Big Dumb Beautiful Dog

We have two dogs. A basset hound named Sorsha(I'll blog about her later) and a Golden Retriever named Duke. Dukus, Doofus, whatever.. He's got many nicknames. My blog today is about Duke. Meri got him about 3 years ago as a pup. He was the gentlest, sweetest pup in the litter. That is, until we brought him home, took him to the vet for a checkup and found he was full of worms... Once he kicked that with a ton of meds, he turned into our own personal version of Marley.











This dog is a chewer. He has eaten countless stuffed animals (which I'm not totally against...), a cell phone, bird feeder, the heated dog food dish with cord, all the plastic parts of our gas grill, all the plastic, metal & rubber parts of our turkey fryer, the cord off a borrowed drill that was left on the patio table for 2 minutes, the trampoline net and padding, among other things. I built a gate for our deck so the dogs could still come up on the deck, but not run around to the front of the house. We also have a huge fenced yard for them to run around in. We had to block off the deck when we discovered that our big dumb beautiful dog was bored and was chewing on our siding. The siding was getting dried out in the sun and was a bit flakey on the bottoms. We had been planning on getting the house re-sided eventually, just not so soon... Duke chewed so much siding, the back of the house looked like a gingerbread house. How aggravating... We had my handy man brother in law re-side just the back last summer with Ryan.

Then to top that off, he started chewing on the deck railings. The railing is held up by spindles and he started gnawing on them until they broke loose, then he'd rip them out and chew them at leisure around the yard. We then blocked off the deck steps, but now he's working on the spindles at the bottom of the deck steps and the deck looks terrible.




Hopefully we'll have the deck railings fixed before graduation as we've depending on having some of the guests out on it... The dogs will definitely be at the kennel for that weekend...

Someone had told me about some HUGE smoked bones you can buy at Walmart. They're great. However they don't last as long as I'd like. AND Duke doesn't share. Poor Sorsha. I'll give one to Duke and give Sorsha another privately. Within minutes, Duke will have both next to him as he gnaws happily and Sorsha is sitting a little ways away just staring at him in amazement.

Last week, Duke got out of our yard. I made Ryan walk all the way around the fence to check it out and he found a hole under the fence. We put Duke on a chain until Robb and I could get the hole fixed, which we did yesterday and then we let Duke run again. However around 8pm, we got a call from a neighbor who had found him out. We guessed that maybe he had jumped up onto the top of the dog house and over the fence from there, so we moved the doghouse away from the fence.

Just a little bit ago, I heard Ryan yelling for Duke out front of the house. He had made the great escape again and we don't know how he did it. He's in our kennel for now until we can figure out how he is doing this. When we caught him this last time, he was frolicking through the neighborhood with a big dumb beautiful black haired dog. I think I know which neighbor she belongs to... So Ryan is on the rampage to get Duke neutered, but I don't think Meri will stand for it. She's desperate to get a girl Golden and start her own little Retriever litters...

More later, as the saga WILL continue.