Dog Breaks Wind to Sabotage Marital Harmony

APRIL 2, 2004
By GREGORY J. RUMMO

     A PASTOR FRIEND of mine gave me a copy of a little book entitled, Connecting With Your Wife, by syndicated radio program host Barbara Rosberg. It’s a guide to helping men understand what makes women tick.

I read it in a little over two hours and quickly realized that I needed to implement many of Rosberg’s suggestions if I wanted my wife to be happy and feel fulfilled.

But I have a problem the author never addressed in her book: What if a member of the family—in this case the dog—does his best to sabotage my efforts?

Chewy, our golden retriever, has an especially keen sense of whether a person is a “dog person” or not. And when he senses a person is not a dog person, he has an impish, slightly evil streak that surfaces.  

In our home, the unfortunate recipient of this not-so-subtle chop busting is my poor wife who still manages to tolerate “that smelly, 85-pound thing that sheds all over the house.”

Chewy was a 4-month old puppy when we first brought him home. He was an energetic, rambunctious dog that could easily clear a coffee table with one swipe of his tail. He had too much energy for his previous owners who couldn’t take care of him. They returned him to the breeder and we became the beneficiaries of a housebroken, crate-trained pure bred golden retriever.

He is a very smart dog.

In less than one week, I trained him to relieve himself in a wooded area of our backyard where several seasons of dried leaves have accumulated on the forest floor. This worked like a charm until my wife brought home an Oriental area rug for our dining room. It was a soft, wool carpet, light brown in coloration with a leaf pattern woven into the fabric.

Although Chewy is smart, he’s still only a dog. Even he was unable to discern between a soft carpet of leaves outside and a soft carpet of leaves inside.

The rug wasn’t on the floor for 24 hours when he matter-of-factly walked into the dining room, squatted on the rug, and proceeded to empty his bladder in front of the two of us.

“NO!” We both screamed in unison.

Stunned, my wife turned to me. “I thought this was supposed to be ‘the smartest dog in the world’?”

“OK, OK,” I offered in as comforting a tone as possible. “It was an accident, I’ll clean it up.”

I am convinced it really was an accident—it never happened again—but Chewy never forgot my wife’s “smartest dog in the world” comment.

Chewy almost always waits for me to be away—way away, like out of the country or impossible to get home right away—before doing something naughty to sow marital discord and give my wife yet another reason to hate him.

Once he timed a bout of vicious diarrhea to coincide with one of my trips to the Andes Mountains in Peru. On another occasion he wolfed down several mouthfuls of Holly-tone I had spread on the azaleas in the backyard. Having filled his belly, he ambled innocently into the family room where in front of my wife he reared back and emptied the contents of his stomach all over the tile floor.

I can’t imagine anything grosser than cleaning up composted chicken manure vomited up by a dog. But of course I was nowhere close to home when this unfortunate episode unfolded and boy, did I get an earful when I got home.

Lately, Chewy has had a change of heart. He has decided to carry out his delicious acts of canine retribution while I am home. This at least allows me to connect with my wife’s emotions, sympathizing with her whenever he decides to do something mischievous.

Take for instance his most recent spiteful act.

Jenny had chased Chewy downstairs after he snuck into the kitchen to lick the crumbs and other assorted delicacies off the floor from under the table with “that three-foot long, pink disgustingly wet and slimy tongue of his.”

Later that evening as she was ironing in the family room, I heard her yelling at the dog. “Go away! Get in your bed!”

I could tell she was really exasperated.

Wanting to show deep affection and understanding for my wife I hollered down to her, “Now what? Can’t you leave that poor dog alone? No wonder he hates you. First you chase him out of the kitchen, then downstairs. What more do you want out of the poor dog’s life?”

“He’s standing under the ironing board passing gas just to annoy me!” My desperate wife yelled back.

 I give up. I’m blaming it on the dog—In more ways than one. n

Gregory J. Rummo is a syndicated columnist. Read all of his columns on his homepage, www.GregRummo.com. E-Mail Rummo at  GregoryJRummo@aol.com