Every once in a while, your pet does something so bad — so outrageous — that you just have to laugh. (Maybe after you’re done cleaning up!)
I like to tell a story from Moose’s early days with me. While I was at work one day, he ripped open a garbage bag and redecorated the kitchen with the contents. The cans that had been in the garbage were licked and chewed clean — Moose even left tooth holes in some of the cans. That’s one mighty jaw!
I posed the question to some pet lovers I know online, and got some amazing stories in response.
Katie from Alabama had a pretty wild child in her dog Julie: “When we first adopted Julie she was a 105lb 18 month old Dane who’d never lived inside a house and had serious neuroses. The first time we left her at home alone, we closed her into our bedroom after shutting closet doors and putting everything we could think of out of reach. The only things she had access to were our bed and the twin-sized bed that had belonged to the deceased Dane that we’d owned before her and that our other dogs slept on. We assumed she’d adopt it as her own. No such luck. She first pooed and peed all over the twin bed, then ripped the blinds and curtains from the windows, ripped the covers off our bed, and tracked poo all over everything.
“We tried a number of ways to minimize her destruction after that. We got her a wire crate that she demolished, injuring herself in the process. We tried giving her free reign and she ate the arms and cushions off of a giant sleeper sofa. We tried leaving her in our yard and she ate her way through siding and wood and into the crawl space, and then out of a ventilation vent beneath the house so that she could escape in the front yard, where she promptly went to the front porch to wait by the front door until we returned home.
“My husband and I also do rescue and have lots of stories about our foster dogs.”
Kelsey from Wisconsin also shared a “home alone” horror story about her dog, Vita: A month or so after she was adopted, Vita one day managed to liberate herself from her crate while I was away at class. This is the scene I opened my apartment door to the first time my boyfriend came over: Aside from dragging the garbage out of the kitchen and spreading it all over the apartment, she also destroyed and partially ate a hardcover political science textbook, chewed the corner of a very rare, pricey paperback book, and destroyed a remote. I estimate her rampage ended with the remote’s batteries, one of which had a very distinct canine tooth mark in it.
A coworker at the cats-only boarding facility used to have a dog who would chase the beam of light from a flashlight. Once they made the mistake of shining the light on the ceiling — so the dog went upstairs and chewed through the floor to try to get to the light!
Do you have any “tails of terror” from your pets? It’s story time!