I’ve bought my dog a scary new bed. I’m not sure what’s scary about it but the dog thinks it’s terrifying and should be avoided at all costs. There should certainly be no lying on it.
To me the (expensive) new bed looks fluffy, cosy, comfortable. To the dog it looks like some kind of trap. Something designed to transport him to the vet or, worse still, clean him. (Heaven forbid.) It’s just a bed.
I thought he’d love it. My main concern was that he’d love it so much he’d eat it. That, at least, won’t happen, not if he won’t go within two paws of it. This is, by the way, a dog who loves to lounge. On my bed, on my couch, on me. My dog weighs 30kgs. I really need him to lie on that new bed.
For now, he just lounges on the floor, studiously avoiding the scary new bed. We’ve tried everything to win him over, including showing him Instagram posts of all the other dogs lying on their lovely new beds, lying on the lovely new bed ourselves to show him how lovely it is, and leaving it in all his favourite snuggle spots. Now he just thinks the bed is following him around and is even scarier.
My big dog is a big chicken. The resident rabbits aren’t even afraid of him. That’s how come we have resident rabbits. We send him out the back door to chase them off the lawn but what we suspect happens, once he’s around the corner, is he gives them a quick hug and sends them hopping off on their merry way.
My dog loves a hug. It’s his superpower. And I love my dog’s hugs. There’s nothing like it to get your day off to a good start. Lucky for me, it’s how every day starts. I let him out of the kennel (where he prefers to sleep rather than on his cosy new bed – go figure) and he immediately leaps up on to our bed. It’s actually more of a body slam than a hug but it’s meant with love, you can tell.
In the evening he sits on my lap on the couch and we watch Netflix together. That’s 30kg of lap dog. 30kg of snoring lap dog. I really need him to get on that new bed.
The only time the chicken-dog does not behave like a chicken is when he’s defending me from the vacuum cleaner. Well thank goodness for that. The vacuum cleaner is his mortal enemy. (It may have been something I said.) The dog goes into full attack mode and it’s all I can do to get anything cleaned up.
Summer is the worst. This is the time for rolling in dried grass and then bringing it inside to roll into the newly vacuumed carpet. The dog, that is, not me. I’m the one hefting the vacuum cleaner in and out of the cupboard and wondering why I bother.
That the dog who loves cuddles and sleeping on people’s laps should also love his kennel – essentially just a wooden box with a run on the front – never ceases to amaze me. Sometimes he takes himself off there, tucks himself up in the dogbox and lies there happily watching the world go by. I have a feeling that at night-time all his bunny friends call by for a chinwag.
Update: Roxy has saved the day. Roxy is next door’s 15-year-old Shih Tzu. Roxy is almost completely blind and deaf but she knows a good bed when she finds one. Roxy is scared of actual scary things like the big, noisy machines that came to her house yesterday to fix the driveway. Roxy didn’t like the machines so she made a rare trip through the fence and came to our house where she found refuge in a cosy new dog bed.
Some time later, when the scary machines had stopped with the scary noises, Roxy went home and Beau, the big scaredy cat-dog, decided the new bed wasn’t that scary after all.
The End.
