Wet Feet

My dumb brother, Rocky, hates to get his feet wet. I mean he HATES it. He is such a pansy dog. He won’t even put his feet in the pool to get a drink of water; he spreads his front legs all out like he thinks he is a giraffe or something. It is a little crazy. I think it is because he spent so much time at the shelter before he found a home. He never had a chance to get used to wet feet or pokey grass as a puppy. The shelter people said he was unadoptable because he was too nervous. I feel bad for them, because they are trying to find so many dogs homes that they have to pick and choose which ones they think people will love.

It is true, when he first came home, he was pretty scared of just about everything. Now he hardly ever tucks his tail even when there are a lot of people around. But this whole wet feet thing, it’s a problem. See, in Florida, in the winter, the grass is very wet in the mornings. Something about dew points or rain or that dad hasn’t mowed the grass in a while.

We are a family with a morning routine. First dad gets up and showers. Then he opens the door to let us out and feeds us. Mom lies in bed pretending to be asleep. When this process is working correctly, we eat, we poop, and then I get to climb into bed with mom after dad leaves for work. Mom pretends to sleep some more before she gets up. After she gets up, I play with the dummy for a while to make him happy because I know he has to go in the box for a few hours (I try to make him behave, I swear, but when he is ransacking something it looks like so much fun, I end up joining in.)

Anyway, this wet grass is ruining our routine. Rocky doesn’t want to go outside to poop in the grass. I get that; wet grass sucks, but we have a cushy life and this one little thing isn’t a deal breaker. Rocky is ruining everything. He wants to poop IN THE HOUSE! This means mom doesn’t get to lie in bed and I don’t get my morning snuggles. Well, this morning she caught him. Woo hoo! You should have seen it!

She came around the corner and caught him in full squat by the front door, man did she yell. She told him ‘No, go outside.’ And he sure did—right out the back door and back in through the bedroom door. Mom changed directions to chase him the other way. It was exactly like when he runs around the kitchen island and thinks I don’t know which way to go. Mom knew which way to go, but she didn’t catch him. He jumped into his box and wouldn’t come out.

That didn’t stop mom though. She just shut the door and pulled the whole darn crate right out onto the pool deck. Then she got a leash and took him out into that tall wet grass and made him walk around and around in it. It was horrible to watch (from the dry rocks, wet feet suck). I can’t really blame mom for being mad. Rocky is a year and a half old and knows about pooping outside. This is sort of like your 13 year old child being sent home from school for pooping his pants because he thought the bathroom was too smelly. Not acceptable.

There was no way that Rocky was going to finish his poop in that grass this morning. Not only were his feet wet, but he was so scared by mom yelling that his butt would take hours to unpucker. Mom walked him around and around and talked softly to him so he wouldn’t think the grass was such a bad thing. It really didn’t work. I knew it wouldn’t. On the upside, maybe mom will get that she needs to crawl her butt out of bed 30 minutes earlier and take us for a real walk in the mornings like she did in the fall. That would be fantastic.