The long-awaited Plato Post
Sep. 20th, 2011 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_deep_magicAnd now, what all some of you have been waiting for...
Have you met my dog Plato?
Plato is a rescue dog, and according to his paperwork, is a dachshund/terrier mix. What kind of terrier? What else is in there? No clue. He looks as if someone put a large-ish terrier in a taffy puller. Behold his full glory (no, really, this is as majestic as he is capable of looking):
(Ignore the slumbering German shepherd and his filthy cage in the background. We will return to him shortly.)
So, the story of Plato: I have always been a dog person and wanted to own one, but I never knew how long I'd be staying in one place, so I held off on adopting one. Also, they take quite a bit of time and money (but mostly time) if you want to have a well-fed, well-trained dog that doesn't smell like a dumpster. Or, you could have Plato.
Are we supposed to be on the couch? We are not.
So one day my dad decided that what I needed was a dog -- taking care of another living creature would be good for me, and keep me from focusing too much on my own problems. So we went to the pound "just to take a look." Fun fact: everyone that has ever gone to the pound "just to take a look" has left with a dog. That is just the way of things. So we walk past rows and rows of pit bull mixes, who are probably lovely, sweet-natured things, but sadly, will probably never be adopted. There was a chow mix that I was looking at, only she was the laziest thing I have ever seen in my life. I probably would have adopted her if I could have gotten her to so much as turn her head. But as we go by another row, I notice a card on the kennel for a dachschund/terrier mix named "Plato."
Well, I'd been considering getting a dachshund, since I am not usually a fan of little dogs, but in my experience, dachschunds have dignity that other little fluffballs, well, don't always have. So we have a volunteer from the shelter bring him out to a play pen, where he is all nuzzles and playfulness and "take me home and loooooove me," and we thought, how perfect is this? A dog named Plato? (I was a philosophy major in college who somewhat inadvertently specialized in the ancient Greeks.) And c'mon, look at this little guy:
I double-dog dare you not to fall in love with me. Like, right now.
So we went to lunch, where I expressed my doubts at being able to care for a dog, but my dad said he had faith in me, and that something needed to change in my life, and this could be it. Now, I'm not blaming anybody, because it was my decision, and I said yes. After all, his name was Plato.
It was not. When we started to fill out the paperwork, we realized that his two previous owners had called him Pluto, and whoever had written the sign had written a wonky "u." But I pulled him aside and called him by both names -- he answered to neither, so I figured I could get away with changing one lonely little vowel. He was only (approximately) a year old at the time, and my dad agreed that the name was close enough not to confuse him too badly.
As I said, he'd had two previous owners. The first was someone who had a roommate move in who was allergic to dogs, but described Plato as "playful, active, friendly, protective," and "loves kids" (this is all according to the paperwork). The second owners gave him up because he was too "high energy" and he chewed on the couches. They described him as "playful" and "active" but said he was aggressive when strangers came to the house. Are you detecting a pattern here? Because I should have. I am not a high-energy person. I've been doing better the past few months, but still, no one would describe me as particularly "playful" or "active." But I'd already fallen in love with the damn dog, and he was minding his manners in the shelter, so what are you gonna do?
Plus, his tail looks like a question mark.
Now, my family already has a dog -- a 3-year-old German shepherd named Gator (a.k.a. Big Dog) who is a handful (or three) in his own right. We had to introduce them to each other very carefully, because obviously Gator was already master of his territory, and Plato himself is a tiny li'l alpha. (Their coloring is so alike that some people think we got a new German shepherd. I tell them no, we just put the old one in the dryer and he shrank.) I was genuinely worried at the beginning, and for the first few times they played together, because a) they played very, very rough; b) Plato is almost exactly one-third the size of Gator (30ish lbs vs. 90ish lbs); and c) Plato has no idea of that. I have a really hard time taking pictures of them together, because they are never still when they are around each other. They rile each other up like you would not believe. They've both had some training, but putting both of them in a sit next to each other? Not happening. Anyway, here's a couple of pictures to help you visualize the scale we're talking about. (BTW, that is not Doggy Jail, it is an outdoor pen we've been using until we can get a fence up in the backyard again, which we are doing this week.)
Yeah, that second one is not Gator's best angle.
