Once again I’m behind as spring clean-up and creating a new garden out of an area that consists mainly of sand and rocks takes up what little free time I have. Still, there have been some changes and BeeBee has been involved in most of them.
Previously I wrote about putting a Gentle Leader on BeeBee in hopes of reducing the troubling edginess she displayed around the puppies. It worked well and I rarely saw her acting as if it bothered her in any way. Because of this, one evening when I was brushing her (dog grooming is a daily routine with me and further evidence that I have no life) it surprised me to see that she was missing some hair on the skin between her eyes and the nose loop of the collar. Because the loop is loose enough that she could easily get it off if she wanted to, I couldn’t understand what was going on. But then I started to watch her more closely and discovered that this was a consequence of a game she now played primarily with Ollie, although sometimes Fric and the cat joined in, too.
The game consists of Bee pounding on Ollie who then races under the chaise with Bee in hot pursuit. But although Bee can wriggle under it, she has to slow down to do it. If she doesn’t, she doesn’t get her head down far enough. When this happens only her needle nose goes under and the rest of her head plows into the padded chaise and suddenly stops the action. Concurrently, the nose loop of the collar gets shoved up on her muzzle with enough force that, after multiple shoves, it’s worn the hair off. While all this is going on, Ollie or whoever is under the chaise escapes, gets Bee from behind, Bee backs up, and the game is on again.
That solved the mystery. But what to do about it? I did consider wrapping the nose loop with duct tape simply because duct tape is my first answer for everything. However, I quickly dismissed that idea for reasons too numerous to mention and decided moleskin was the way to go.
So off I went to the local Wal-Mart to support the Chinese economy, undermine the American way of life, and hopefully find some moleskin. As it turned out, once there I remembered exactly where to find it because I had been misdirected to it by a clerk the previous week. Yes, you read that correctly. I did say “misdirected.” I forget what I wanted but the clerk I asked told me I could find it against the wall next to the pharmacy. Wrong. All I found there was such a dizzying array of condoms and vaginal creams and douches it made me wonder what went on in Claremont that I didn’t know about, but then I decided I didn’t want to know. Because what I wanted obviously wasn’t there, I’d wandered around a bit in that general area and found what I was looking for next to–in case you were wondering where this was going–the feet-related section with its moleskin products among others. Thanks to that what I now I considered a fortuitous past event, I could find what I wanted immediately.
Because one of the trials of being anal is that you worry about things that no sane person would, I worried about how Bee would act when I removed her GL long enough to put the moleskin on the underside of the nose loop. Would she immediately charge after Ollie with the idea of prodding him to death with her nose to make up for all those weeks she’s behaved? Should I put her in her crate to prevent this?
As so often happens with my anal worries, they turned out to be groundless. Not only did Bee not go after Ollie, she never left my side the whole time I worked on her collar. In fact, she kept her eyes glued on me and that collar the whole time. She reminded me of a little kid watching her beloved security blanket being mended. When I had finished, she stood perfectly still while I put it back on her.
Then she looked at Ollie, gave her peculiar but nonetheless loud and irritating deaf-dog bark, and chased him under the chaise.