I Am So Washing My Hands

A feather.  A chicken (?) bone.  A used Kleenex.  A wad of gum.  Enough sticks to build a child-size log cabin.

These are all things I have touched in the past few months.  And not out of any unconquerable curiosity of my own.  I have not become a budding naturalist, eager to gather specimens in the nearby urban park and bring them home for further study.  I do not see a bedraggled pigeon feather and think:  treasure!

Unfortunately, Dorothy does.  Not only does she think “treasure!”, but she thinks “edible treat!”  Thus when I write “touched” above, what I really mean is “tried to wrestle out of Dorothy’s clamped jaws for a good five minutes.”  As a bulldogge, Dorothy is naturally stubborn.  But as a me, so am I.  Thus we can on occasion be found in the park, Dorothy with her jaws locked on a bone, say, me with my hand locked on the bone locked in Dorothy’s jaws.  It’s a stand-off that so far I have almost always won, albeit not without a lot of exclamations of disgust. 

One of the many commands we have been working on in our training sessions is “drop it.”  This is probably the command that Dorothy is the least inclined to follow, but indoors she will respond, with the occasional thirty-second lag time.  And strangely, she is quite good at responding to “Leave it”, especially when “it” is “cat”; by now she almost always will leave the it she is concentrating on and come to me for a treat. 

But this is her response indoors.  I’ve noticed that outdoors is a whole other scenario.  Commands that she will follow in our apartment will just make her blink at me and continue on doing what she’s doing when we are outside.  So I can only conclude that at the moment, indoors Dorothy is my bitch, but outdoors I’m Dorothy’s.