Scotty, ruler of my home

Looking at Facebook and other social media I see them in abundance: pictures of dogs and cats everywhere, one more funnier and cuter then the next. So I promise you this won’t turn into a blog about how sweet my dog is. (Obviously, she is, she’s just the cutest little critter on earth…but I’m sure everyone feels that way about their own). I just want to tell you how my home and family is being ruled by a creature vaguely resembling a gremlin and weighing no more then 2,5 kilos. You might wonder how this is possible. How can a creature so small make sure the two adults and one almost-adult do exactly what she wants? And have the humans feel good about themselves too while they are doing her bidding?

Observing her, I began to see patterns. First of all, we live under the assumption that this house we live in is our house. Wrong. It is her house, and we live in it to make her happy. Scotty has a fixed routine in her day, which starts very early when she wants out. We don’t want any accidents, so as soon as I hear her nails clicking on the wood floor I get out of bed to walk her. (Beats me by the way how she can make noise walking like she weighs a ton.) Getting back home, the first thing I have to do is to give her a couple of dog-crunchies, she will walk straight to her bowl for them. I tried in the past to skip this and go back to bed instead, but this isn’t a good idea. If she doesn’t get fed immediately she will not eat all day and be sick, which gives me more trouble to clean up after her. So, a couple of crunchies to satisfy the first pangs of hunger, and then I can try to get some more sleep. Not too long, mind you, because if she feels that it’s taking me too long on my days off to give her a proper meal, she will sit in the door opening of the bedroom trying to hypnotize me.

As she is very small she can’t jump on chairs or couches. Not a problem. She has various large pillows scattered through the house to settle in luxuriously. Plus, after dinner and another walk, she wants to sleep on a throw on one of our kitchen chairs while we lounge at our large kitchen table to watch the telly. After all, that’s her chair, so we had better respond to her wining by lifting her up, pronto. At times we have to leave the house to work and she can’t come with us, but she doesn’t mind: she needs her sleep and uses the lonely hours to relax and catch some zzzzz’s. On the other hand, when it’s my day off and I go to visit my mom, she knows she has a much better chance of being allowed to come with me, so on Fridays she keeps an eagle eye on me. When I take out my car keys, she’s there!

So you see, we are trained perfectly to cater to lady Scotty. Still, even after writing down my observations, not a clue as to how she does it. Could it be that we are at fault for spoiling her?