber is cumulative. By around the 27th toss, no human wants to even consider touching the thing. By this stage, I have usually backed off.
But the dog has no discernable sense of the passage, or non-passage, of time. None of them do, as far as I know. So after the dog walks off a victor, she is likely to walk back in for a brand new game perhaps 45 seconds later.
Such is the filling of the empty nest this week. The photo is from fairly late in the game this evening.
1 comment:
We have the same game here with the Boston, except with one attention hogging pug running interference. This usually generates growls from the Boston, and the game morphs from fetch to tug-of-war.
Good luck avoiding the sloppy whale.
Post a Comment