This Old Dog Did Learn a New Trick

Some may remember my Brittany spaniel, Maggie. The one who ate the $120 last year. Well, a bunch of $20 bills aren’t the only thing Maggie has eaten. She has eaten sponges and shoe boxes and unopened letters, and she’s dug used tissues out of the garbage and consumed them as though they were rare Alsatian bonbons.

One of her favorite maneuvers is jumping onto the table while the family is eating--she has a vertical leap like Michael Jordan’s--and grabbing my napkin, taking it into the living room and shredding it. She dug craters in the backyard the size of missile silos. She routinely poops in the house.

Maggie, the Katzenjammer Dog.

A few weeks ago, I decided to do something about it. I made her into a throw rug.

Hahaha.

Actually, social-climbing lawyers I know recommended a canine training facility, a rustic place deep in the woods, costing $500 a week. It’s apparently the Phillips Andover of dog boarding academies.

I dropped Maggie off. One week passed, then two, then three. No word from the trainer.

I telephoned.

“It’s taking a little longer than I thought,” he said. “I found out she is a Brittany, and they are very difficult dogs to train.”

He found out she was a Brittany? What did he think she was, an aardvark? He is a professional dog trainer. This is like a master chef suddenly discovering the potato he had baked and served with sour cream and chives was, in fact, a banana.

“Another week then?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said. “I’m under a lot of stress.”

How much stress can there be teaching a dog not to eat a sponge? It’s not like I handed him my dog and said, “Teach her to play the violin.”

I waited a week. Then another. Our home was quiet, tranquil, Maggie-free. My kids had nearly forgotten what she looked like. I considered leaving her at the trainer’s for good, bringing home a gerbil and telling the kids it was Maggie.

Six full weeks passed. In a sense, the joke was on Maggie because at this rate, when she got back, there’d be no money left to eat.

I called the trainer. “I assume she’s trained.”

There was a pause. “It’s not as much whether the dog is trained,” he said, “as whether the family is trained.”

“I’m coming to get her right now,” I said and hung up.

The trainer led Maggie out of the house and let her run free. And she ran gloriously. Maggie was fast and sleek and exuberant.

“How will she behave in the house?” I asked.

“Let me show you how she does in the road,” he said.

The trainer put Maggie on a leash and walked her to the middle of the road that ran by his house and then yanked hard on the leash, flipping Maggie into the air by her neck like a trout being pulled from a stream. I gasped.

“She won’t want to go in the road now,” the trainer said.

Of course not. She’ll be too busy calling a personal injury lawyer.

“Let me show you how she is in the open field,” the trainer said.

And as I watched Maggie perform obediently in the field, I realized that she’d been trained fabulously; she was a great outdoor dog. Which would be fantastic for me if I were a fur trapper.

“What about in the house?” I asked.

“In the house, she stays in a crate,” the trainer said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The object of the training is to make all her rewards come outside,” he said. “The reason she’s good in the crate is so that you’ll reward her by taking her outside.”

“I want her walking around the house, sleeping on the bed with me. I don’t want her in a crate. She’s not a bowling ball.”

“If you don’t keep her in a crate, you’ll undo all the training,” he said.

*

Ipiled the kids and dog in the car and left. We pulled up to the house. As I opened the door, I tried positive reinforcement. I said, “Maggie, you are a well-trained dog now. You will not revert to your old habits. I have complete confidence in you.”

She bounded straight for the kitchen, hopped up on the counter top, stuck her paw in the goldfish bowl and began to swipe at the goldfish like a bear with a salmon.

That night, Maggie ate a napkin. The next night, a sponge. The next night, she dashed out the front door and ran into the road. This week, she leaped out of the car through a rolled-down window and went bounding through backyards until she fell into a neighbor’s swimming pool and had to be fished out like an old boot.

I am tempted to say that Maggie learned nothing from the dog training academy, but that would be wrong. Maggie learned one dog skill she’d never had before: Now, without requiring any command from me, entirely on her own initiative, she drinks out of the toilet.