On The Dangers of Owning A Smart Dog

There is a lot of heavy shit on my mind these days, and the actual blog that I’ve been mulling over in my head is honestly something that no one needs to read during a pandemic. So, for right now, in order to give myself a remote sense of productivity, I’m going to write a series of Izzy stories for your reading enjoyment. You are welcome in advance for making the most irresponsible, impulse purchase in the history of such purchases at the Baltimore City SPCA in April 2007: Izzy.

I make reference to a few of her first year’s antics in a blog (click here for the link) I wrote several years ago, but a decade later there have been a few more doozies. I had great aspirations of self-training a reliable, mixed breed therapy dog. 13 years ago, when she was just a tiny one, I tried teaching her how to move things out of my way in my apartment. With much peanut butter and patience she eventually mastered, “move your bone,” or “move your toy," and with ample opportunities for practice, she soon learned that “go get Meg” (my roommate back in Baltimore) meant I needed help out of a pickle. She also walks exceptionally well on a leash – I think running over her paws a few times with my manual wheelchair when she was a puppy sent an enduring message. Along the way she also learned how to open doors – at least the ones with lever handles. She had no problem jumping up, depressing the lever and barging into someone’s room, and she soon figured out how to depress the handle, walk backwards and stick her snout in the doorway in order to pull the door open as well. During her first few years with me, I was still able to walk, albeit with difficulty, and there were occasional nights when I tripped and fell en route to the bathroom and needed Izzy to go “wake up Meg” to help me off the ground. On another morning, I woke up and struggled to get myself out of bed. Unable to break my superhuman extensory tone in the morning, I could not pull myself into a seated position to transfer to my wheelchair. I summoned the beast: “Izzy, come, come up here!” She leapt onto the bed, eager to encroach upon my personal space as always. Once she was standing directly over my face, I grabbed her collar and told her to “back up.” Whether she knew what I was talking about or she just backed away from me in an act of attempted defiance, I will never know – but the result was that she pulled me into a seated position. Once seated, I was able to grab onto my nightstand and reach forward for my wheelchair in order to successfully transfer out of bed. That was the first moment I realized, this beast deserves a therapy dog vest.* Whether or not she would be physically able or well-trained enough to help me out of the myriad predicaments I’d find myself in over the next dozen years remained to be seen, but I knew I needed her by my side.

There have been times however, especially in her younger years, when her extensive therapy dog “training” and her intuition backfired. For example, I never thought about the downside of Izzy learning to open doors inside my apartment. Fast forward a year or two to when my friend Meli flew in from Seattle to visit me for the weekend. Izzy mistakenly believed that anyone entering my apartment was there explicitly for her entertainment, and was thus non-plussed when the two of us departed the apartment to go out for brunch. Two hours later we returned to my apartment to find a pink Post-It note stuck to my door. It read: “FYI, I found your dog in my apartment. I returned her and put her in her crate. – Apartment 509.” I was confused, the deadbolt to my apartment was locked – how did she get out? I shrugged it off thinking perhaps the door had not latched for some reason. But then, just a few weeks later when I was wheeling to the garbage chute in my pajamas, immediately after the door latched behind me I heard clattering – as if the metal handle on my apartment door was being violently jiggled up and down. I thought to myself, maybe this is how she got out? I dumped the garbage and headed back towards my door where I discovered that somehow Izzy had managed to lock the deadbolt during her erratic clawing at the handle. Wearing pajamas on a Saturday night with no cell phone on me, I immediately panicked – how was I going to get back in? None of my friends had an extra key, Meg was in New York for the weekend and how could I contact anyone without my phone? The apartment manager didn’t even have an emergency contact number, and I wasn’t particularly friendly with any of my neighbors. In desperation, I did the only thing I could think of at the time: “Izzy girl, Izzy girl!! Let me in, come on girl, open the door!!” She must have hesitated for a minute or two thinking, why isn’t she just opening the door herself? Yet with repeated urging, I heard the familiar scrambling of her front paws against the door handle and soon enough she depressed the handle and pulled it backwards just enough to let me in. I felt the same sense of pride at that moment as I did when my most academically unmotivated student finally managed to pass a test. I leaned forward and praised her as if she had saved someone from a burning building. Never mind that she was the one who had locked me out to begin with, her brilliance prevented me from spending the night in the hallway of my apartment building.

That was only one of many door-related exploits perpetrated by this dog of mine. On at least two other occasions she managed to escape the apartment while I was in the hospital and at school. I received a phone call late in the afternoon the day before I was scheduled to begin my first chemo infusion. Recognizing the number as my apartment manager's, I answered: “Hey Melody, what’s up?” Sounding flustered she responded, “Are you home? Your dog is in my office.” Confused, I explained, “I’m in the hospital for a couple days, nobody is in my apartment right now. Meg will not be home until after work. How did she get into your office?” That question was never answered (although I wish I could get my hands on the security footage). To be clear, I lived on the fifth floor of a high-rise building. Melody’s office was on the eighth floor. Which meant that Izzy either rode the elevator up three flights or that she somehow got into the stairwell by way of a heavy duty door that she pulled open before walking up three flights of stairs to the eighth floor. Either scenario did not make much sense to me. Who in their right mind would let a dog get into the elevator unaccompanied? Or how did she manage to pull open such a heavy door? On another afternoon, the maintenance guy from my building called me at school to report that Izzy was found on the ground floor of the parking garage. He escorted her back to the apartment, begging the question: what would have happened had he not been in the parking garage when she came out of the elevator door? It was terrifying to consider.

I’m sure you are shaking your head at this point and thinking, why the hell did you not just put that Houdini of a dog inside her crate? Good question. Primarily because when I was the only person in my apartment, I was physically unable to get her into the crate by myself. She’d throw herself on the floor just outside the crate and have a canine equivalent of a toddler’s flop and drop. From the confines of a wheelchair it was pretty much impossible to force her in, and she couldn’t be enticed by a treat when she knew it meant I was leaving her alone in the apartment. The most annoying part of these shenanigans? When there was an able-bodied person in the apartment with me, all I’d have to say was, “in your crate” and she’d walk in obediently. (Clearly not a characteristic of a reliable therapy dog when said therapy dog is able to expertly exploit her owner’s disability.)

I’m going to leave off on that note, and hopefully – as the quarantine continues – I will be motivated to chronicle a few more Izzy adventures before life returns to normal. She is 13 at this point, and already had a cancerous tumor removed. My goal is to get these stories written while I can still look at her sleeping on the floor in front of me, gnawing on her bone, occasionally passing gas, and making me smile.

*Important note, although she does currently have a therapy dog vest, it is just from Amazon. She has accompanied me to a lot of places over the years, but I’d never take advantage of the system and bring her with me on a plane or, Lord forbid, to a grocery store.