Vigilance

Molly and her crate

In the same category as "don't overfeed the dog" was "don't feed her from the table". The spoiled dachshunds I grew up with got more people food than they should have and too often they got it handed to them by people seated at a meal. So of course the family dogs begged at the table and whined and barked when they felt we weren't responding to their needs. 

I really didn't want my dog to do this. Molly never got a table scrap from our hands (which is not to say she never got a table scrap), but she put a few pieces together in her own mind about what we were doing up there and what it meant to her. She was never one to whine or bark or even obviously beg at the table, but she understood the rewards of constant vigilance and of the occasional foray onto the table itself.

We, on the other hand, had been confident enough in our training of the dog that while we knew not to leave things lying around on low surfaces, we thought things on the dining room table were safe. As a failsafe, we always pushed the chairs in under the table, thinking that not even Molly could jump that high. For more than three years, this method worked. 

But that all changed one fateful night when we had a friend over for drinks and snacks before going out to dinner. In the rush of details before leaving, I absent-mindedly left two small bowls on the coffee table with some roasted red pepper dip and some hummus in them.

When we returned from our night out, I saw the small bowls and remarked to myself how very, very clean they were. Of course the dog had gotten on the coffee table and scarfed up the leftovers.

As was so often the case with our understanding of the dog, we underestimated the meaning of Molly's having broken the table top barrier. It seemed like a one-time event for us. We would just make sure not to leave anything on the coffee table again. 

For Molly, it was the opening of a frontier....

For the first three years we had Molly, I worked at home and she slept with us, so we had not used her crate for anything but transporting her when we travelled by car. The events arising in the aftermath of the evening we had our friend over were in some measure the reason why we started to crate her.

Not long after the evening out with our friend, I came home one day at lunch time to give Molly her walk. There was evidence everywhere in the form of little pools of dog barf on the carpet that Molly had indeed gotten onto the dining room table and had eaten about a half a pound of butter.

I came home a few days later at lunch time and found little patches of chewed clean hairless carpet on the spots where Molly had barfed. Clearly the clean up had not gotten all the butter. Just as clearly the dog could not be trusted on her own. So we started putting her in her crate when we weren't at home.

When we were at home, and eating at the table or preparing food in the kitchen, Molly remained vigilant for the opportunities gravity brought her as crumbs fell like rain from the dining room table, or chopped vegetables and other goodies dropped from the kitchen counter.  

We never left anything on the dining room table again. But that didn't mean the dog gave up trying for another sweet bonanza she knew she'd scored at least twice before. Once in a while, I'd come out of one of the bedrooms in our condo when the dog and I were home and see the cloth on the dining room table rucked up at one end, the kind of thing you'd see after a dog had launched itself to the floor from the table top.

Molly keeps a vigilant eye on the lower corner cabinet where we stored her biscuits.

When Molly wasn't obsessing about food, she was happy to play, which you can read about here.