Yesterday my two dogs alerted me to a rat under the pad for the air conditioner on the side of the house. Pepper had already dug a huge hole in the wet clay. Any more digging and the air conditioner was going to tip over. So my adult offspring and I put a wire fence up around the AC unit to stop the digging.
Today I went to the masonry place to buy two bags of large rocks to put around the base of the AC unit pad. No, it won’t stop the rat, but it might get her to move if I keep on messing with her, unless she already has babies, of course.
The guy who rang up the rocks asked me what kind of dogs I had, Jack Russell and Lab mix, which launched him into the story of how he got his rescue dog, Scout, half Jack Russell and half Basenji. A woman was walking the pup in a park near his place in Southern California, and she told him and his wife how the puppy was found along Highway 5 in a rainstorm. Someone had dumped him.
The Foster mom told them how to go about applying to adopt him, and they did! They love the way that Scout patrols the yard and growls at anyone or anything that gets too close. Mine also growls, but we’ve trained her not to growl at family members (two-legged or four). We compared notes on how smart and also how psycho Jack Russell dogs can get, how they are motivated by their prey drive and how they need jobs to keep themselves busy and happy.
All this while I waited for my $36.00 sale to go through. The guy obviously needed to brag a bit. He didn’t have a photo (maybe he did, but I didn’t ask to see one). The dog above lives on the internet as a Jack Russell/Basenji mix.
He wondered if Scout would ever bite anyone. I told him about Daisy’s run-in with the law, how she hadn’t bitten a small dog but somehow the dog got roughed up while her owner tried to scoop her up while Daisy was right there, in psycho mode — constant insane barking, all teeth showing, but no biting. She’s done it a few times when she wants another animal to move because after all, it is her park (was her park). Now she’s on house arrest.
Daisy is eleven and slowing down a bit. She even takes cat naps on the couch and sometimes gets her snore going in the middle of the day.
Scout is one year old. He weighs about forty pounds. He is going to be hyper/psycho for a long time to come. But Rock Guy likes the way Scout guards the property when he is away.
He tells me that some UCSF doctor had told him that Jack Russell dogs are the smartest dog breed out there. I don’t know if it’s true, but Daisy is definitely the smartest dog I’ve ever had. She can open doors, get closed gates to pop open, scale fences, sneak out an open doorway as quick as I can open it, know that the zipper sound on my suitcase means a road trip, sit up in the car every time a semi tractor trailer goes by, catch rats (and a squirrel) and shake them to death.
The first night I had her, I locked her in a wire crate. She got out of it, and when I checked on the crate, it was still locked.
I should’ve named her Houdini.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 