Puppy Teeth
I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Every so often, Weegie does something perfectly nice. Early this morning, for about 15 minutes, she played quietly with a toy at my feet while I worked on my laptop.
She knows half a dozen words of English plus all the variations on her name: Weege, the Weege, Weegikins, Weegel, the Weegemite and, as our local cardinal puts it, "Weegie, oh Weegie, oh Weegie, oh Weegie, oh!" Play it!
More amazingly, she goes to the door and looks at it. When I come and open it for her, she runs outside and goes to the bathroom! This only happens sometimes, but you have no idea how thrilling it is.
She has learned to walk on the leash reasonably well, sits on command, allows a certain amount of grooming, and sleeps quietly for as long as she can at night.
But despite this evidence of progress, she is still a biting, chewing, yapping terror a good bit of the time. And I still feel mean, constantly shushing and scolding (while unhooking her teeth from my sweater) and following suspiciously whenever she leaves the room (invariably, I am glad I did).
We are plunged from perfect harmony to agonizing chaos in the blink of an eye. Yesterday, she lay sweetly at Craig's feet while he spoke with his most important client on the phone. I came home from the office unexpectedly, and Weegie flung herself at me with ear-splitting shrieks and peed all over my shoes. She was glad to see me.
They say you should praise a dog (or a child) nine times for each correction. But with Weegie, nine out of ten behaviors are undesirable. Do the math: to maintain a ratio of nine times that I praise her for each correction, I would have to overlook 89 out of every ninety infractions. How would she ever learn? And how would we (and our house) ever survive?