What My Dog Taught Me Today

Other than eating, sleeping and racing outside to bark at imaginary burglars, my dogs’ favorite pastime seems to be play fighting. Ellie and Frankie (our Chihuahuas) do it the most, growling and biting at each other in that tentative, slow way dogs do when they aren’t really mad at each other. Chloe joins in occasionally ...

It still amazes me how calmly our dogs accept double standards. Now, I understand how they can accept different standards between humans and dogs, but they also, very calmly, accepted different standards between dogs. Sandy is a Chocolate lab, and somewhat big. Cody is some sort of terrier mix and just on the upper side ...

Like an explosion all 5 dogs will rush up from where they are laying and with loud barks hurl themselves to the dog door into the yard. The racket they make is almost thunderous and it blocks out every other sound in the room until they finally get outside. They do this maybe a half-a-dozen ...

I’ve never been able to teach our dogs to be patient, or altruistic when it comes to food. We feed them enough because several of them are having some mild weight problems. We did feed them out of one bowl, but we notice some were getting skinny (namely the two males) while the rest were ...

This is Frankie. He wants to be petted. He does this about once every half hour or so. He puts his little front paws on my leg then stares at me with his sorrowful, little, puppy-dog eyes until I give in, stop work, and pet him. After about 15 to 20 seconds of petting him, ...

Today I tried teaching Frankie and Ellie to fetch. They’re Chihuahuas so I didn’t know if they’d be able to get the process as easily as Sandy, our chocolate lab, did. I threw one of their toys and Ellie eagerly ran after it, but then stopped half-way back to play with it. She eventually brought ...

I thought occurred to me a while back that God has left a whole lot of metaphors scattered about our world. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if absolutely everything in this world was an intentional metaphor for something far more worthwhile in eternity. So I thought about dogs. I like dogs, I always have. ...