Time to Call in the Reinforcements

After 6 weeks I'd love to be able to say that the mutt has settled down, but I'd be Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire if I did. In fact, things took a turn for the worst there for a moment. Lots of biting for fun, nibbling everything from rugs to base/skirting boards and carrying poop around the garden.

I have had to concede that this isn't going to be the year we win any gardening prizes. She has chosen a spot on which to bask, where once I had tall green and white striped grass stuff. It's now brown and flat. There's a path between the flowers where she races around with whatever she's nicked from the house, and nothing is growing there either. Fortunately the plants on either side of her mud moat are tall enough to hide the worst of it.

What is really painful however, is her penchant for stripping bushes, giraffe style. Last week we found leafy branches all over the place and I couldn't figure out where they were from. We have a couple of tall weeds down by the potting shelf so I thought she'd been there. It took about two days to dawn on me that one particular spot in the garden was looking extremely bare. And then I noticed them: -

Those two stumps sticking up were once a beautiful Summersweet bush. It took me 7 years to get it to flower nicely, and now it's gone.

It used to look like this.

 She has now moved onto the nearby small tree, but my mother has come up with a foolproof deterrent of leaning all my metal trellises up against the trunk to stop her jumping, (the dog, that is). Personally, I think it's a matter of days before she figures out they're a potential stairway to heaven.

Anyway, I have engaged a nice dog lady who is going to help with "behavior reinforcement" in true American fashion. Plus, she takes the dog to the dog beach wth a handful of other dogs to wear her out and get her socialized. I love my hourly walks (twice a day) and it's doing wonders for my gluteous maximus, but that's a lot of time to hand over to a mutt. And, in Chicago, it's illegal to let your dog off the leash so I can't run her around anywhere. (Not that I'm at all confident she'd come back.)

On the brighter side, she's stopped peeing in the house, and we get stopped in the streets by men and women alike because she's so darn pretty.

The culprit, with branches.

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