A joke:
A Baptist preacher decides to get a dog. He and his family go to shelters and breeders throughout the area in hopes of acquiring a Baptist dog. (To have a dog of any other faith would surely set tongues wagging.) After a long search, a shelter volunteer informs them that she has just the perfect dog for them. She presents to them a dog that she commands to find Psalms 23. Quite remarkably, the dog locates a bible on a nearby table, paws it open, and noses his way through the pages until he locates the passage.
They promptly adopted the dog. Some members of the congregation came calling the following day. The pleased new dog owners demonstrated their pup’s tricks and the visitors watched, agog, as the dog tracked down a series of versus.
“That’s pretty cool,” asked one visitor, “but doesn’t he do regular dog tricks?”
“I’m sure he must,” replied the preacher. He turned to the the dog and bellowed “Heel!”
Leaping into action, the dog clamored up onto the kitchen table, pressed a front paw against the brow of the preacher, and let out a wailing howl.
“My Lord,” cried the preacher, “this is a Pentacostal dog.”
I first heard this joke around the time that Amber and I adopted Ado Annie, four years ago.
Annie was my first dog. I wasn’t accustomed to their habits. So when Annie got big enough for us to put her on dry food, I was concerned by her refusal to eat it. (In retrospect, she damned well would have eaten it when she got hungry enough.) We discovered that she would eat it if we flung each morsel across the kitchen floor. Puppy that she was, she’d chase it down and snap it up, waiting for the next piece. In this manner we taught her to eat dry dog food.
In this manner, she taught us to play the food game with her.
These years later, she still demands to play the food game. Since she’s half Jack Russell, she needs a lot of exercise, which she doesn’t always get. Come bedtime she’ll sit by her bowl of dog food, whining and pleading with her eyes. I fling morsel after morsel across the floor until, the right rhythm and speed achieved, she gets the holy ghost (as we call it, in homage to the joke). This is when she gets wound up enough that she races around the room at top speed, making a dozen tight circles around its perimeter until she plops down, exhausted.
This is not always how I like to spend my evenings. I figured out how to deal with this about six months ago. The bedroom is a no-barking, no-playing zone, and Ado knows this. So I fill up her bowl at bedtime and carry it into the bedroom, signifying that we’re not playing the food game. When she tucks into her bowl for her late bedroom-dinner, I praise her. And now I don’t need to play the food game every night, merely almost every night.
Annie, on the other hand, now insists on eating dinner in the bedroom at bedtime (regardless of how much she’s already eaten), all the while keeping her eyes pointed up at me, desperate for praise. Just a few days ago I realized what I’ve done: I’ve associated eating with praise, and given my dog an eating disorder.
I’m wary of doing anything to change her behavior. Like the biologists who import lady beetles to eat the imported mites and then need to import spiders to eat the lady beetles and birds to eat the spiders, I don’t know what new mental disorder I may trigger in my poor little dog by attempting to correct this behavior.
This is why I shouldn’t be allowed to have children.