Bad Dog

My boyfriend's dog  (we'll call him Jack, because that's most of his name) recently regressed in his toilet training knowledge and began making messes in his home. What do you do when your dog suddenly becomes unmanageably messy? Of course, you bring him to your almost-OCD girlfriend's house for retraining!

I'm not bitter; I like having a furry creature around—especially one who's a little more cuddly than my decidedly independent rabbit. But I'm less appreciative of my new role as dog janitor.

Now, Jack is well known to have a selective incontinence problem. At first, whenever I would see him after an absence of a day or more, he would get so excited, he would wet himself (and my shoes, as he was usually jumping all over me). My boyfriend says he only does this for "pretty girls," so I guess I should be honored. I feel like a veritable Cinderella, scrubbing his urine off the floor after every overenthusiastic greeting.

I quickly learned that if my first action upon arriving home was to cut short the formalities and quickly herd him to the back door, I could get him outside before disaster struck. But Jack's real problem is what he does when no one is around.

When he was spending the day in his tiny dog crate, he never had an accident. He knows better than to poop where he sleeps. But as soon as my boyfriend upgraded his lodgings, things got messy.

One day, he tried to confine the dog to the kitchen (blocking the doorway with a chair and his cage). In a very short time, Jack pushed the cage and chair aside and proceeded to root through the trashcan in my bedroom before depositing a turd in the middle of my floor.

Jack was downgraded to the bathroom, which has an actual door. I came home that day to find the garbage can upended, used dental floss and Kleenex all over the floor, and several yards of toilet paper unrolled into the midst of the chaos.

Yesterday morning, after Jack had spent several days in the bathroom with no further destruction, my boyfriend started setting up the food and water bowl in my bedroom. "Are you keeping him in the room today?" I asked. He confirmed he was. "Move the garbage can somewhere where he can't get to it," I suggested. I also warned him that if his dog messed up my room, he might not find a dog at all when he got home. I alluded to the burying of a body. And then I went to work.

When I returned that evening, I entered my room with dread, asking, "Jack, were you good today?" After several weeks of toilet training in my house, Jack knows the drill. He scrambled out immediately to grovel, quivering and shamefaced, in the living room, providing me a perfect view of the small puddle in the middle of the rug.

I did not kill him.

Instead, I decided to take a deep breath, get out the vinegar spray (again) and blog about it.