My Naughty Dog Is Dead Meat

my dog Maddy is such a shithead. I think I have finally come to grips with this simple fact.

She will be 2 this year and is the most destructive dog I have ever owned. Maddy has always been a chewer. When she was a puppy, she would shred toilet paper while I showered so it looked as if it were snowing by the time I was done. She once ate a stack of shipping boxes, creating a cardboard snowstorm. She has roughly 100 chew toys, tennis balls, rawhide bones, and a plethora of other toys to distract her from her mission in life - destroying anything of value in her path.

In the few years she has been alive she has been responsible for a massive amount of destruction. Her partners in crime are my 2 teenage sons who are often charged with watching her but pay very little attention to what she is doing when I'm not home. Last year, she chewed the corners off the new oak cabinets in my newly built house. That was the beginning of a long string of inappropriate chewy toys. Among other things, she has eaten the remote controls to all the TVs in the house, several video game controllers, lots of computer cable, at least 6 retainers. We resigned ourselves to lock her in a kennel whenever we were gone, which seemed to curb the problems. The day the boys went back to school this fall, they forgot to put her into her cage...... she proceeded to chew the cordless phone into a milion billion bits. Maddy is officially an electronics specialist- like everyone else in this house, she loves her gadgets. The only difference is we like to play with them, she however likes to EAT them! Lots of lectures ensued about responsibility and controlled containment strategies. Vows were given that it would never ever ever happen again - "promise."

Today, my hubby met me at the door and said "your kids aren't getting anything for Christmas." Then he hugged me. THe boys forgot to kennel her when they left for school today. Never one to pass up an opportunity to east soemthing of value, Maddy the Destroyer had eaten my Garmin 301, my most prized possession. She tried to eat my iPod too but only managed to mangle the charging cord and the cute pink leather case. She ate the buttons off the Garmin and munched on the screen so it is totally black. Because the buttons are chewed off, I can't get it to power off and quit beeping. With every sickly beep I would like to wring her stupid neck with the Garmin strap. Lucky for her, she ate the strap too.