SIGH
I went out for a pleasant evening of touring the First Friday art events in town. I came home to discover the following ...
Okay, let me preface this by explaining that our elderly dog's hips are failing, so she can't walk straight and will sometimes fall down and be unable to get back up again. This usually produces a lot of uncoordinated thrashing and an escalating series of panicked whines eventually ending in mournful howling. For extra fun, it usually happens at 2 or 3 in the morning because she's blundering around in the dark, runs into something and falls down. (I've lost 2 nights of sleep this week because of this ...)
Anyway, when I got out of my car in the garage, I heard mournful, hoarse, exhausted howling, and braced for what I was going to find. What I found was that she had crapped all over the floor, fallen down in it, and then (based on the forensic evidence) thrashed in circles for possibly hours and finally managed to thrash her way into a corner. She was too exhausted to stand up. I picked her up a couple of times, put her on her feet, and she'd just fall over.
The other dog, meanwhile, was literally running in panicked circles because he's desperately neurotic anyway, and clearly knew that we don't poop in the house and thought he was going to get blamed for it somehow. Unfortunately my attempts to shoo him out the door so I could clean it up just made him decide that he really WAS being punished for something, which resulted in even more panicked circles (across the area I was trying to clean up) combined with attempts to climb my leg in pathetic apology.
.............................. FML.
Fortunately, Elderly Dog didn't seem to be actually hurt, and once I got everyone calm, clean and fed, she seems to have fallen asleep (exhausted by all the panicked flailing, I guess) while the other dog has gone off to find a dark quiet place to deal with his neuroses in peace.
I think I am going to have an adult beverage now.
This entry is also posted at http://sholio.dreamwidth.org/941728.html with
comments.
Okay, let me preface this by explaining that our elderly dog's hips are failing, so she can't walk straight and will sometimes fall down and be unable to get back up again. This usually produces a lot of uncoordinated thrashing and an escalating series of panicked whines eventually ending in mournful howling. For extra fun, it usually happens at 2 or 3 in the morning because she's blundering around in the dark, runs into something and falls down. (I've lost 2 nights of sleep this week because of this ...)
Anyway, when I got out of my car in the garage, I heard mournful, hoarse, exhausted howling, and braced for what I was going to find. What I found was that she had crapped all over the floor, fallen down in it, and then (based on the forensic evidence) thrashed in circles for possibly hours and finally managed to thrash her way into a corner. She was too exhausted to stand up. I picked her up a couple of times, put her on her feet, and she'd just fall over.
The other dog, meanwhile, was literally running in panicked circles because he's desperately neurotic anyway, and clearly knew that we don't poop in the house and thought he was going to get blamed for it somehow. Unfortunately my attempts to shoo him out the door so I could clean it up just made him decide that he really WAS being punished for something, which resulted in even more panicked circles (across the area I was trying to clean up) combined with attempts to climb my leg in pathetic apology.
.............................. FML.
Fortunately, Elderly Dog didn't seem to be actually hurt, and once I got everyone calm, clean and fed, she seems to have fallen asleep (exhausted by all the panicked flailing, I guess) while the other dog has gone off to find a dark quiet place to deal with his neuroses in peace.
I think I am going to have an adult beverage now.
This entry is also posted at http://sholio.dreamwidth.org/941728.html with
comments.