I was reading the Puggle Thread (one of many) and everyone says "my puggle is the best dog ever, they are great!"

It makes me ask, "What dog is not the best dog ever?" We have rose tinted glasses on. We forget everything they do wrong once they get it right, the destruction, the replaced furnuture and carpet, the weeks of sleepless nights during potty training, the bottles of cleaner the thousands of papertowels over the years to clean the messes.

Who remembers what their dog did before it was "perfect?" Before years of work and training finally clicked together to create that 'perfect' dog you get complimented on.

Today, when I got up, Daemion peed on the floor while I was letting the other dogs out of their kennels. I was absoutly floored about it and he wound up back in his kennel. While 98% good, I find that every few months he gives me a 'push' to test me to see what he can now get away with, just in case I've lost my mind and its okay now.

My GSD is not allowed unsupervised in the dog room or he will mark the kennels. He will pee inside of the front grate and assert his place as Alpha. It is the only problem, so as long as we keep him out of there we don't even remember we have a problem because not letting him in the room is now remote.

My springer loves to dig holes in the yard. Although it's not fixed for humans to enjoy it aggravates me becaue it sems he only does it when it's muddy and I've just cleaned the carpet. Then I yell at him and he pouts and comes over to say "sorry" by giving me a kiss...It's pitiful!!!
The only other ting I can think of is when my big one is out with me anddigs up all the flower bulbs...Last year I planted 160 bulbs and he got to most of them...

Every now and again, just enough to annoy us but not enough to make us crate him, Bowen raids the trash can. He'll get out 2 or 3 things that have caught hsi fancy and leave the wrappings on the living room floor.

Sometimes (again not always) he is bad about jumping on visitors, he doesn't put his paws on them but leaps up.

For the most part..ChiChi was an excellent puppy and easily trained in all aspects. More recently though...she has found that leaving little turds for me here and there annoys me (she's done it about 4 times in the past few months). Other than that..she is now and was then a great dog/puppy.

Nikko on the otherhand was terrible. Hardheaded, destructive and disobidient. She chewed up sooo much stuff, including, but not limited to...shoes underwear, carpet, mail, family photos, tons of Xmas lights. She was a digger, an escape artist, and a growler. She even bit a little 7 year old girl once (for good reason...the little girl was kicking her and tormented her). Anyway...now she's sweet..I don't know what happened...she'd turned into a princess over night...and seriously she is the BEST dog! lol

I am sitting here reading while my hubby drags his but around trying to get dressed so we can leave and lol the one about digging seemingly only when it is muddy cracks me up! Mine do the same exact thing. Try having ten come running in on a muddy monday morning and you are running late for work! I can't leave my coffee cup for a half a second or they drink it! I cannot sit down to eat so much as toast or they look at me with these pitiful eyes like I starve them to death. Especially my cocker Bear who by the way is a butterball!

Pepper (female pit pup) has managed to eat out the entire underneath of my sofa and honestly I have no Idea how she gets under there because my kitten can't fit! (good thing it is an old sofa)

Rusty absolutly cannot be near a human being without throwing his ears back, squinting his eyes up like he is stoned and wacking you ever so gently with his pay! He was so hard headed to learn how to give paw and once he got it he refuses to stop. When he ws younger he peed on EVERYTHING he saw!

Addie is great for the most part with the exception of the agressive spell while outside which I might add has been nipped in the bud. But when she was younger she ate a hole in my porch floor! She chewed everything! I got her at 12 weeks old and she was doing great really fast with houstraining. I never needed a crate. She hit 5 months and it was pee everywhere, poop everywhere and eat everything in sight! That dog cost me more money in remotes then I can count! I have to say SHE never ate the furniture. Just everything else! Oh and still today if she gets mad at me she will snub me and pinch a tiny one off on my pillow!

Rambo has a fettish with my husbands shoes till this day but at least now he doesn't eat them he just steals and hides them. We have found many a shoe barried in the yard! and some slippers still bare the results of his puppy teeth.

Dillon the new one is awesome so far but then I am waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Gidget does nothing wrong she never has really just hard to house break she loves it outside and spent way too much time running in the fields during the day when she was younger.

With the exception of Gidget They ALL eat the families underwear! Clean or not they don't care!

Other then that they are an absolute joy to have around. LOL

My 2 dogs are 85% perfect when they're awake and 100% perfect when asleep.

But Grace snores like a freight train when asleep, so I guess that would make her 99 1/2% perfect while asleep.

No rose colored glasses here. I may call them my kids, but I know they're still butt sniffing, garbage eating, cat chasing, hole digging, plant eating, shoe stealing, food mooching dogs.

i may have my glasses on but i swear scout is as close to the perfect dog as i have ever had. even from puppyhood. she never destroyed anything. had a fetish for crayons but that was all she chewed that wasnt a dog toy. she does dig holes but i don't consider that a bad thing. it is part of the nature of her breed. if i didnt want a digger i should have stayed away from this breed so i cannot fault her for her moonscapes. i didn't enforce the whole jumping on people cause quite franky i love it when i come home and she jumps on me and says hello. she steals food, especially frshly cooked pot roasts. what dog wouldn't do that if given a chance ?


thunder on the other hand is not so perfect - bites, growls, steals food, pisses on me, barks incesantly at people and other animasl, need i go on ?

i dont even pretend own rose glasses.

lets see. eating my baseboards is definately #1. #2 is tied, eating the carprt OR eating the kitchen lineoleum.

hmmm. snowball is a whiner, a bad whiner. we call her our ninny, or sissy, dog. she whimpers about everything.

snoopy is pretty good, hes really too dumb to be bad. except, i suspect him as the basebaord eater.

they dig holes, bark at everything under the sun, snowball is leash aggressive, snoop has the worst case of selective hearing ive ever seen, he leaps straight into the air like a kangaroo, she escapes from the fenced in yard at least once a week to park herself on the back stoop, i could go on for days.

i am glad not to have trash diggers or poop eaters.

alot of this i attribute to them being puppies and me not being as diligent as i should be about teaching manners. i'm working on it....

the only thing that is really important is how much their mommy loves them, despite (because of?) all of this!!!

I've got a 4mth old english springer. He's the first dog I've had since childhood so we're both goin thru a steep learning curve. He's so smart, he's already picked up sitting, lying down, rolling over and fetching on command. And maybe its still the honeymoon phase but I cant get mad at him despite the fact that he decided it was time to start stripping the wallpaper in our newly decorated kitchen, felt it was best to dig a hole in our new kitchen carpet, pee'd twice on the living room carpet last night, is building a collection of old banana skins in our backyard (each retrieved every time we have taken him for a walk), and shows a disturbing fondness for the sauce (he is like an empty beer bottle seeking missile)

i cant believe i forgot this part.

when we got snowball she has separation anxiety adn would howl all night. she soulnded like e turkey gobbling, for hours on end, i am not kidding. 5,6,7 hours straightshe would scream. guess thats what you get with a pet store puppy.

we ended up medicating her to calm her at nite. we didnt get a full nites sleep, but for the weekend she spent sick at the vet, for the first 2 mos we had her. i dont have any kids, but my b/f said it was worse than when his dtr was a newborn adn infant.

even now, when i hear her whimper in her crate, my whole body tenses up and my stomach flips like im gonna be sick. the memories are so awful i block them out. it was the worst 2 mos on my life. we were seconds from contacting a rescue to come get her.

potty training was nothing compared to crate training. the neighbors used to tell me that she would scream all day long while we were gone too. i am glad we stuck it out wiht her but there were more than a few shaky moments as far as her future with us was concerned.