next step, world domination

I’m slowly becoming convinced that the four-legged creatures in my home are way smarter than I give them credit for.

This gives me pause for several reasons.

• It makes me doubt I’ll ever be able to fully Gracie-proof this house.
• Asserting my Alpha authority (especially when Phoebe is demanding attention by shoving her head onto my keyboard WHILE I’M WRITING) often results in pitiful puppy eyes, which triggers one of two responses from me: fuss louder and stare into even more woeful eyes or give in and do what she wants.
• At times it makes me believe I’m being outsmarted by a dog, which is just a little depressing.

Last summer’s battle of wits over the bedroom door demonstrated this dynamic perfectly.

I can’t leave the dogs loose in the house if I’m leaving for an extended (well, ANY) amount of time (which I’m sure you already know if you’ve read this or this or this or this).

If the weather’s decent – i.e. not raining, horrifically hot, or terribly cold – I’ll leave them in the backyard. Truthfully, Phoebe’s more of an indoor dog and given her druthers would always choose to stay in the house, but I’m kind of weird about separating them.  Part of me feels like we’re all gone, they should have each other for company.  Another part thinks it would make Gracie feel bad if she were left outside while Phoebe got to stay in (though I admit that sounds a little dog-owner-crazy).

At any rate, they’re typically together, and with summers in North Carolina being the godforsaken, 150% humidity, heatstroke inducing hell that they are it means they’re usually left in the house for May, June, July, and August.  (Thank you, Lord, for working A/C.)

Anyway, I keep them inside because I don’t want to torture them, but I’m not crazy enough to let them run around wherever they want (see links above).  They stay in our bedroom, and if Gracie’s being particularly naughty I’ll put her in her crate for good measure.  It’s what we consider a calculated risk – they’ll (well, really GRACIE) will most likely do well and if she doesn’t, we’ve limited available possibilities for destruction.

Now here’s an interesting fact about our bedroom door, one that’s central to the battle of wits last summer.  That door swells in the hot months so the latch doesn’t quite catch – you can “close” it, but it’s not really closed in the sense that the doorknob thingie doesn’t extend fully into the doorjamb hole.  (All very technical language, I know – feel free to give us the correct terminology if you’re in contracting or, say, just know about doors.)

So we’d put the dogs in my bedroom before leaving, but when we’d close the garage/house door behind us the change in the hallway’s air pressure (yeah, I have no idea if that’s what caused it) would open the bedroom door. Voilá, canine freedom!

After a few experiences returning to find destruction throughout the house we tried another approach.  We’d pull the bedroom door closed while wedging BrightSide’s slipper under it, the theory being that this would secure the door enough that it wouldn’t simply pop open.

Enter the canine intelligence factor.

Even after using the slipper, we’d still return to find the bedroom door open and dogs happily greeting us.  I didn’t know what was going on; I just figured the slipper wasn’t giving us enough pull on the door.  At least that was my theory until the day Bear and T-man discovered the dogs’ secret: Phoebe had figured out how to open the door.

(In my own defense, I’d like to point out here that it’s not like I was leaving them all day or anything.  A longish block of time would be four hours, if I had errands or volunteering or appointments back-to-back.  So the dog didn’t have eight or nine hours for problem solving, but I guess given proper motivation…)

Anyway, Phoebe had learned how to hook her paw into the slipper and pull on it until the door popped open, then she’d hook her paw around the door itself and pull (seriously!) until she could get out of the bedroom.

Okay…next I flipped the slipper upside-down, figuring that way Phoebe wouldn’t be able to actually get her paw into the slipper so she’d only be able to grab at the sole of it.  Surely that wouldn’t give her enough leverage to open a freaking door.  No go…she still managed to break free.

All right, smarty pants, then I brought the slipper to the outside.  I’d close the bedroom door and then shove the slipper (upside-down) underneath it.  This didn’t work either.  We’d still return to the house to find two dogs with wagging tails greeting us at the door.

I’ll freely admit that at this point many people would have actually tried to fix the door itself.  All I can say is a) I’m stubborn, and b) I’m not like “many people.”

By this point you’re probably wondering how we finally fixed it, and I’m just a tiny bit embarrassed to say that we didn’t…we finally reached September, the door went back to normal, and the latch worked again.  I can’t imagine how surprised Phoebe must have been the first day she yanked on that slipper and the door didn’t open for her.

So I guess I’d have to say the dogs won the summer’s battle (you can see how that insecurity about being outsmarted might come into play here, right?), but I’m determined they won’t win the war on this one.  Before next summer we’ll figure out a way to fix the door itself.

I’m sure of it.