As most of you know, Fluffy (the dog) was not named in response to her coat's texture or appearance. It was a random event, certainly not intentional, but the name has come to suit her. Although "Fluffy" doesn't refer to her physical nature, it is particularly apt as a description of her nonetheless as the stuff between her is just like fluff. She is exceptionally, and I mean *exceptionally* stupid.

Many many events have happened to further confirm her measly IQ, and I've written about some of them, but even these didn't adequately demonstrate to me just how dumb she really is. Nope, this one has exceeded all others in being perfect demonstrations of her *lack* of brain power.

For a while there, we thought there was some hope. It took one whole day with absolutely nothing on TV, 2 full "giant" bags of Cheetos and every drop of my patience, but I finally taught her "sit". I was so excited! It meant that she could be trained, although it would be tough, there was now a distinct possibility that at some time in the distant future we would have successfully trained her out of watering the carpet. I kept up the basic "sit" training for another 2 weeks before I had the time to teach her another one.

Once we had "sit", we tried "Shake". Two more packets of Cheetos and another weekend, we sort of had "shake" as well. It wasn't perfect, she used the wrong paw, but it was close enough for us. It had taken us 6 months to train Fluffy with 3 basic commands (the other was "OFF!!!") but we thought there was hope. It was time to start toilet training.

I'll admit, I'm not an organised or persistent sort of person, but I also had a dream of one day restoring my not-even-a-year-old carpet to close to their pre-Fluffy appearance (and smell). So after she had shown some ability to be trained, I started with toilet training. We tried pretty much everything we knew, and often lamented about how easy it was in comparison to house break a cat (Place cat into litterbox. Training done).

The less than sympathetic bloke in the pet shop told us *never* to yell at her; if she did something wrong, just tell her "bad dog" in a stern tone of voice, and praise her when she does the right thing. That might work on a *normal* dog with about average or above intelligence, but Fluffy just kept weeing randomly, up to three puddles a night. You can imagine how tiresome it was getting.

Eventually, after the "bad dog" didn't work, and the throwing outside didn't work, and the dragging her face over it (not in it) didn't work and I could think of no other easy way, I took upon the last course of action. It was intensive, and meant I had to sacrifice as many "Buffy" episodes as it would take, but I took Fluffy out to the back yard, religiously, every two hours, and said "wee-wees" at her.

Rain or shine, hot or cold, I stood there and waited until she went. I'm sure that the whole of the local mozzie plague was reared single-handedly on my blood, but I stood outside, endured being eaten alive, put up with the neighbour's "concerned" stares and missed the most meaty episodes of Buffy so that I could finally have carpets that aren't the doggy equivalent of chamber pots.

A month. At *least* a month. It took a month of going out every two hours, every night, before she got the idea, and then another two weeks or so before I was certain that there had been no puddles or even over-excited "leaks" to add to the carpet's eu de dog-piss aroma. Joel & I both breathed a great sigh of relief and started to compare prices of industrial-grade professional carpet cleaners. It seemed kind of pointless calling in the cleaners until she had stopped making puddles, and unlike the government, I am not going to give as-good-as-free handouts to the carpet cleaning industry each time Fluffy relieved herself. Sure, I still had to go out every few hours, but now I could schedule it within Buffy's commercial breaks.

While we were looking forward to breathing fresh, clean, sweet, ammonia-free, air inside the house again, we were also trying to stop Fluffy rudely taking food out of our hands or pawing at us while we were munching. The idea, which I thought was a brilliant one (drat my "genius") was that Fluffy would have to be lying down before she got any random treats from us. I had foolishly thought that if the only time she ever received random food treats was if she was lying down, there would be no reason for her to stick her nose in our dinner plates, drink out of our cups, and clobber us in various delicate regions while climbing up our armchair-prone bodies in her attempts to snap at the chippie packet.

And it worked. After a while, albeit a rather long one, she finally understood the complicated and non-monosyllabic command of "lie down". It was heaven. A dog that shook, sat, and lay down on command, and more importantly, one that didn't piss on the carpet. Wonderful, or so we thought, we finally have a creature we can almost bear to live with. If she grows out of chewing absolutely everything that can fit within her jaws, we may actually enjoy her company.

Now I'm old enough to remember old old computers. The ones that used DOS, had an exciting maximum range of 4 colours on the screen at any one time, were in 40-pitch and the only programming language that worked with them that was in any way accessible to the lay person was BASIC. One of the basic facts of life was limited memory, and something referred to as "the stack". Only a certain amount of data could be "poked" into the stack, and if you tried to poke in more data than it was capably of holding, the program went to bits and you were often left with the kindly words "I/O error" flashing on your green screen. Either that, or the stack would chuck a bit of a wobbly and the last thing you tried to poke into the stack was now the only thing that could be "peeked" at.

Which leads me to conclude that Fluffy has very limited "stack". After her sub-routines of "eat", "drink", "drool", "chew" and "chase cat" are running, there ain't much room in that Fluffy little head of hers for much more. Because now, when we say "sit" she lies down. She lies down when we try "shake" or "off" as well. And tonight she kept the professional carpet cleaners at bay as well by leaving another puddle again, and then obediently laid down when I yelled at her. If I take her outside and say "wee-wees" she either jumps all over me looking for the treats I'm holding as her wee-wee reward, or, you guessed it, lies down.

Next time I feel like getting a dog (haha) I'm going to get a Scotty-dog, because then I can have a "Mac" rather than this thing that keeps crashing (and drooling and chewing) and clashing with other systems (Shmogg). At least she isn't industry standard, but that also means there is no hope of upgrading her memory. She is the "Apricot" of dogs.

Copyright © Vicky Chapman
March 18, 2000