Dog Gone
Anybody want an Akita? I've got one for you and I'll just about pay you to take it. I am so completely fed up with that dog that if I were to go on about it for ten pages you'd only get a fraction of how fed up I am. Nonetheless, I'm going to go on about it anyway.
I lost it with her tonight. Absolutely seeing red, primordial rage, near blackout lost it. I'm hardly exaggerating at all when I tell you I've never come so close to killing an animal in my life. I was so crazed with rage that I actually found myself chasing her around the backyard with a plastic coathanger in my hand. I don't think I would have hit her had I caught her but I can't swear to it. I was so angry that, looking back, I'm glad she's faster than I am.
What set me off? A chewed up pillow, that's all, just a silly little throw pillow shredded into a blizzard all over the bedroom. But it was the latest instance in a long line of destructive behavior and it was the straw that almost broke Suki's back. Only a five dollar pillow this time, but there have also been hundreds of dollars worth of shoes, nearly half of a set of Malibu lights, one corner of an expensive coffee table, wicker baskets and brooms and mops beyond counting, most of Zoe's plastic toys, every doorstop in the house, five patches of Berber carpeting in the den, several flower pots and the plants that were in them, two decapitated Barbies, an amputee Ken, several gutted teddy bears...the list goes on and on, a veritable wake of destruction every time the dog is unsupervised for 10 seconds. And then today she started out by taking a crap in the living room and had a roll of toilet paper for lunch (which I found out about at the worst possible moment). So I was fully primed this evening when I walked into the winter wonderland that was Suki's latest demolition.
The course is clear: the dog's gotta go. I eventually calmed down enough to call our local Akita Rescue chapter, thinking I could give the dog to them, but they just got me going all over again. I think they must be poor spellers, or perhaps their listing had a typo, because their name can't be Akita Rescue, it has to be Fescue or something equally worthless. Actually rescuing Akitas apparently isn't part of their charter. I succinctly explained the situation to the women who answered the phone -- "I have an Akita that needs rescuing" -- and she said I should take the dog back to the breeder I got it from. When I said I hadn't gotten it from a breeder, her brain must have frozen up: she suggested again that I take it back to my breeder. I repeated, as calmly as I could, that I had a dog that needed rescuing and did she want it or not? "I'm sorry, sir, we don't take rescues." I didn't tear her ear off or engage an obvious nitwit in a debate about why Akita Rescue doesn't rescue Akitas. I wanted to, but I didn't. Instead, I thanked her and hung up and resisted the urge to throw the phone out the window.
So now I'm stuck with a dog even its own people won't take. We could take her to the pound, but we don't really want to do that because she'll end up dead if she's not adopted. We want her in a good home, not in a landfill, but one way or another that dog's got to go. We're bound to end up living in tents if we keep her. Shredded tents.
