My Love and Torture

If you are a dog owner, you know this truth: Nothing can drive a person crazier than his or her dog. As dogs owners, we routinely come home to tipped over garbage cans, their half-rotten contents scattered over the kitchen floor. We find our favorite shoes irreparably chewed through and slobbered on. We step into little piles of poo surreptitiously deposited behind large furniture. And always, we discover our four-legged friend at the scene of crime, looking at us and wagging his tail with heart-bursting joy. You're tempted to yell, but you can see in his eyes that the memory of his transgression has already slipped from his mind, even as his mouth is still wrapped around your shoe. You can't really know exasperation until that moment.

Dogs, being dogs, cannot be expected to flawlessly live according to human conventions. The destructive habits of dogs are really our fault and therefore count towards our moron tax.

Teabiscuit, my dog, has cost me a lifetime* of moron tax. Memorable instances include:

1. He once dragged a used baby diaper out of the bathroom garbage can and chewed it open in the middle of my living room. He ate half of the diaper and smeared the other half on my white rug. I found him with a diaper tag stuck on his face and brown stain around his mouth.
   
2. By pulling at the curls of the carpet with his teeth, Teabiscuit unraveled approximately a 3x2 square foot area of my carpet.
   
3. While I was putting on my favorite jeans, Teabiscuit jumped at me. On the descent, he managed to nip a piece of my jeans between his teeth and pulled down a strip of fabric from my thigh down to my knee.
   
4. He has eaten a pair of wire frame glasses and a ceramic plate. To this day, I have no idea how he managed to break both those items into bite-sized pieces.
5. Teabiscuit once nipped the end of the toilet paper roll in his mouth and ran into the living room streaming the toilet paper behind him like a ribbon. He managed to unroll about a quarter of the toilet roll before I discovered and stopped his antic.
   

* Teabiscuit has also given me a lifetime of love and fulfilment that makes all the rest worthwhile.