Andy Sauer
I have a good dog with a bad reputation. By almost every measure of temperament, he is a mellow pooch. He’s big and fluffy. He takes long naps. He loves to cuddle. He’s friendly, especially with kids. He doesn’t jump up on people (often), and compared to our other dog, who possesses a pair of body parts that lends its possessor to aggression, he’s a pushover. He does have his faults.
We live in a house positioned very close to our street that’s very popular with dog walkers. My dog, Whiskey (that’s right, Whiskey Sauer), seems to be beside himself with a visceral anger that in this expansive world there exist other dogs. Whenever a dog passes by the house, day or night, he scratches his paws on the window sill and stands on his hind legs and lets loose the most furious barrage of barks a canine can muster. If he’s really mad, he’ll pound the window with his paw. He smears nose prints on the glass. One set of pricey wooden blinds sport his bite marks.
Well, there’s a beautiful, well-behaved Golden Retriever whose owners regularly walked him past our house. One day, Whiskey’s demons overtook him and he not only shredded the screen, he jumped through it. “Oh my God!” I heard the Golden’s owner scream, followed by my wife’s “Whiskey! Whiskey,” which, at 10 a.m. probably raised other concerns in the neighborhood. Fortunately, Whiskey just wanted to make proper introductions, and the meeting was friendly. From then on, our downstairs windows stayed closed, no matter how hot it got.
Nonetheless, a summer later, the same Golden Retriever and his owners were walking by the house, and Whiskey resumed his protest, this time from the second floor window, which was open. He pushed the screen out, jumped out of the window, stuck the landing on the driveway and ran, bloodied, after his new friend.
That Golden Retriever and his owners don’t walk by our house anymore.
The barking had become so common that we barely even responded to them anymore. It was like background noise.
Then, in the middle of a summer night, he howled with anger, and wouldn’t stop. He was furious. I went downstairs, looked around, turned on the lights and asked him to keep it down. It was late. I went back to sleep. The next morning, I was mowing the lawn and noticed one of the front screens was pulled out of the window frame. Someone had forced it open from the outside before Whiskey sounded the alarm.
Good dog.