About three years ago, my family decided to get a dog. Since my mom is allergic to pretty much everything besides the air, we decided to adopt a miniature poodle because they are (supposedly) hypoallergenic. Which is how Max came into our lives.
We adopted Max from “Doodle Dawgs & Fabulous Felines,” an organization that rescues animals from kill shelters. Max was 12 years old, which is about 70 in dog years, but we were reassured that he was quite spry for his age.
The first few days with Max were blissfully uneventful. Max is a sweet, polite dog who loves people and boings up and down whenever he gets excited. We discovered that his favorite food is cheese and that he has a bizarre fear of trash cans.
After about a week, my mom was sneezing so much that she looked like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. So it was decided that Max would move to my grandparents’ house, since they live right across the street.
After a few months, it became apparent that Max had a few issues, to put it delicately.
First of all, his breath stinks. Like really stinks. The vet suggested that we brush his teeth, so my mom bought chicken-flavored toothpaste and a doggy toothbrush. As delicious as chicken-flavored toothpaste sounds, Max was not having the tooth brushing – it took two people to hold him down, and a third to actually get the brush in his mouth. After a number of unsuccessful attempts, we decided we’d rather deal with the bad breath.
Now, I don’t really understand why he has bad breath, since Max is probably the only dog in the world that hates eating. When we put down his food bowl, he'll slowly saunter over, take a whiff, and then return to his bed where he’ll spend the majority of the day sleeping. It has become a daily struggle to get Max to eat his kibble.
“Max is on a hunger strike,” my grandmother said the other day as I walked into her house. “He’s refused to eat anything since yesterday.”
Like most Jewish grandmothers, my grandmother can’t handle it when someone, human or otherwise, isn’t eating. In order to entice Max to eat, she makes delicious concoctions of meat, rice, and potatoes. The mush she makes smells so good that I’d eat it. I honestly don’t get the dog’s deal.
A few weeks ago, I noticed my grandfather sitting on the porch, feeding Max kibble by kibble. And he was using a spoon.
“Um, what are you doing?” I asked tentatively.
My grandfather looked up triumphantly and said, “Max has eaten 43 kibbles! He likes eating off the spoon!” (I just picture Max telling his doggie friends, “Look what I can make the humans do!”)
Max also hates going for walks, which is almost as weird as the whole not eating thing. Instead of walking like other normal dogs, Max will stop at every tree, bush, fire hydrant, pole, rock, garden, and pile of recycling to take a sniff. If he smells something that interests him (which is pretty much anything outside), he refuses to continue walking until he has thoroughly sniffed the entire area. I once made the mistake of trying to pull him away from a stop sign before he had finished his detective work. He literally sat down and squinted at me until I let him resume. Another time I thought I had won, as I managed to pull him away from my neighbor’s bush after he spent almost 10 minutes smelling the roses. When we were a few blocks away, he suddenly turned around, and walked straight back to the bush. He’s one stubborn pooch.
Max has also become slightly (mostly) incontinent. In November, my family got together at my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving dinner. My cousin threw her winter coat on the couch when she arrived. (Spoiler alert: this was not a good idea.) About two hours later, my brother started laughing hysterically in the living room. He called into the dining room, “Max peed on someone’s coat!”
Luckily, the coat was machine washable, but my cousin still wasn't too thrilled about the situation.
Even though he has some problems (one of which is that he still doesn’t know his own name), Max has truly become a member of the family. I just wish he’d stop eating off a spoon.
