This is what happened.
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I'm petsitting this weekend, and this dog, while very sweet, is made of crazy. She's so high energy she vibrates. She doesn't have an ounce of fat on her body. She's the living embodiment of a Powerplate Platform. She may be endorsed by Madonna.
Others tell me that she calms down and acts like a normal dog sometimes, but she almost never does around me. I walk in the door and she starts bouncing from me, to the wall, to me, to the other wall... she bashes into furniture and sometimes gets so excited she pees on the floor. I've been around dogs my whole life and watched many episodes of 'It's Me Or The Dog,' so I ignore her and walk through to the kitchen, settle myself around the house, and avoid eye contact.
It doesn't work.
And since the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results... this time I came armed with a very special technique happened upon by The Librarian. I call it, 'Give her something to eat besides my face.'
I brought these:
They came in a three pack for $7.98 at Walmart, and I spent a few minutes standing in the pet toy aisle, eying them suspiciously. Would three be enough? I'm petsitting all weekend, after all, and even though these were the largest white rawhides offered (any color rawhide + white carpet = disaster of biblical proportions) they didn't seem all that large to me. How much peace could $7.98 bring me?
Anything was better than no peace at all, though. After all, there's a really great Chinese takeout place near their house, the best I've located so far, and I want to be able to eat my Broccoli with Garlic Sauce on previously mentioned white carpet without stress.
Here's a comparison photo of one of the bones with the face it would hopefully be replacing:
(Serious face because it's serious business.)
As you can see, they're fairly close to a foot long. They're light and feel dryer to me than a lot of the rawhide products I've handled in the past. The label makes it very clear that they're not for human consumption, so I can't speak to their taste. I can speak to the fact that they Tamed The Savage Beast.
For, you know, a little while.
I'm not a dog. I don't understand the appeal of dry, untanned animal hide, but then, I've also never had the impulse to roll around in rotting dead animals, which I'm given to understand is a favorite past time of members of the Canid family. But I tossed the first bone onto the floor and for the next four hours, the Beast's entire attention span was focused on something that was not me.
Within the first twenty minutes, she had gotten one of the ends completely off. I think I was right about these being somehow drier that regular rawhide, because when she got it separated, she left a trail of crumbly little rawhide bits on the carpet. The rest of the bone put up a good long fight before it succumbed to the Beast's Big Sharp Pointy Teeth. It took a while.
Sometimes the Beast tried new techniques, including one that involved letting gravity do some of the work and just opening and closing her jaws.
I really do love this dog.
And this Chinese food.
The Dragon Wok on Skeet Club in High Point, for you locals. Same shopping center as Feeney's Frozen Yogurt.
Item: Exer-hides Rawhide Bones
Price: $7.98 plus tax
Size: 16.2 ounces (for 3 bones)
Purchased at: WalMart
Rating: 7 out of 10
Pros: Taming the savage beast. My delicious dinner.
Cons: Eventual defeat. Little bits on the carpet. Gross if you think about it too much. Extra gross if you Google it.
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