The other dog stayed with us on Thursday night, since his old man was away at camp with number two child. He can't go into kennels anymore since his neuroses have intensified with age and he goes batshit crazy if he's shut into a pen at night.
To the point where he tries to chew his own paws off.
I wish I were joking.
Until he was about four or five Wilson was quite emotionally stable. But therafter he became progressively spooked by loud noises, particularly thunder and fireworks. In January 2002 we went out to visit friends for a few hours leaving Wilson in the backyard. While we were gone there was a thunderstorm and given that he had already started to show signs of being terrified of them, I was worried enough about him to go home by myself to check on him.
That decision was validated by the few small drops of blood on the entrance tiles. And the fact that he didn't come running down the stairs as was his pattern. The drops of blood turned into splotches as I ran up the stairs but in the lounge there were pools of it. It was hard to see at first what had happened - I couldn't find Wilson initially, but then I noticed the hole in the window. It wasn't a big one but it was jagged around the edge, not leaving much room for a 30kg golden retriever to get through unscathed.
Which he hadn't, as I discovered, when I found him lying in a puddle of blood on our bedroom floor. There was a gash in his muzzle about two inches long and I really thought he was dying. It turned out I had come home just in time because he would have bled to death if he had been left for much longer.
Once we had got him all stitched up at the vets, we had a chance to completely check out the damage. When I figured out what had happened I cried. Wilson had clearly been trying to get inside for a significant period of time because the aluminium frame surrounding the window had been bent right back and had teeth marks in it. But because we had security stays on the window he hadn't been able to open it completely and all his hard work had been in vain. I guess at that point he just thought "fuck it, I'm going in" and dove head first through the window.
I couldn't take the girls back to the house until all the carpet had been replaced. It looked like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre had been filmed in there. In his panic it seemed he had run around in circles, tracking blood into every carpeted room in the house. Not only was the carpet soaked but he had shaken himself off a few times and splattered the walls in the process. The insurance covered the cost of the new carpet, but not the underlay (because they are wankers. They are also bastards because they then added an exclusion clause for damage caused by pets).
For the last six years we have lightly drugged Wilson for a couple of weeks each November during the fireworks season and we keep a very close eye on the weather reports.
But in the last six months he has started to become even more highly strung. While he used to love going to the kennels and playing with the other dogs, he went in for an overnight stay in May and completely flipped his lid, trying to scratch his way out of his pen overnight and cutting his paws open in the process. There had been a storm and at first we thought it was that that freaked him out. But the next time he was there he did the same thing, and because he hurt his paws again he started chewing at them compulsively. We got the message that time.
On Thursday night when I brought him back to my place he followed me from room to room, clearly forgetting that I'm the woman who never stays in one place long. Eventually I took pity on him and turned the TV on. That distracted him sufficiently that he could sit still for more than a few seconds, and eventually he fell asleep.
I love him so much.
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