My dogs are both… Horrible… But they are polar opposites of each other. I’m mostly writing this in prep for an upcoming dog sitting but since I don’t talk about my dogs often I’d love to tell you guys all about how… Horrible my dogs are. lol
I have two dogs: Billy Jr. and Pudding. It sounds very egotistical of me to have a dog named after me but NO! It was actually my mom who named my Maltese and we got him in Korea. In Korea I happen to be called by my Korean name and not my English name so we had a clean separation of names. I guess my parents really like sticking to one name, huh?
Pudding was my wife’s dog and she was originally going to be named Bambi. But Bambi in Korean means night rain and because Pudding was kinda small and frail in her infancy my wife’s family thought it would be too sappy of a name so they named her Pudding instead, because she’s a Poodle!
Billy Jr. is a super nervous guy and he always whimpers. But at the same time he’s a chill lad, he has these very short bursts of on-and-off where he’s on and whimpering and demanding all of the world’s attention and then all of a sudden he’ll just go somewhere by himself. And during these alone times he gets very annoyed at attention and wants to nappy nap. The worst part about this is, I’d be doing something important and he’ll be begging for attention so I’ll cut the work off just to play with him. It is precisely at this point he no longer requires attention and will just go somewhere to sleep. What a poop dog!
Pudding is an active, active dog. She loves to wreak havoc on the house by gathering 10,000 of her prized toys and will pick one of the week for my wife to throw. And if she doesn’t throw, she’ll throw a tantrum on top of my wife’s hair and pull her hair out. She did that to my mother in law and I think that’s where she developed the habit. For a small dog she has so much energy, and it has to exit her system one way or another. So the fetch is the good way, and the bad way is… I’ll talk about that soon.
Pudding loves fetch but Billy loves tug. And they won’t ever switch; Pudding will NEVER tug and Billy will NEVER fetch. It’s so crazy how this works. Why can’t they play with each other?! They keep demanding attention and play to their respective humans and get this: they kinda developed an affinity for human genders. Billy will love men in general and not really give any kind of care to women while Pudding loves women in general and hates men (she’ll bark or try to bite their ankles!).
One thing they do have in common: they bark a lot. They’ll bark at anything. But what’s worse is, in isolation they’ll bark and slowly stop. When they bark together, they’ll keep feeding off of each other’s energy and continue barking and this drives us bonkers. Thankfully (or not?) Pudding’s hearing has been declining with age and now she’s not agitated at the smallest sounds coming from outside and when Pudding doesn’t bark, Billy’s barks are more manageable.
They both hate other dogs, they don’t even like each other! I think we did a poor job of introducing them to each other, we never really formally let them have the slow acquaintance time but instead just started living together with them. That’s our fault (but then, what isn’t?). But there’s a minute difference here: Billy will just bark at other dogs but not know what to do other than that, but Pudding will actually lunge at dogs that are smaller than her. This is why we don’t go to the dog park anymore.
Billy’s health is mostly okay, it’s actually kind of amazing how he’s more or less fine given all the stuff he eats from the streets. He has a voracious appetite and will eat literally everything when unmonitored, but at the same time he won’t try to eat anything out of his reach. While he’s generally healthy he had one big health scare, a genetic disorder called liver shunts; basically he had an extra vein on his liver that kept on pumping unfiltered blood, constantly accruing bladder stones. He couldn’t pee and we corrected that with surgery, and this is how I got involved in donating to UC Davis Veterinary School.
Pudding doesn’t have big health scares like this but she will eat stuff that’s out of reach. She has this crazy determination and she’ll make things somehow work to eat things that Billy wouldn’t even look at. She always does this when she has unreleased energy and because of this we’ve had to open her up or go to the ER so many times. She’s had squeaky toys, chocolate, macadamia, corn husk, monstera plant, some big seeds of palm trees… One time she stayed at our friend’s house and she ate our friend’s rice. So my friend was out of rice and Pudding pooped rice for days.
Billy has a bit of an incontinence problem because of the aforementioned bladder stone issues. He will pee frequently and he won’t hold to accommodate for my schedules. If he wants to go, he’ll give me a glance and if I don’t respect the glance in time he’ll just go for it. Because of this I needed to clean up after so many pee sites I’ve become sort of a pee expert which I really appreciated when I started volunteering for the animal shelter! I also became pretty good at carpet cleaning because of this.
Pudding is pretty good in that regard. She prefers to go potty outside. But again, because of age, she’s developed some IVDD (disc slippage) and this makes it harder for her to be athletic. BUT THAT WON’T STOP HER, BECAUSE SHE CONTINUES TO WANT TO PLAY FETCH!!! Anyway, another side effect of IVDD is poop problems because she can’t get into “position”. So sometimes she’ll want to stay inside because of the pain but she needs to poop, but can’t go outside… And she’ll explode at home.
The thing is, I’m completely fine with picking up after poop and pee. But Pudding originally lived with my wife and my wife has a big big big big poop pet peeve, so Pudding got educated in the way of “POOP IN HOUSE = BIG NO NO”, so as she poops she will run away leaving a nasty trail of poop… Which inevitably falls on my lap. Sigh.
Billy’s quirks that annoy me are due to his insensitivity and general… “dumbness”, we call it. Pudding’s quirks that annoy me are due to her intelligence and general “smartness”. They’re such horrible little dogs but again, are there really horrible dogs? Aren’t people who think that just horrible owners? And I’m really just talking about me.
Then why do we love them? Well, how can we not when they look like this?
Little goofballs, they are.
