it's a match! not for the squeamish.

so, not only do i like dogs, i also really like to read dog training manuals.

i take a lot of their advice, and discard a lot of it, too, but i am always intrigued to read their philosophies, etc. there's a grad-school-y pleasure in considering the Other and being with the Other and even being the Other. plus i love the idea of dog training as a discipline and a lifestyle, and i like the idea of dogs as constitutionally social, and so therefore how we measure and maintain that sociability. i also like considering the possibility that dogs are superior to humans since they lack resentment. i really like those manuals that do not talk about dogs sentimentally even while preserving the idea of their sentience.

now, as i train maebe, i am reading a lot of things which, if they are to be believed, mean i seriously fucked up doggie #1, lola. she does not seem to be at all fucked up, and so if you're doing the math, means that many things i am reading are not to be believed. much of the information i am taking in is solidifying what i already suspected: that lola is really the Greatest Dog Ever. for example, i'm sure i remember house training her in like three days. of course, this was eight years ago, so memory might be fuzzy. but i treated that Monks of New Skete book like a bible at the time and it seems to have worked.

anyway, this brings me to maebe. she's only either 11 weeks old or 14 weeks old, and we've only had her for four weeks. but dammit, if progress on house training isn't going maddeningly slow. and i have not slept a full night in that entire four weeks. part of house training is of course teaching them where and when not to go, and this also includes teaching them where and when to go. this manual i just read gives a trick for getting them to make #2 on your schedule.

you rip off a cardboard match from a book, moisten the non-sulfur end in your mouth, and then stick it up their butt. if you think you are above this, you do not currently have a puppy that wakes you up at 4 a.m. every single night to poop, and you also may have an over-inflated sense of your own dignity. also, i would not want to be trapped anywhere with you. anyway, it works like a goddamn charm, she poops within like 60 seconds. and so tonight, i, with a belly full of soup and a tired back from cleaning the house all day and fantasies of sleeping through the night, shoved that wet match on up there and it worked as it has since i've been using the trick, which is like two days. and i felt like i was cheating! that's my problem with it: not that its gross but because it seems like manipulation. which is stupid, because the idea behind it is that it stimulates their poop production in the same way that a "real" mother dog would by licking their little buttholes. circle of life, people, circle of life.