I think our dog is possessed.
Why would a slightly overweight, 9-year-old, Welsh corgi prone to relaxation, who had seemingly felt comfortable in his surroundings for a couple of years, suddenly decide he was in Stalig 13 and needed to escape?
Fox had been satisfied to spend the hours while my wife and I were at work sleeping at our kitchen door next to the garage or lounging on his soft pad, his favorite squeaky chew toys nearby, at the cozy angle of our kitchen cabinets.
His only limits were strong plastic gates at the doors off the kitchen to the dining room and hall. He had a sizable room in which to roam.
When we initially propped the gates against the doorways, Fox used his snout to edge them out of the way and get into the rest of the house. Once we used their spring-lock action, though, he seemed to understand his limits.
His recent need to escape began shortly after Christmas. Although he appeared to have been favoring his stout hind legs and limping for a while, we began to notice teeth marks in the handle of the gate that closed him off from the dining room.
Fox could only have reached that handle by standing on his back legs to chew on it.
We were sure it was a temporary problem, so we added masking tape to the handle. But when we came home one day, he had chewed through the masking tape and the handle.
After I used my fingernail’s worth of craftsman skills and sawed a piece of wood to go in front of the gate, we thought we had solved the problem.
Not so much.
Fox moved a chair that propped up the piece of wood that held up the gate. And, as if to throw it in our faces, he had clawed the door frame and eaten a 4-inch, half moon-shaped hole in the wood. The shredded wood was strewn across the scene of the crime.
A new configuration of chairs that propped up the wood that blocked the gate that kept him in the kitchen worked for a couple of days.
Then one recent Sunday, Fox outdid himself.
When we returned home from church, he had nosed a wooden chifforobe four inches away from the wall to move the chairs to get to the wood that blocked the gate that kept him in the kitchen.
This is a smart dog, we reasoned while we cleaned up the mess.
But it’s not as if there is food on the other side of the gate. True enough, there’s a dining room on the other side, but dining rarely goes on there and if there had been food on the floor he long ago would have spotted it with his radar snout and vacuumed it into his Food-R-Us mouth.
When she took Fox for his annual inoculations, my wife asked the veterinarian about the dog’s recent behavior.
Maybe he has separation anxiety, the doc told her. Perhaps the wood is good for his teeth, as long as he doesn’t swallow it, he said.
He had lost several pounds, the vet said, so at least he was getting some exercise.
So my wife, hoping to placate Fox but save the house, decided to drag his crate into the kitchen each morning. She also decided to keep a radio on.
One morning, it sounded like NPR. The next morning, it was on J103. Earlier this week, as I was leaving for work, the announcer for the contemporary Christian station was praying for children whose parents had requested supplication for their kids’ sanity and safety at school.
I started to call in and put Fox’s name on the list, but I didn’t want to seem like I was making fun of the process.
So far, the crate and the radio have been hit or miss. One day, nothing’s been moved. The next day, things are askew.
On the one hand, Fox seems like a smart dog to have strategerized all this.
On the other hand, he has never made a play for the other gate.
Clint Cooper is the faith editor and a staff writer for the Times Free Press Life section. He also has been an assistant sports editor and Metro staff writer for the newspaper. Prior to the merger between the Chattanooga Free Press and Chattanooga Times in 1999, he was sports news editor for the Chattanooga Free Press, where he was in charge of the day-to-day content of the section and the section’s design. Before becoming sports ...
