Tobi the Escape Artist

Anyone who knows me knows full well that I love my dogs dearly...but I was about ready to murder Miss Tobi yesterday!

She still has around four weeks left of crate confinement before we can start letting her do a few stairs & get back into her regular routine. Once she is to the point she can do stairs, we still have 2-3 months before we can really let her get fully back to normal running around. However, she's antsy. And I can't blame her. I would be too if I got ran over and then was caged up, despite the fact I didn't do anything wrong in the first place. But, explaining that logic to Tobi clearly doesn't work. She just seems to think she's getting punished. And she's bored out of her mind. We give her toys during the time she is crated, but it's not quite as fun to play with them when no one is playing with you. We also make sure we keep her crated a minimal amount of time when we are home and able to have her lounge next to us.

She is pretty well trained to not leave the confines of her floor pillow & she's only on that if she's not right next to us on the couch. So, I don't feel overly sorry for her simply because I know how little her time in the crate really is compared to the time she spent crated pre-accident. But, I do still feel bad...especially when she does her pitiful whine. Yesterday, she was upstairs in her crate while we were getting groceries put away and cleaning; she carried on and on with "oooooooow oooooow eeeeeerrrrr" and then I'd say, "Tobi, stop." A few seconds later, we'd get another "ooooooooow ooooooooow eeeeeeerrrrr" echoing down the staircase. "Tobi, knock it off." Again, "ooooooooooow oooooow errrrrrr." "Tobi!" ...and then a defeated "err." I couldn't stop laughing; it was so stinkin' cute. She had to get the last "word" in.

Yesterday afternoon, however, I wasn't thinking she was so cute. We had a million and one (no exaggeration) errands to run. In-between some of them, we stopped by the house to drop a load of purchases off. The girls were just fine and still in their crates. We decided we'd better grab some lunch before tackling the rest of our to-do list, so we went up the road to a tavern we really like. After being there for about a half hour, Artis' phone rang and it was his brother, Mont, who had just gotten to the house. All I heard was Artis say, "She did what?! Is she OK?" My heart plummeted because I could just imagine it was one of the girls, but figured it was Tobi and that she'd somehow re-injured herself.

He hung up and said, "Tobi escaped from her crate and met Mont at the door downstairs." Now, I know that Tobi's crate door was latched & I know it wasn't that I just thought it was latched. If that particular crate isn't fully latched, it's noticeable. With a couple of her other crates, the mistake can be made. Artis asked me if I was positive I'd latched it & since I knew it had, we both started laughing at the fact she had managed to yet again get out of a crate. The last time she escaped crate confines, she had wedged her nose in the zipper closure and managed to get the door unzipped. She met us at the door of the garage as we were coming in, with a, "Hello! Welcome home!" excitement. We were home about a minute and then ran out for ten more minutes, putting her back in her crate before leaving & making it such that the zipper couldn't be opened the same way. So, when we returned and found her happily greeting us yet again, we were perplexed...until we saw that she had chewed through the vinyl mesh air vent on the crate. It was a collapsable travel crate, so I didn't expect it to be 100% perfect, but still...the thing died in a day. That's when we switched her to have a steel crate, hoping she didn't secretly have a file hidden with which she was going to whittle down the walls and escape again.

What really irked me about yesterday is that for her to be greeting Mont at the door meant that she went running down the stairs and across the hardwood floors. The few times we have let her walk in the house, she has to have extra support to make it across the hardwood floor without slipping. I just don't want her to re-injure herself or make it worse so that she won't make the anticipated full recovery. So, I had words with her about that. She'd better have listened.

Meanwhile, we had friends over last night & she got to be too much to handle, so I put her in her crate so she could still see everyone, but not be so crazy. We watched her as she put her paw through the crate door and batted at the latch to get it to slide open! That's when it was decided that we're going to have to padlock the door & that we'll leave the padlock unlatched, but situated such that she can't figure out how to get it off the door to where she can smack the latch open. If that fails (which it probably will after about a week), we'll then lock the padlock. Artis said that we may have to go with a combination one; I'm thinking that's fine, except that we can never say the code in front of her or she'll figure out a way to unlock it with the code.

What I don't get is that this 8-lb. monster has an incredibly sharp brain & can learn things incredibly quickly--yet she struggles when it comes to some of the basics like "shake" or "beg". Maybe if we make it seem like it's something we really don't want her to do, she'll actually start to do it. Does reverse psychology work on dogs? Hmmmm...