Surviving Life With A Canine Train Wreck

The first day he came to live with us he stepped through a screen door. The door wasn’t open.

Zzzzzipp.

Suddenly he was standing in the kitchen, cheered by the sound of his new master, my son, pouring kibble into a bowl. He was a 7-month-old Alaskan malamute puppy.

Never ran into one of those things before, he seemed to say.

I also noticed that he shot my wife and me a knowing glance, which I now realize meant, These things happen. An understatement if there ever was one.

I can’t give you a complete accounting of the “things” that have happened since then because they blur in memory. The dog has consumed countless articles of clothing and household items. He ate a fence until we lined it with welded wire. He uprooted a beautiful 12-year-old wisteria vine and joyfully paraded with it in his jaws as though it were a hindquarter of moose. The coiled garden hose is a bowl of noodles to him. He ate a piece (only a small piece) of my parents’ motorhome. The side yard, the dog yard, is where we keep the compost - to him it’s a banquet table - and all summer long we’ve fought a battle to barricade it from him. This battle we dare not lose. We’re talking ozone-threatening flatulence.

I could go on, but you get the picture.

The dog’s name is Durango. “Deranged-go” my oldest daughter’s boyfriend calls him.

After a lifetime of living with dogs, Durango is my first experience at cohabiting with what I now think of as the “canine train wreck.” All dogs can make a mess, of course. But I’m not talking mess. I’m talking catastrophe.

Through conversations with other dog owners I have learned that canine train wrecks happen in even the best of families. Those of us who live with them prefer not to bring the subject up in public. But it helps to talk, which is what I’m doing.

Take the case of Leslie Connell, a Clumber spaniel breeder over in Puyallup, Wash. She loves Clumbers - who wouldn’t? But when people ask her about getting one of her puppies, she has to clear her throat and ask, “Um, have you ever owned a Clumber puppy before?”

The point, she says, is that when Clumbers mature they transform into the sedentary, lie-by-the-fireplace, followyou-anywhere breed they are famed to be. Until then, however, your average Clumber puppy is a train wreck in progress. Puppies of hers once ate through drywall. “My God,” said the contractor when he came to repair the damage. “The structural integrity of your house is at risk.”

My wife one time had to comfort an elderly couple who were canine train wreck victims. They were fellow travelers on a bicycle trek who opted to sleep at a nearby bed and breakfast, rather than camp with the rest of the trekkers. They left their bikes in the inn’s back yard in the company, unbeknownst to them, of a Siberian husky puppy. The puppy ate their bikes. Ate the tires, ate the panniers (those saddlebags bicyclists carry their gear in), ate the nice expensive gel seats so popular with the mature rider.

“There, there,” my wife was able to comfort them. “These things happen.”

A friend of mine’s Akita just ate the camp sleeping pad of another friend of mine. It was the Therm-a-Rest Deluxe LE Long model, $90 at REI.

“That’s all right,” said the dog’s owner philosophically. “It just means that your dog becomes a more expensive dog.”

Train wrecks happen with mixed breeds, too. A farm dog of my acquaintance - one Bilbo Baggins, half sheltie, half chow - was just charged with one. His master brought a canola plant in from the field to show some visiting foreign exchange students. Bilbo destroyed the plant when no one was looking.

“Tiny canola seeds everywhere,” his mistress told me. “You wouldn’t believe the mess.”

I looked at Bilbo for explanation.

Those students were spies, he told me. They were going to smuggle that plant out of the country and threaten the domestic canola industry. I had to destroy it. That’s one canola plant you don’t have to worry about, he said with a waggish wink.

If you have a canine train wreck story you’d like to share with others, drop me a line. The way I see it, we train wreck victims should try to help one another cope. Maybe we can form a support group. CTWSA Canine Train Wreck Survivors Anonymous.

Next week: Confessions of a train wreck breeder.