My husband picked Chloe from her monthly “spa day” around 4 p.m. My daughter? No, my basset hound. Well, not exactly a basset hound, according to an expert I spoke with. She’s a “field basset hound,” meaning, I believe, that she has some beagle in her. It’s not a bad mix, really. She listens well—for treats—and doesn’t drool. She barks like a Rottweiler, which is a good thing, but howls when she really wants to let herself be heard. She’ll eat anything, and I do mean anything. It took us a few years to realize that we couldn’t anything on the kitchen counters because, although she’s low to the ground, like a basset, she’s long and has a very long tongue. She’s eaten whole loaves of bread, whole packages of English Muffins, meat, cheese, well, you get the picture. We were able to break her of the habit of eating the cat poop in their litter boxes.
Chloe listens and figures out what you want her to do. When we got our Temper-Pedic mattress, she couldn’t get her little legs up on the bed, so we went and bought doggy stairs for her. So she’s decided the bed is hers. She usually tries to sleep between husband and me, but not in a parallel position. No, she sleeps cross-wise, digging her nails into my husbands back. This usually drives him out of bed and down to the couch. Chloe seems to get that this will happen, because as soon as he’s up, she moves up to his pillow and goes to sleep.
She’s not trainable in the usual sense; I think she has ADHD. She never has figured out how to fetch. She watches my son throw a ball, or a bone and yell, “FETCH!” and she’ll sit there and watch him go and bring back the ball and try again. She has an amused look on her face, as though she’s trained the boy to fetch things for her.
We also have two cats. One, Tigger, is five years old and Chloe is smitten with him. It’s made him a nervous wreck; he eats and throws up his food. Then he’ll eat some of Chloe’s food instead. He’s in need of some Valium or Xanax. Our second cat, Lucy, is the queen of the house and the other pets know it, but Chloe is not bright enough to believe it. She’ll go up to Lucy, I suspect to try to be friendly, and Lucy will swat her with her clawless paw hard enough to make Chloe yelp. I think Lucy has never bonded to Chloe or Tigger. She had her mate, my other cat, Winston, who died when I was five months pregnant with my son. She’s very anti-social to the other pets, but will come up to my husband and me and meow until we scratch her back. Then she goes back to her spot in the house- the end of our bed on my side. She was a stray I adopted in Florida when she was a year old. She’s now fifteen and has an obsessive-compulsive licking disorder where she licks her belly down to the skin. This is an actual veterinary diagnosis, not my assumption.
I feel like we need an animal behaviorist, or a dog/cat whisperer to come to our house and figure out what’s wrong with our pets. Alone, they are lovable and gentle. But put them together and all hell breaks loose. Consider this: While Chloe is stretched out between my husband and I on our bed, which is a king-sized bed and of which Tim and I have about 12 inches to ourselves, Lucy is sleeping at my feet and Tigger is sleeping at my husbands feet. Any variation from this configuration confuses the hell out of Chloe. She’ll stand on the top step of her doggy steps and whine and moan, until I intervene and put Lucy back in her place and Tigger in his. God forbid that Lucy is sleeping in Chloe’s spot or comes a few inches into her territory. Chloe will start to quietly moan and then loudly groans until Lucy retreats. It’s like Lucy is saying, “Iespown you, don’t you forget it!”
Our non-dysfunctional ten-year-old son is responsible for caring for these little psychos. Feeding them twice a day isn’t too bad; he balks at cleaning the litter boxes. We have two, because Tigger decided he didn’t like sharing one with Lucy anymore. Maybe he didn’t put the seat down, I’m not sure, but one day he started urinating in the corner of our dining room. On thick pile carpet, which now has to be replaced, because we tried everything on the market to clean it - things that swore it would remove pet odors, even cat urination odors. They lie, don’t believe them. So Tigger has his private litter box, which means twice the work for our son. But hey, he earns ten dollars a week allowance and that’s his only main chores. Other than keeping his room clean, but that’s another subject in itself.
My husband and I watched the movie Marley and Me and realized that Chloe wasn’t such a bad dog.
