Property Damage

You might not be aware of this but we recently moved out of our teeny one bedroom apartment into a new house.

It's huge compared with our last living accommodations and one of it's biggest selling points when we were looking was it's ginormous fully fenced wooded backyard.

Use Gauis to estimate size :)

One of it's few drawbacks was a single room with carpet. Now Gauis is pretty good about house training when supervised. When left to his own devises, not so much, especially not on carpet. He sort of demolished the carpet at my last place. But I had a plan. You see this house has an extra back bedroom that I was going to make all his.

Complete with a water bowl two doggy beds, kitty towers (for the cat) and chew toys. In essence this is more room than he had to run around in my old apartment! We are even going to put up his title certificates and ribbons and lovely pictures of him on the walls so it's homey! We were even going to make the kitty stay in there with him to keep him company as he loves his kitty. His own room, that's great right? And it sure beats having to stay in a crate.

I did not take this picture in this frame and do not "own it" so ssshhh no tattling on me.

So no proublem? Happy puppy, happy mommy, disgruntled yet resigned kitty right? Wrong.

Gauis would like everyone to know that he does not like being closed in one room. Not even for the measly 2-3 hours he is without human companionship during the day. Even if that room has MORE SPACE then he was used to inhabiting in total.

Extreme damage close up!

This was accomplished in about 3 days and I have no doubt that given a month he would be able to dig himself out. And having to sweep up large chunks of wood every night was not making me happy. He also managed to bang up his noes something awful.

I don't think this is separation anxiety as he never had that at the old place. I think this is just snotty, spoiled, bored behavior. For a while this meant crate time. As I will not give into this and see another carpet ruined. But now we are trying the baby gate.

He has managed to knock it down twice and escape (No accidents in my carpet room, thank the lord). And he hasn't jumped the baby gate yet (Something he has accomplished in the past. Serves me right for all the agility training.) So far so good.

SO I hope this dispels any perfect puppy myth Gauis might have had going for him. Anyone whose read this blog from the start I'm sure knows he's not perfect. But for the new folks. He can cause just as much trouble as any dog :)

P.S. I'm sure you noticed I found my camera's battery charger. Agility trial update tomorrow!