Chester – Day 6
This morning I’m going to backtrack a bit and start to explain some basics of Chester’s life. Sometimes living with Chester is like having a large stuffed animal dog … you put him in a corner; he stays there until you physically move him.
If you came to our home for the first time, you’d never know we have two dogs. Sure, there’s blond dog hair on the dark hardwood floors, but it’s impossible to tell if that’s from one dog or two. Casey would come to meet you, tail wagging even while sitting to wait for you to pet her (for about 30 seconds until we had to make her sit again). Chester would be nowhere to be found unless you knew about his corners or hiding places. He doesn’t bark, wag his tail, play, he doesn’t chew large bones or toys. Treats are a different story for tomorrow. We’ve never seen him with a ball in his mouth. He’s only picked up a stuffed toy in his mouth once. The only sound he makes is a kind of popping sound with his mouth (usually when he’s nervous). Oh, that’s right … the past few nights he snores. He looks like a real dog but doesn’t act like one. We’re working on changing that.
He spends all night in his kennel/bed. Again, we NEVER close the kennel door. He never gets up on his own to leave. In the morning I put the harness on him (he sits or lies patiently and lets me fasten it). Then I connect his leash and tug it gently. Sometimes he will move, most of the time he balks and it takes some actual lifting to get him up. Once he’s up, he walks cautiously to the bedroom door where he either tries to bolt across the hall to my office and “his corner” or he lies down in the hallway. If I didn’t have him on a leash, he would go directly to the corner in my office, never beyond that. The hallways and large kitchen areas of the home are hardwood floors. Chester prefers to walk on carpet because his footing isn’t as secure on the wood (I don’t blame him, Casey doesn’t like the wood floors either). Occasionally he has to be physically lifted again in the hallway to start moving to the next place.
We head down the hall, around the corner and down stairs to the basement and the slider door to the fenced backyard. Sometimes Chester lies back down and has to be coaxed again to get up to go out. If it’s still dark outside, the shadows frighten him and a few times I’ve had to physically move him out the slider door. Once outside he turns back to the door like “let me back in.” I walk around the yard a bit and he usually follows but keeps returning to the door.
Eventually he’ll find a place to potty, then immediately back to the door. When I open the door, he bolts to his “other place” under an end table near my rocker/recliner. That’s his spot in the Man & Dog Cave basement, our family room. Until yesterday there have only been two times when Chester left that area without serious prodding. We’re making progress in that front because twice yesterday and again at 5 a.m. today he came upstairs on his own (but only when Casey, Glenn and I are all upstairs). If anyone is left in the basement, he is content to stay under his table. Now that we’ve learned to vacate the basement, I don’t have to play tug-of-war with him to remove him from under the end table. Once at the top of the stairs, he looks around nervously and scoots down the hallway to his corner of my office, or across the hall to his kennel/bed. Unfortunately our system doesn’t work the other way around. He would stay in his kennel/bed or the corner of my office all day without leaving to go downstairs and out to go potty. I believe his bladder would physically pop before he’d attempt that on his own. He’s never had an accident in the house.
Note: besides the accomplishments noted above, he allowed a few small girls to sit near him in his office corner and they whispered, no petting yet. He stayed on the kitchen sofa for what seemed like a long time to me, while I cleaned my neglected kitchen. He’s not afraid of the pump sound of my jetted tub. He’s taking a bit more time eating instead of inhaling it like he did the first few days (he’s aware that there’s another dog in the house even though we feed him in private).
Chester doesn’t like walking around corners (there might be something scary on the other side) … he dislikes shadows for the same reason. He’s not a fan of closed doors either. You never know what might be behind them and it slows his forward progress if we have to stop to open it. Although he’s been here almost a week, he moves around the house as if it’s the scariest Haunted House on Halloween … the possibility of lots of “things” popping out at you from who knows where. Of course he hates quick movements or strange sounds (doesn’t everybody?). He is; however, open to FOOD … all kinds of FOOD. That’s tomorrow’s topic.
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