Thor, the dog of Thunder

Hiding from a thunderstorm

My dog is completely worthless.  I am not ashamed to say it.  I am really not.  He just is.  It is not, however, due to any fault of his own.  It is our fault, the Admiral's and I.  We broke him.  If dogs had psychiatrists, he would be on the couch. 

We really probably should not have had kids, as badly as we messed up the first living creature we were entrusted with. 

Back at the tender age of 26, my husband and I were living in a really nice one bedroom apartment.  This apartment did not take animals, and we had discussed many times about wanting a dog.  So when our lease was up, we found another, equally nice apartment, acutally a townhouse (yes, I felt a little like Barbie.  Dream come true baby! Living in a townhouse, now all I needed was a string to pull up an elevator, and a corvette), and we got serious about this whole dog thing.  This was a huge commitment for he and I, so we did not take this lightly. We talked about the kind of Dog we wanted, and both of us decided that we wanted a Husky. 

As luck would have it, a co-worker of my husband's told him that he had just surrendered a Husky, pure bred, to the Humane Society a couple of days before.  So on Saturday morning, bright and early, we trekked down to the local humane society to get it.  We talked to one of the workers there who told us that unfortunatly, even though we knew the person who surrendered the Husky, they hold all new dogs for a week to make sure that they don't have any diseases, and even then, if we were not there when the dog went out on the floor, someone else could adopt him, and she was not able to let us know right when the dog went out, because she didn't know and it may be when she wasn't there.  (bucket full of help, this one).  We were so dissappointed. 

I love dogs and puppies, so I said to the Admiral, "Do you want to at least go back and look?  There may be something there." 

"Why not, we are here." 

We walked into the room where all of the dogs were, and right in the front, in a glass atrium, there was the cutest little teddy bear of a puppy.  Husky-who???  That husky was never to be ours, because immediatly when we went up to this puppy, he shook his little stuffed toy so hard he fell on his butt, stealing our little pea-pickin heart! 

The name on the window was "Thor".  We adopted him right then, and kept the name. 

He even looks like he needs a therapist in this picture

Now, I have TONS of puppy pictures, but this was before digital cameras were really popular, so I don't have any pics on my computer of him.

So how have we completely messed up this dog, you ask?  Well, he was a pretty brave puppy. Nothing seemed to rattle him.  So on July 4th, when he was about 7 months old, we decided it would be fun to take him with us to see the fireworks.  (Brillant right??)  We managed to get seats really close to where they were going to be setting them off.  (Even more brillant, aren't you glad we procreated?)  We spent the better part of the evening hanging out, with people petting our well behaved dog, and talking to friends.  We got our blanket all set up, and settled in to watch as it got dark. 

As soon as the first firework shot off, I knew we were in serious trouble.  He literally jumped up and threw himself off of the blanket, and pulled as hard as he could on the leash.  I smelled the nasty smell of poo and looked at the blanket, he had literally had the schmidt scared out of him.

I get up, realizing my precious boy was in distress, and let him lead me.  He was pulling so hard he was about to break his neck and my hand.  The Admiral shouted, "You take him to the van, I will get the stuff", as I ran (and dear hearts, I do NOT run.  Ever.  At all.)  as he pulled me, and I tried to lead him to the car.  I was really hauling butt now, running faster than I had or will ever run again, and he was still about to pull me off my feet. 

I get back to the car, open the hatch, and throw him in.  The Admiral catches up with us and gets in the car. 

"Guess that was a bad idea."  Umm, yeah.  It was. 

no man in a dress with a knife will sneak up on me!

We get him home, and give him a bath, (I will spare you the details of why, just refer to the earlier comment about his reaction to fear), and after it was done, we sat on the couch and looked at him.  He looked as though he had PTSD.  He was jittery, jumpy, neurotic and not happy at all. 
We knew then, that we no longer had the same dog we had brought home.  We had broken him.  His psyche was cracked, and it was our fault. 

To this day any kind of noise gets him all jumpy, and he growls this growl that would be comical if we didn't know it was because we broke him. (What am I talking about?  It is still comical. He sounds like a monkey, "Oooo, Oooo" What dog sounds like that??? ) He does not act like normal dogs either.  He gives us these looks like he is just tolerating us, and that if he had his way we would be eating kibble and he would be eating the meatloaf.  When I say this, I do not mean just looking at us.  I am taking looking at us as if he were biding his time until he can make his move.  Like this:

Just you wait.  Your kingdom will be mine.

(and yes, those are my Corgi legs in the background).  But all in all, he is worthless.  He is blind now from cataracts, so he can't see to even pick up food off of the floor well, and with three toddlers we have a LOT of food on the floor.  He is deaf,though I think he is faking it so he doesn't have to do what he is told. because miraculously he will hear "Treat" or "Walk" and he is all of a sudden the picture of youth.  He sleeps most of the time, and granted, he will be 13 in December, but he could at least sleep in the same room as the family, and do his damn job of being 'mans best friend', be just goes off and sleeps somewhere alone.  (Probably because little man won't stop trying to ride him like a horse, or touch his penis, I get the draw Little Man, his penis is very fluffy but leave it be.)  He eats diapers out of the diaper pail (GROSS!!) , drinks from the toilet, drools on the wood floor, and sheds like you would not believe,  I could have knitted ten dogs from the amount of hair I have swept up in the last two years.  (If I cared to and if I could knit).  And his fetish for "burying his food" in the corners of the house has gotten out of control.  If this dog was a person, he would be a hoarder. 

He is supposed to stay off of the couch.  As you can see he also obeys well.

But he is ours.  And our kids adore him.  And one day he is going to pass on, and it is going to devastate this family like you would not believe.  My oldest son grieved for weeks over the death of our guinea pig that he had absolutely nothing to do with and never took care of so it usually fell to me (He actually asked me what we were going to do about it when we moved.  Like I was going to exhume the body and take it with us!).  So what is he going to do when this family pet passes of whom he has walked everyday, cleaned up poo, and fed for the last few years?  I shudder to think of it.

Until then, I have Thor's issues to deal with.  And though he has his moments, he is mostly a good dog.  When he isn't barking at nothing.  Or stealing the babies' food.  Or eating off of the counter.  Or when I have to  clean up a diaper that he shredded to pieces so he could eat the contents of it (GROSS). Or digging through the garbage.  Or staring at me like he wants stage a coup and take over the world.  Other than that, yep.  He is ok.