CULPRIT IDENTIFIED

Mike gets testy with ol' Nell and her ways. I guess I do, too. Wouldn’t it be ironic, I said recently, if when Nellie is gone we discover she wasn’t the dog at fault – that the culprit was really Bess all along? Well, Bess is the “fair-haired dog” around here, so Mike rejected that possibility.

Bess rests comfortably

Over the course of the last month, some dog here has taken to ripping and ingesting textiles while we’re out – Mike’s windbreaker, my favorite little fleece jacket, an old towel on the floor, the corner of our bedspread, and the corner or our newest dog pillow. We would later find the remnants as processed through the dog’s system or regurgitated, and the conclusion was that Nellie was to blame because she was angry with us for some reason. The angry part bothered me because Nellie doesn’t seem to care that much, but she does show symptoms of dementia -- so maybe she would eat a towel. For this reason -- and some others -- we began to put Nellie in the kennel when we leave. Bess, the wonderful one, was allowed to remain in the house.

Yesterday Mike and Ken went on a guided fishing trip to the Grande Ronde River. Dressed in his hunting pants, Mike left in the Dakota at 5:45 a.m. The dogs were in the house, and Bess curled up in a little ball on one of the pillows. I thought it was odd that she wasn’t more active, but dogs are a strange sort of human, after all.

Nellie (Note the gnawed corner)

When it was time for yoga class, I put Nellie in the kennel but left Bess in the house. I was gone about an hour. When I came home, Bess went outside, and when I checked on her a bit later, I noticed that she was nauseous and nibbling grass on the back of our lot. I walked her across the street where she continued to eat grass and green leaves. Long story short, she upchucked pieces of the red dog pillow. Back in the house, I discovered that she had indeed gnawed the pillow and pulled out some of the stuffing.

Relating this to Mike later, he said, “Oh! I wore my hunting pants and I left in the Dakota. She was mad at me because she thought I went hunting without her.” Well, if I had realized what she was thinking, I would have explained to her that he just went fishing. 

I think it's reasonable to conclude that Bess is the "textile gnawer." I think two dogs need to go to the kennel when unsupervised. KW