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  4. It didn’t matter how quiet I was with a bag of chips or where I was.  As soon as I opened a bag… POOF… I had doxies suddenly staring at me pretty much like your boys.

      • Our Ravenous Beast has an extensive English language vocabulary. He’s a pretty docile black Lab, but if one of us says the magic words “treat,” “eat,” “cheese,” “meat,” “lunch,” “dinner,” “food,” “snack,” etc., his ears go up and he takes his place in the kitchen. “Maybe you could teach me how to say this stuff in one of your foreign languages?” “Ravenous Beast would become multilingual in a week, tops.”

          • Our previous dog was a small German shepherd and because I’m crazy it was fun I made her bilingual English/German. She was a friendly, sociable hound, too friendly sometimes, so I’d bark out, “Sitz dich, Hündchen!” (“Sit, ‘puppy'” although it’s also a friendly diminutive) and she’d obey. To the other dog owners I might as well have been speaking Klingon, so rare is it to hear German spoken nowadays in New York.

            Prior to her we had two dogs, one a bright Cairn terrier and one an elderly King Charles Spaniel. Our local dog run, for some reason, saw an influx of French and French-Canadian patrons, so I/we got the Cairn bilingual in French/Québécois but the King Charles was a lost cause. He was a wonderful dog in so many ways, but he was an old dog who could not be taught new tricks.

        • Mine respond to “What time is it?,” “Is it 5:00?,” “Is it time to feed the dogs?,” and “Are you starving?”

          Sometimes we speak in code: “The canines would like you to know they are famished.”

    • Because I’m feeling self-indulgent, as always:

      One evening, in The Before Times, Better Half was off in some global locale and I was up on our planted, amenity-ridden roof with my dog. This was before the co-opization of the building, when dogs were allowed on the roof. A neighbor I was friendly with was up there with her dog. Over a glass or six of wine we were lamenting about how it sucked that our respective husbands traveled so much, but we had much more to discuss. We were out of wine and she said, “I have more, just watch [her dog] and I’ll–”

      “I just realized you’ve never seen my apartment! Let’s all go to my apartment because I have lots of wine!”

      So we went down and her dog made a beeline to my home office/underground lair, which is where Faithful Hound’s crate/mancave is. Tipsily we ran after and my dog was not far behind. The crate barely fit my dog and barely fit the other dog, but rather than WWIII breaking out my dog squeezed in companionably with her dog. How they both fit in there defies one of the Newtonion Laws of Physics but they did.

      I have never told Better Half about this but the secret to a strong and long-lasting relationship is the judicious deployment of secrecy. But the weird thing is ever since when we run into each other and our partner(s) and dog(s) are around we plead all ignorance, as if she and I had snuggled up in the mancave. Closest I’ve ever come to seducing another man’s wife, I guess.

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