So the two of them together are less Milo and Otis than one of those raptors from Jurassic park and a T-rex, if they actually teamed up to take down the helicopter. They get along fine now, but they still play very rough -- and it's ALWAYS Plato who instigates it. He nips Gator's cheek or ear, "C'mon, playwithme playwithme playwith me!" and gets Gator to chase after him until Gator starts letting Plato know he's had enough, at which point Plato slides under the coffee table, where Gator, try as he might, can't get to him. So it's hard to get anything done with them both out and tearing around the house, but god, is it funny. They play tug-of-war with everything, and since neither will concede, they tire themselves out and have to lay down, whatever toy it is still clutched in both their mouths. Here's a not-great shot of one of their many Frisbee Battles:
So that is Plato at his cutest. But I'm also keen to get a DNA breed test done on him, because I swear there's something else in there, too, something not entirely... canine. It's like there's this other berserker dog that lives in his head, and when the switch gets flipped (from what I've seen, due only to oversensitive protectiveness and alertness), out comes El Chupacabra. He goes stock still, then apeshit crazy, jumping and barking and growling and lunging, sweet god the lunging, which I can only control with a prong collar even though he only weighs 30-something pounds. He has never bitten anyone, but he has snapped once or twice at someone trying to pet him. But that's only his initial reaction -- after he gets to know the person, he's fine, and he hasn't actually snapped at anyone in months.
But there are a zillion things that set him off. The trainer I worked with very generously referred to him as "hyper-alert." He notices and responds to all stimuli, everywhere, and it can be nearly impossible to get his attention, especially if there's something around that really presses his buttons. His number one enemy, the thing that triggers El Chupacabra every friggin' time? Bicycles. Typical scene when I'm walking him:
Bicycle: ::approaches::
Plato: ::goes rigid:: Assessing threat level...
Me: Plato, it's just a nice man on a bicycle.
Plato: Assessing threat level...
Me: Plato, please, for the love of god, don't go nuts this time.
Bicycle: ::passes::
Plato: THREAT LEVEL MIDNIGHT! THREAT LEVEL PLAID! GET THE WOMEN AND THE CHILDREN TO THE LIFEBOATS! FIRE EVERYTHING!
Me: Dammit, dog.
Bicycle: ::rides away::
Me: You feel better now? You got that out of your system?
Plato: Huh? Hey, a squirrel!
Here, let's have another picture of the dog, just to remind you he's all cute and shit.
What the trainer told me to do in these situations is get his attention and get him to do something, like sit or lie down or shake or pretty much anything. The problem is, he locks on to whatever stimulus it is, usually before I even notice it, and there is absolutely nothing I can do to get his attention. The worst was during his final test at the end of the training classes. Indoors, he'd been doing so well. He even did a sit and lie down in the toy aisle, which is one of his biggest distractors. Then we go outside, he freezes, and I see it: two guys on bikes about to ride by. He's on a leash, of course, so he's of no danger to them at all. But out comes El Chupacabra, and all our focus is lost. Compounding this problem, both gentlemen on the bikes were black, and they gave me a dirty look at my dog's horrible snarling reaction, because what horrible owner would train her dog to be aggressive against members of a certain race? It took all I had not to run after them shouting, "I SWEAR MY DOG'S NOT A RACIST; HE JUST HATES BICYCLES!"
SUVs are a problem, too. Some smaller ones don't trigger him, so I'm still trying to find the threshold of Chupacabra for 4-wheeled vehicles. But here's the weird thing: he loves riding in my dad's gigantic pickup truck. Everytime we walk by it, he gives me a hopeful look, like, "Ride this time?" Once, he got past me out the front door while my dad was outside with the truck's driver side door open, and this happened:
I can has keys nao?
It took me ten minutes to get him out of there, since when I'd reach in, he'd hop over the middle to the passenger side. And when I went around to the passenger side, he'd hop right back. Cute, but annoying as fuck. He has some other... issues as well. He pees on the carpet all the time. It's not marking behavior and it doesn't matter how often we take him out, he just... dribbles sometimes, nearly always when he's running around with Gator. It's not true incontinence, or it would happen while he's sleeping, which it doesn't. The vet says we're doing everything right for the potty problem as far as behavior goes, it just seems to be a very specific form of excitement leak. So I have gotten to know the steam cleaner very, very well over the past few months. Seriously, I'm thinking of listing industrial steam cleaning experience on my resume.
The problem is that, far from being the focus that I needed, Plato has become more of a source of anxiety for me than anything else. We're working on it, and he's slowly getting better, but what I want is a dog I can walk around people, people who are inevitably going to say "Oh look at the adorable doggie!" and bend down to pet him, and the dog doesn't flip out and scare the shit out of them. I do not have that. Hopefully, we will get to that stage, but we are not there yet. We are still at the "I love you, but you exhaust me in ways I didn't know were possible" stage. I don't get weepy when he does something stupid or awful anymore, because he wants to be a good dog, he really does, El Chupacabra just doesn't know how.
