My Two Dogs

Well, let me tell you, I have some kind of dogs. They are rat terrier fiests. One is blind, one is mentally challenged, and both of them are going deaf. If we tied the dogs together, maybe one could see where the other one was going, but they neither one would hear a car coming.

Anyway, Sophie Elizabeth is my dog, and Maddie Biscuit is my husband's dog. Maddie used to be our daughter's dog, but she kept running down the street trying to escape and she got tired of chasing her, so we took the dog in.

I love them both dearly, but they do have issues. Sophie is mentally challenged. She is a PICA dog. That means she eats inedible things, mainly plastic bags. If you find a ziplock zipper laying in the floor, it just means that Sophie has eaten the bag part. If you hurt her feelings, or she is feeling blue or even bored, she eats plastic bags. Mostly those Wal-Mart or Food Lion plastic bags. She will, if she can't find her favorite brand of bag, consume a regular trash bag if necessary. Anything can set her off and she binges on plastic bags. Then, naturally, she has to dispose of the contents of her stomach (because plastic bags don't digest very well) -- how do I put this delicately?--there really isn't any other way to say this -- she barfs the entire bag that has been torn into little pieces and swallowed onto the closest piece of clean carpet that she can find.

Sophie likes carpet. She spends her entire dinner time carrying mouthfuls of food from her dinner bowl to the carpet to eat. Sometimes she eats what she brings to the carpet, sometimes she likes to leave it there to have for a snack later. Annoying habit -- though, she has done it since she was a tiny puppy. She is spotted on one side and has black and white markings on her other side, while her head is mostly black and white and brown. We call her the "Cowmation" dog.

Maddie is an escape artist. When we lived in Alabama, Wayne had to move the woodpile because Maddie was jumping up as high as she could from the woodpile to try to scale the 9 foot privacy fence. She managed a few times before he figured out what she was doing. She is like a hamster, if her head can get through a hole, her whole self will follow. She has chewed through her kennel door so many times (and it is chain link fencing) that Wayne has had to put rat wire on the bottom of the kennel door to keep our Houdini dog from escaping. My question is this...Since she is blind, where is she going? What is she looking for? The grass smells the same in the kennel as it does in the rest of the yard.

We have to be careful of Maddie around the dock. If she gets on the pier and loses her balance, in she goes into the river. We have to stand on the side of the yard hollering so she can hear our voices. Since she can't see, and she can't touch the bottom, she needs sound to guide her back towards safety. She has learned not to go too far onto the pier, but sometimes, she can't help herself and just goes swimming. It's got to be disconcerting to a blind dog to one minute being on solid ground to the next minute being in the water.