Zooey, Get Your Gun

So you already know about Zooey, our black lab that sheds like a woolly mammoth. She's a completely loveable dog, but I'm pretty sure she has some issues. Mental acuity issues. When she was a little fur ball puppy, she liked to bark at inanimate objects. One day I was in the bathroom getting ready for work and she was on our bed. All of the sudden she starts barking her ferocious bark, which at the time was little more than a yip. I turned around and she's trained on our ceiling fan, barking like a madman. Once I caught her barking at our fishtank. And a cabinet door that was ajar. She'd been around these things for months, but all of the sudden she now regarded them as suspicious persons. I should have gotten her into therapy then and there. So much pain would have been avoided. Never ignore the warning signs. They're asking for help.

She's kind of grown out of that phase and now only uses her ferocious bark (and it's really bone chilling now) around midnight when Ron's out of town or I'm home alone. She's downstairs, I'm upstairs. Scares the crap out of me every time. Who knows what she's barking at because I'm sure as heck not going down there to see.

I'm really sorry to say this, but even though we'd like to think she's really smart - she's not. She's got this red rubber thing (I think it's called a Kong) and loves it more than anything else in the world, except when Ron gets home and she tricks him into taking her out eighteen times before bedtime. We call this red rubber thing her ball, even though it's not really a ball at all. We say, "Zooey, get your ball" and she's off in a flash. She knows exactly where it is at any given moment of the day. We've taught her how to retrieve it when it goes under a chair or table; she even knows where I've hidden it if company's coming over. Based on this seemingly high IQ, we thought that she could possibly be the next Rin Tin Tin and make us piles of money. However, just to be mean, the other day I said, "Zooey, get your gun" with the same inflection I use when I tell her to get her ball. She zips off and comes back with that red rubber thing in her mouth. Then I decide to further test her intellect - I call her Marty. She runs up to me, sits (we only pet her if she sits) and swishes her otter tail back and forth in 6/8 time. My hopes for my canine sponsored retirement come to a screeching halt. She's not gifted. No AP classes in fetching or drug sniffing for her.

One night I'm going to wake up and she'll be standing over me with a knife, having watched too many episodes of "Wallace and Grommit." I'm going to start locking my bedroom door.