Give a Dog a Fish...

Some of my favorite stories about the dogs involve some form of counter surfing. Natasha didn't do this. Faith hasn't yet. Morgan considered the infant in the height chair to be a self-replenishing popsicle stick: he was constantly covered in stuff that was worth licking off, and could be relied on to drop interesting stuff. Somehow, none of the dogs have had any trouble managing "oops" as one of their commands. But my favorite stories along these lines involve Pooh Bear and Trevor.

As a young dog, Pooh Bear (Sheena) had expensive taste in wine. We discovered this one night when we left our glasses sitting on a living room table to check on dinner. The Animal Health Techniciam I was seeing at the time had a wonderful goofy lab, Sunny, who proceeded to teach Pooh Bear that wine glasses were made for dog tongues. You think coordinating two legs is tough when you are drunk! No way these two were going to walk a straight line. The two conducted a series of wine tastings over several weeks. We determined that Sunny would drink (or eat) nearly anything, but Pooh Bear would not touch red wine, and would pass on any white below $20 a bottle. Considering that I was then living in the San Francisco Bay Area, where good wine is readily available in the supermarket at $12/bottle, that qualifies as expensive. Pooh also liked Guiness, but wouldn't touch other beers.

Sunny, for calibration, once ate Pooh Bear's leather leash. Whole. The only part he left was the clasp, and it's entirely possible that he just hadn't gotten to it yet. The AHT got it back in pieces over the next week and a half, and having a quirky sense of humor, carefully froze the entire collection so I could see it. Bleh!

I do feel compelled to point out that dogs cannot digest alcohol (they lack the necessary enzymes) and you certainly shouldn't try this at home! We didn't let them have very much - teaspoons worth on any given night. Being older, if not wiser, I wouldn't repeat those experiments today.

In her older days, Pooh Bear was pretty slow, so it was easy to think you didn't need to keep an eye on her. After all, how fast could she go? Fast enough, it turned out. Our neighbor (and landlord) brings his lunch out on his deck next store one day - a metal bowl of spaghetti with meat sauce. Pooh was out on our back deck, and in the time it took him to go back inside, hunt up a beer, and return, she had ambled over to his porch and finished his meal. We were inside, and we come out to see her nose covered in tomato sauce, licking her lips, and him trying to figure out whether to be annoyed or laugh heartily. Laughing won out, thankfully. Frank has a great sense of humor.

That same year, we found Morgan standing on our kitchen table trying to open a box of Matzoh (!) that was still sealed in plastic. It seems she was having a growth spurt, and was feeling a bit peckish. Either that or she was of German-Jewish descent. And when I say "standing on the table", I mean all four paws! This was my wife's first experience with counter surfing in it's full-on form, but it really didn't prepare her for what was to come. Which brings me to today's posting title.

A few years after the Matzoh Incident we had moved to Maryland and gotten Trevor. One night my wife takes a 2 pound salmon filet out of the oven in its pyrex dish and places it on the counter to cool while she sets up the table. Puts out the plates and so forth, brings out the vegetables, goes back to get the pyrex, and it's gone. Not the fish. The entire dish. As if it had never been.

Now this is puzzling, because she's sure she took it out of the oven, and... but maybe... oh hell, it's probably burning! And she steps around the island in the kitchen and kicks the pyrex dish accidentally, which is sitting on the floor with about half a pound of salmon left, and a very satisfied-looking Trevor gazing at it wistfully, trying to work out whether he has room for the rest of the salmon. Think Winnie the Pooh here, faced with a pot of honey he can't manage to eat. Like that. Now mind you, the pyrex is completely undamaged. Trevor had lifted the whole darn thing carefully off the counter and put it down on the floor for convenient access. Which made the whole thing too funny to be mad about.

Needless to say, we didn't feed Trevor kibble that night. :-) He issued salmon-smelling burps for the next week to remind us of his victory. To this day, whenever we bring bagles home to eat he keeps a particularly hopeful eye on my son. Who has been known to drop the occasional piece of lox...

Sometimes Rotties and BCs don't need to be taught. Motive and opportunity are quite often enough for them to figure things out all by themselves on the first opportunity. So maybe we taught him to fish after all...