Every Dog Has His Day, and Coco Will Too

Coco, our bubble-headed miniature dachshund, is in between two special dates. She had her first birthday several weeks ago, and a few weeks hence will mark her first anniversary with our family. She celebrated her birthday by peeing in the 11-year-old kid’s bed and eating part of the roof of her doghouse. God knows what she’ll come up with for her anniversary.

This seems a good time to step back and assess Coco’s life to date. A kind of animal fitness report. An annual review to see if her performance measures up to her responsibilities--and, if not, what to do about it short of feeding her to the great Dane next door.

We now know that Coco--I still choke over that name--went to obedience school much too early. Although she came out with a cryptic score of 176, this is either one of the great educational travesties of all time or is based on a top score of 10,000. Obedience is not yet in her lexicon.

A neighbor who has been kind--and courageous--enough to look after Coco on occasion was heard to say, in some exasperation, “Come here, you damn wharf rat.” Both in tone and language, this expresses rather precisely the level of obedience Coco has achieved.

When she is called, she has the courtesy to look at her caller. But the look is semi-detached and the summons is clearly not seen as imperative. If it is accompanied by “good girl”--a phrase she seems to associate with a reward of liver sausage--as she moves an inch or two in the right direction, she may eventually get there. By that time, the caller has either picked her up bodily or forgotten what the summons was for in the first place.

Punishing her seems fairly useless (beyond allowing an outlet for frustration) because her memory retention appears to be about 30 seconds. She is always properly repentant when she commits an indiscretion and is punished. She cowers and looks pitiful for a minute or two--and then might quite likely commit the same indiscretion again 30 minutes later.

She is, I suppose, housebroken, although it is difficult to be sure. She certainly has better control of her bladder, which is a big step in the right direction, and because we now let her in the house much more than we used to, she no longer goes berserk at the opportunity to race up and down the halls and chew furniture. We no longer watch her all the time she is in the house, but I perpetually have the uneasy feeling that if she needed to relieve herself, she would. This in spite of a decent track record of late--except for the slip on her birthday, which may have been a statement of some kind.

Coco still has limited acceptance in our big-dog neighborhood.

She is tolerated by the men and responds by barking at them whenever they walk by and make a pass at being civil to her. Children--especially small girls--love her, and the vote is split among neighborhood women. Whenever I find myself with Coco among a group of neighbors, I show them how tough she is by fighting with her, which she does with some enthusiasm. I hope in this way to erode the image of a total cupcake which grows out of her being constantly carried around and fondled--which she also enjoys.

She has absolutely no concept of her size. She’s exceedingly clever about trying to get at the rabbit in his cage, hanging back and looking bored until the door is opened, then darting through a tiny hole into the rabbit’s box. I’m waiting for the rabbit to thump her, which hasn’t happened yet. By the same token, she scolds the great Dane whenever he comes into view and if released would go charging after him.

She tends to be afraid of the wrong things. Opening and closing the garage overhead door frightens her, but she will go into tight places after a raccoon or a killer cat. She isn’t, however, totally unaware of Falstaff’s admonition that “discretion is the better part of valor.” When a cat stands his ground, instead of running as the rules require, Coco backs off to a judicious distance.

The verdict is still out on her skills as a watchdog. Although she hears every unconventional sound and usually barks at it--which is good--she also rolls over on her back and waves her paws in the air to be scratched by every stranger--which is bad.

She’s terribly self-important, going about her rounds each day with an “I’ll-brook-no-nonsense-here” approach--barking at the cats that amuse themselves by baiting her, trying to intimidate the rabbit, raising hell with anyone or anything that crosses her acreage, sniffing out odors that don’t belong. Because she is built so low to the ground, she lives by her nose, plowing a furrow wherever she goes.

I suppose all this adds up to a D-minus in obedience, a C-plus in house manners, a B-minus in security, and perhaps a B-plus in courage, even if it is frequently mindless. But no fitness report would be complete or fair without considering some of the more ethereal qualities she brings to our family.

For example, she’s very, very funny, often without meaning to be. The evolutionary process that produced this shape in an animal must have been intended to lighten the burden of the humans associated with them. She is also remarkably athletic and graceful, which doesn’t go with the shape at all--and makes it even funnier. It’s very difficult to be depressed when she’s around. Especially when she runs and gets a toy the instant you give her a bit of attention.

And then there’s the warmth and trust of having her crawl or jump into your lap, something a larger dog can’t pull off. Sometimes it worries me that I’m going soft on this creature, and then I have to throw her off my lap and fight with her to put things back in perspective.

I just hope she doesn’t try to top her birthday performance on her anniversary. She warmed up for that the other day by stealing one of my hearing aids off my desk and dropping it in the leaves in the back yard. I was threatening her with the great Dane when I found it. This doesn’t bode well, but even if she surpasses this performance, I suppose we’ll keep her around for another year and see how she shapes up then.