Yeah, you just sit there and look cute, you little bastard. I'll vacuum up your pee.
So he is a conundrum, my little guy of many names. He is a growly little alpha who loves taking baths and wearing bandanas and just generally being a fancy dog. When he rides in the truck, we try to keep him in the back seat, but he loves to put his paws up and look over the center console (and lick at anything in the cupholders), and nothing we do can dissuade him, even though his back paws barely touch the ground. But, motherfucker, is it cute:
Pictured: too motherfucking cute. And my sister trying to order at the drive-thru.
So now you've met my dog, and I can tell lengthy stories about him instead of just randomly alluding to something because I haven't properly introduced him yet. The latest is that the vet officially pronounced him Too Fat and we are trying to slim him down, the little furry sausage, but he keeps eating Big Dog's food. Warning: you're probably going to get a lot of "Dammit, Little Dog, why did you have to _____?" posts, but I will make amends by posting adorable pictures. If I can get him to sit still long enough for the camera.
Have you met my dog Plato?
Plato is a rescue dog, and according to his paperwork, is a dachshund/terrier mix. What kind of terrier? What else is in there? No clue. He looks as if someone put a large-ish terrier in a taffy puller. Behold his full glory (no, really, this is as majestic as he is capable of looking):
(Ignore the slumbering German shepherd and his filthy cage in the background. We will return to him shortly.)
So, the story of Plato: I have always been a dog person and wanted to own one, but I never knew how long I'd be staying in one place, so I held off on adopting one. Also, they take quite a bit of time and money (but mostly time) if you want to have a well-fed, well-trained dog that doesn't smell like a dumpster. Or, you could have Plato.
Are we supposed to be on the couch? We are not.
So one day my dad decided that what I needed was a dog -- taking care of another living creature would be good for me, and keep me from focusing too much on my own problems. So we went to the pound "just to take a look." Fun fact: everyone that has ever gone to the pound "just to take a look" has left with a dog. That is just the way of things. So we walk past rows and rows of pit bull mixes, who are probably lovely, sweet-natured things, but sadly, will probably never be adopted. There was a chow mix that I was looking at, only she was the laziest thing I have ever seen in my life. I probably would have adopted her if I could have gotten her to so much as turn her head. But as we go by another row, I notice a card on the kennel for a dachschund/terrier mix named "Plato."
Well, I'd been considering getting a dachshund, since I am not usually a fan of little dogs, but in my experience, dachschunds have dignity that other little fluffballs, well, don't always have. So we have a volunteer from the shelter bring him out to a play pen, where he is all nuzzles and playfulness and "take me home and loooooove me," and we thought, how perfect is this? A dog named Plato? (I was a philosophy major in college who somewhat inadvertently specialized in the ancient Greeks.) And c'mon, look at this little guy:
I double-dog dare you not to fall in love with me. Like, right now.
So we went to lunch, where I expressed my doubts at being able to care for a dog, but my dad said he had faith in me, and that something needed to change in my life, and this could be it. Now, I'm not blaming anybody, because it was my decision, and I said yes. After all, his name was Plato.
It was not. When we started to fill out the paperwork, we realized that his two previous owners had called him Pluto, and whoever had written the sign had written a wonky "u." But I pulled him aside and called him by both names -- he answered to neither, so I figured I could get away with changing one lonely little vowel. He was only (approximately) a year old at the time, and my dad agreed that the name was close enough not to confuse him too badly.
As I said, he'd had two previous owners. The first was someone who had a roommate move in who was allergic to dogs, but described Plato as "playful, active, friendly, protective," and "loves kids" (this is all according to the paperwork). The second owners gave him up because he was too "high energy" and he chewed on the couches. They described him as "playful" and "active" but said he was aggressive when strangers came to the house. Are you detecting a pattern here? Because I should have. I am not a high-energy person. I've been doing better the past few months, but still, no one would describe me as particularly "playful" or "active." But I'd already fallen in love with the damn dog, and he was minding his manners in the shelter, so what are you gonna do?
Plus, his tail looks like a question mark.
