I spent a couple of nights at my sister's house recently. I luckily had some time to take off from work and I just wanted to get away from the smell of paint and wood stain (hubby is fixing up one of the bedrooms). It is almost always a nice retreat. She treats me so well, leaves me alone if I need it, talks if I don't want to, listens when I do. Their home is inhabited with my brother-in-law, a generous, super-intelligent, bookish sort and his dog. It is not and will never be her dog. She resented the animal from the moment it entered their living space and even though he has mellowed over time, she still resents him. Although, there are cracks in the grumbling lately. He will follow her up to her office occasionally and she will let him stay while she clacks away on the computer keys, figuring out ways to help people communicate.
I have never really had a problem with the dog. He was a little high strung at first, rambunctious and rowdy. He has an unnerving habit of "smiling" at you, curling back his lips to show you his canines. He doesn't growl when he does this. But I've never seen another dog do that without the growl and snap of jaws immediately following, so this expression usually stops me from petting him for a moment or two. Her husband thinks the dog is wonderful. He also assumes that he is smarter than he is, the dog not the man. Evidence to the contrary abound, but, my intelligent BIL just doesn't see it. One thing the dog used to do was grab things off horizontal surfaces and drag them under a coffee table in another room. There he would rip, shred and demolish whatever it was, mostly eating it at the same time. It didn't matter if it was edible or considered food. My sister despaired of ever deterring this behavior, and in her husband's defense he didn't like it either (maybe because he lost a pair of sunglasses or two) They tried lots of things to make him stop: squirting him with a foul smelling substance whenever he did this, yelling, whacking, and eventually just moving everything they thought he wouldn't be able to wrest from the surfaces to another place. Because he's older now, he doesn't do this with any regularity. He has taken this habit though to a different level. As an example, I was sitting on the couch reading. I had taken off my shoes and curled my feet under a throw to keep them warm. The dog came over for a pet or two, which I obliged, but I decided that I was done and commanded him to "go lie down." You don't say please to a dog, it confuses him, or at least this dog. Anyway, before shuffling off to lie down, he reached down, picked up one of my sneakers in his mouth and shuffled off with it in his mouth. Depositing it in front of him after laying down under the coffee table. He didn't maul the shoe. He simply put it down and looked up at me as I stood to retrieve it. I took the shoe back and placed it next to the mate, but he didn't come back for it. He just made his point.
In the morning the following day, I was getting myself ready to go downstairs and realized one of my slippers had vanished. It was next to my suitcase on the floor when I crawled off to bed the night before. I opened the door to the guest bedroom and saw the slipper next to the door. Sure enough, my sister told me the dog had entered the room while I was sleeping, picked up the slipper and taken it downstairs and placed it under the coffee table. Not mauled, not shredded or mutilated. Just placed there to be found the next morning. The next day I was packing to leave. I had placed my pajamas on top of my suitcase and gone into the bathroom to brush my teeth. I came back in the guest room and the bottom pants of the pjs were no where to be found. I walked downstairs to the coffee table and there in a lump were my pj pants. I appreciated his not ripping them or otherwise damaging them, they are one of my favorites. I marveled at his kleptomaniac tendencies and how they had evolved. No longer destructive, just sort of benign attention getting. I could live with that and evidently they are. After all he's still there, under the coffee table, looking out.
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