She was such a sneaky puppy,
which earned her the nickname "weasel". She was fast as lightning
when it
came to getting some food.
My husband, being a creature of habit, would prepare his food and set it
down
on the coffee table while
he went back into the kitchen to make something to drink (or vice-versa).
So many
times he came back to find
what he'd left partially eaten (like he wouldn't notice). She knew
he'd be
coming back so she was long
gone and hiding by that time. Have you ever seen bite marks in a
bowl of ice
cream? Found your
glass of chocolate milk half drunk with splashes of it all around?
Then she got brave
and started doing "drive-by's".
I guess she figured we learned not to leave stuff lying around... We were
eating pizza one evening,
sitting on the floor in the family room and she walked by right in front
of me and
snagged a bite of it right
out of my hand! If you went to the drive-thru to get food and were
eating in the
car with Cerberus in it,
watch out! She was so sneaky and her timing was perfect. She'd
wait until just
the right moment when you'd
just raised the food to your mouth and she'd take a bite out of it.
She knew
you couldn't see her!
I'd made stew another night and we were eating it at the table and the
stew was still
in a pot on the stove.
We heard Cerberus barf and both of us went into the kitchen. There
were large
chunks of carrot, potato
and gravy on the floor that she'd just barfed up. We both blamed
each other for
giving the dog stew.
Neither one of us did, she just helped herself! Apparently it was
too hot for her
liking.
Rommel and Cerberus got into
lots of trouble if left alone in the yard. We rented a very small
house for a
few months when my husband
first got out of the Marines. We kept the dogs in the house during
the day
because right on the other
side of the chain-link fence was a schoolyard full of children who had
nothing
better to do than throw
rocks at and tease our dogs. (And people wonder why some dogs bite
children.) On
the weekends, however, the
dogs hung out in the yard a lot during the day to get fresh air.
That's when
they dug their best holes!
The neighbors behind us had some kind of little fluff dog that drove Cerberus
nuts. In the summer
of 1993 the St. Louis area was devastated by floods. Creeks that
were usually dry were
flooding into people's homes
and one of our friends' houses was in danger of flooding. We were
out most of
the afternoon and pretty
late into the night digging trenches and filling sandbags to help out.
The next
morning the dogs wanted
to go outside early and I let them out in the yard and went back to bed.
The
neighbor rang the doorbell
all frantic and asked me to bring the dogs in the house right away!
I
immediately went to the
back to let them in and saw that Cerberus had almost dug her way out of
our yard
and into the neighbors to
get the fluff dog. Only her butt and stubby tail were in our yard.
That was a
close one! In the
6 months we lived at that rented house they did plenty of damage.
We had to fill all the
holes they dug and sow grass
seed, we also had to replace some of the asbestos siding Cerberus either
broke
off with her bowling ball
or the dogs had eaten. Digging holes is also dirty work so we had
to re-paint one
side of the house where
they'd marked their turf with muddy paw print graffiti. It's amazing
that they did
most of their damage at
either military base housing or rental property.
Written by Sharon Wehlermann
on July 29, 2000