Sophie gets a new dog bed

Sophie, our 4 year old, loveable Craigslist puppy, is what we believe to be some sort of pointer mix. Hunting dogs with high levels of energy that need fields to run around and things to herd. If given the opportunity, she will run for hours, which she did do last summer, resulting in paws rubbed so raw she didn’t walk for a week.

We live in a 2-bedroom apartment, with grassy areas and a large open desert next door. While she has plenty of room to exercise, she is left in the apartment while we are gone, often for hours at a time. This has resulted in numerous incidents, involving Neosporin (apparently she has an acquired taste for it) chalk and not to mention her first vet visit, which resulted in a stomach xray and a $300 bill to let us know she had “garbage gut.” We leave the tv on for her, which works for the most part, but some days I think she just gets a wild hair in her and must do something to avenge us for leaving her alone.

Enter: her dog bed. She has had the same dog bed for a year now, a nice square one from Costco. It is her one piece of furniture she knows belongs to her. The place she goes when she is in trouble, when told to lay down, when tired, etc. One day I suppose she decided she needed a friend to play with, and the dog bed took on just that role. We came home to fluff and stuff spread across the living room. It was salvageable, so it was re-stuffed and given back to her, much like a child’s teddy bar that lost an eye. We continued to come home to unexplainable fluff around the house, which was thrown out, resulting in a less than comfortable dog bed for Sophie. We don’t know what drove her over the edge, but she had enough. I came home to find the dog bed slashed. Clear across the center. Fluff everywhere and this time, it wasn’t going back in. She accompanied me out to the garbage where it went to remain forever.

Jake, always the disciplinarian, was sure to let us both know that she would not be getting a new one. That was until he realized how much of an important fixture that raggedy dog bed had become to our dear Sophie. When told to “go lay down” to get her away from begging at the dinner table, she would mosey over to the place where her dog bed used to be and walk around in circles until finally settling on a rug that was coincidentally closer to the dinner table. She had no place to lie during our family time in the living room, resulting in her trying to squeeze her way onto the couch. After a few weeks of this, we finally brought her back her precious dog bed. An even better one that makes her look like a scruffy princess sitting atop her pillow. Jake still stands strong that if she chews this one up, that’s it, but we all know, she’ll always have her sanctuary even if she does continue to chew them up.