Now, my family already has a dog -- a 3-year-old German shepherd named Gator (a.k.a. Big Dog) who is a handful (or three) in his own right. We had to introduce them to each other very carefully, because obviously Gator was already master of his territory, and Plato himself is a tiny li'l alpha. (Their coloring is so alike that some people think we got a new German shepherd. I tell them no, we just put the old one in the dryer and he shrank.) I was genuinely worried at the beginning, and for the first few times they played together, because a) they played very, very rough; b) Plato is almost exactly one-third the size of Gator (30ish lbs vs. 90ish lbs); and c) Plato has no idea of that. I have a really hard time taking pictures of them together, because they are never still when they are around each other. They rile each other up like you would not believe. They've both had some training, but putting both of them in a sit next to each other? Not happening. Anyway, here's a couple of pictures to help you visualize the scale we're talking about. (BTW, that is not Doggy Jail, it is an outdoor pen we've been using until we can get a fence up in the backyard again, which we are doing this week.)
Yeah, that second one is not Gator's best angle.
So the two of them together are less Milo and Otis than one of those raptors from Jurassic park and a T-rex, if they actually teamed up to take down the helicopter. They get along fine now, but they still play very rough -- and it's ALWAYS Plato who instigates it. He nips Gator's cheek or ear, "C'mon, playwithme playwithme playwith me!" and gets Gator to chase after him until Gator starts letting Plato know he's had enough, at which point Plato slides under the coffee table, where Gator, try as he might, can't get to him. So it's hard to get anything done with them both out and tearing around the house, but god, is it funny. They play tug-of-war with everything, and since neither will concede, they tire themselves out and have to lay down, whatever toy it is still clutched in both their mouths. Here's a not-great shot of one of their many Frisbee Battles:
So that is Plato at his cutest. But I'm also keen to get a DNA breed test done on him, because I swear there's something else in there, too, something not entirely... canine. It's like there's this other berserker dog that lives in his head, and when the switch gets flipped (from what I've seen, due only to oversensitive protectiveness and alertness), out comes El Chupacabra. He goes stock still, then apeshit crazy, jumping and barking and growling and lunging, sweet god the lunging, which I can only control with a prong collar even though he only weighs 30-something pounds. He has never bitten anyone, but he has snapped once or twice at someone trying to pet him. But that's only his initial reaction -- after he gets to know the person, he's fine, and he hasn't actually snapped at anyone in months.
But there are a zillion things that set him off. The trainer I worked with very generously referred to him as "hyper-alert." He notices and responds to all stimuli, everywhere, and it can be nearly impossible to get his attention, especially if there's something around that really presses his buttons. His number one enemy, the thing that triggers El Chupacabra every friggin' time? Bicycles. Typical scene when I'm walking him:
Bicycle: ::approaches::
Plato: ::goes rigid:: Assessing threat level...
Me: Plato, it's just a nice man on a bicycle.
Plato: Assessing threat level...
Me: Plato, please, for the love of god, don't go nuts this time.
Bicycle: ::passes::
Plato: THREAT LEVEL MIDNIGHT! THREAT LEVEL PLAID! GET THE WOMEN AND THE CHILDREN TO THE LIFEBOATS! FIRE EVERYTHING!
Me: Dammit, dog.
Bicycle: ::rides away::
Me: You feel better now? You got that out of your system?
Plato: Huh? Hey, a squirrel!
Here, let's have another picture of the dog, just to remind you he's all cute and shit.
What the trainer told me to do in these situations is get his attention and get him to do something, like sit or lie down or shake or pretty much anything. The problem is, he locks on to whatever stimulus it is, usually before I even notice it, and there is absolutely nothing I can do to get his attention. The worst was during his final test at the end of the training classes. Indoors, he'd been doing so well. He even did a sit and lie down in the toy aisle, which is one of his biggest distractors. Then we go outside, he freezes, and I see it: two guys on bikes about to ride by. He's on a leash, of course, so he's of no danger to them at all. But out comes El Chupacabra, and all our focus is lost. Compounding this problem, both gentlemen on the bikes were black, and they gave me a dirty look at my dog's horrible snarling reaction, because what horrible owner would train her dog to be aggressive against members of a certain race? It took all I had not to run after them shouting, "I SWEAR MY DOG'S NOT A RACIST; HE JUST HATES BICYCLES!"
SUVs are a problem, too. Some smaller ones don't trigger him, so I'm still trying to find the threshold of Chupacabra for 4-wheeled vehicles. But here's the weird thing: he loves riding in my dad's gigantic pickup truck. Everytime we walk by it, he gives me a hopeful look, like, "Ride this time?" Once, he got past me out the front door while my dad was outside with the truck's driver side door open, and this happened:
I can has keys nao?
