When I was a teenager, my sister brought home a strange, thin, matted dog named Sheila. When we got her brushed out, she became a beautiful Afghan Hound. However, she hated to be brushed; she had lived most of her life chained outside and did not want to bother with grooming–she just wanted to roam, trash pick, and come in to a warm soft nest. The poor thing quickly became FunnyLookin’ — said with love.
One day Mou found her rooting in the trash, and skited her away with the broom. After that, Funny was nervous about the broom, of course, and we would say that the broom ha d “tooken” Funny Lookin’. Of course, today I’d never use a broom like that. This was well before Cesar Millen and work on using body language to train a dog in an authoritative but less frightening way, or even LEAVE IT! training. Justin knows that LEAVE IT is pretty much my all purpose command for “drop what you have/move away from it”. I thought I was confusing him by using the same command with different purposes, but our local training guru (who runs a dog training company) uses it as an all purpose command, too, and recommends it, so …
Anyway, fast forward from the late seventies and early eighties to today.
Justin, my Labrakita, has a long, sinuous, fluffy tail. He wags it from side to side, but when he is really happy it turns into a propeller tail, moving in wide circles. One day I heard a loud crash!, a yelp, and the sound of scrabbling toenails, and then Justin was running headlong into me. In the kitchen I found that he had knocked the broom over, and it had fallen and scared him. He would not come near the broom after that. I joked that I hadn’t needed to spend megabucks on a fence and an invisible fence; all I needed to do to keep Justin ins the yard was to wire brooms to the 4′ chainlink fence!
Finally I was able to get Justin to pass the broom, though he would shrink away and look sidelong at it. Apparently last night he did not see where I had put it. I had propped it on the box my new kitchen vanity came in (that’s another long story) so it would be at hand for sweeping this morning. Poor Justin; he knocked it over again. This time, no matter how I coaxed him, he would not come near me while I was anywhere near the broom. Poor guy, that really was my fault. I need to remember to put it completely away or make sure the Evil Broom is secure! On the other hand, if I ever need to keep Justin out of a room, I don’t need to use a baby gate–I can merely lean the broom across the doorway.
Broom, 2; Justin, 0.