It took me ten minutes to get him out of there, since when I'd reach in, he'd hop over the middle to the passenger side. And when I went around to the passenger side, he'd hop right back. Cute, but annoying as fuck. He has some other... issues as well. He pees on the carpet all the time. It's not marking behavior and it doesn't matter how often we take him out, he just... dribbles sometimes, nearly always when he's running around with Gator. It's not true incontinence, or it would happen while he's sleeping, which it doesn't. The vet says we're doing everything right for the potty problem as far as behavior goes, it just seems to be a very specific form of excitement leak. So I have gotten to know the steam cleaner very, very well over the past few months. Seriously, I'm thinking of listing industrial steam cleaning experience on my resume.
The problem is that, far from being the focus that I needed, Plato has become more of a source of anxiety for me than anything else. We're working on it, and he's slowly getting better, but what I want is a dog I can walk around people, people who are inevitably going to say "Oh look at the adorable doggie!" and bend down to pet him, and the dog doesn't flip out and scare the shit out of them. I do not have that. Hopefully, we will get to that stage, but we are not there yet. We are still at the "I love you, but you exhaust me in ways I didn't know were possible" stage. I don't get weepy when he does something stupid or awful anymore, because he wants to be a good dog, he really does, El Chupacabra just doesn't know how.
Yeah, you just sit there and look cute, you little bastard. I'll vacuum up your pee.
So he is a conundrum, my little guy of many names. He is a growly little alpha who loves taking baths and wearing bandanas and just generally being a fancy dog. When he rides in the truck, we try to keep him in the back seat, but he loves to put his paws up and look over the center console (and lick at anything in the cupholders), and nothing we do can dissuade him, even though his back paws barely touch the ground. But, motherfucker, is it cute:
Pictured: too motherfucking cute. And my sister trying to order at the drive-thru.
So now you've met my dog, and I can tell lengthy stories about him instead of just randomly alluding to something because I haven't properly introduced him yet. The latest is that the vet officially pronounced him Too Fat and we are trying to slim him down, the little furry sausage, but he keeps eating Big Dog's food. Warning: you're probably going to get a lot of "Dammit, Little Dog, why did you have to _____?" posts, but I will make amends by posting adorable pictures. If I can get him to sit still long enough for the camera.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 10:53 pm (UTC)i feel your wacky-dog pain. my 9 month old puppy is... well, he's a caution. we got him because my other dog died this year and we needed a distraction. HAHA. HA. yeah.
fight on. they can't get worse, right? ...right? damn their cute faces.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 04:24 am (UTC)And, yeah, a 9-month-old puppy would be a distraction from... pretty much anything, I would think. Best of luck, soldier!
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 11:06 pm (UTC)I love the Pluto/Plato mixup (I like yours better) and I loooove his little beard! So cute!
also i'm pretty sure one or both of my dogs might actually be racist. :-/
no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 04:26 am (UTC)I don't know where that comes from. Simple unfamiliarity, if they've only been bred and raised around white people? Our old German shepherd could be like that sometimes, but he spent some time in a police training program, and we always sort of wondered...
And seriously, who names a dog "Pluto"? Shut up, Walt Disney, you're dead.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-20 11:58 pm (UTC)BTW A friend of mine had a Jack Russell who got set off by bikes - and skateboards, and homeless people, and, well, black people, especially men of colour. Which was awful, and tragicomic as her girlfriend was Samoan, BUT he did slowly get way better and hide his far-rightwing tendencies.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 04:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 01:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 04:30 am (UTC)(Actually, I suspect he might be bisexual... if he had testicles. I don't think he can be properly said to have an orientation now.)
no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 03:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 04:31 am (UTC)Buuuuut I couldn't. Probably.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 07:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 08:09 am (UTC)I'm glad things are getting better, even if it's slowly. :)
And because you made me giggle:
no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 03:04 am (UTC)WE WILL MAKE FETCH HAPPEN. EVEN IF WE HAVE TO RESORT TO, I DON'T KNOW, BACON FRISBEES OR SOMETHING. IT WILL HAPPEN.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-21 08:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 03:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-22 07:17 am (UTC)The way Plato plays with Gator doesn't surprise me at ALL; terriers are always the biggest dogs at the dog park. Even when they're the smallest. xD My puppy is 60 lbs but he's the most submissive thing, and he's been both pinned and humped by 20lb terriers, lol.
He sounds absolutely exhausting sometimes, but you're an awesome owner for working so hard with him and loving him anyway! ♥
no subject
Date: 2011-09-23 03:06 am (UTC)Thanks for the reassurance. Sometimes it really is a chore, but then he looks at me with those big brown eyes and I melt.