My dog is named Ida Jane, after my favorite aunt. Like my Aunt Ida, she is resourceful, creative, and very, very clever. She’s a plain old dawg dog, a mutt from the shelter. I don’t know if she was not fed enough before she came to us, or whether she is just greedy, but she is always nosing about looking for something to eat. She unzipped my son’s backpack and ate his drumstick. She nosed into a drawer and ate a pair of socks. After that I always closed the door to the bedroom and made my son hang his backpack on the hook. While she stole food off the counter at every opportunity, she hadn’t opened anything in a long time. I thought she was reformed, sort of, until the refrigerator.
Ida Jane had never shown any interest in our old refrigerator. The freezer was on the bottom, and perhaps she didn’t smell anything delicious in it. It was old, scratched, and had a large rust spot shaped like Australia just above the handle. It still kept food cold, but it was an energy waster. Besides, it didn’t have an icemaker.
It took a long time to find a fridge that would fit in the niche where the old one had been, but we finally found a shiny new model with glass shelves, an icemaker, and—the freezer on the top.
There wasn’t much food to put in the fridge. We had a few pieces of cheese, some pickles, and an unopened package of pastrami. I left to get groceries, and I know
I closed the refrigerator door.
When I came home the door was standing open and the pastrami was gone. The first place I looked was in Ida Jane’s doggie bed, and sure enough, there was the pastrami wrapper.
No one can watch a dog all the time, and as time went by she helped herself to pork chops, cheese, and –her favorite—cat food. Something had to be done. A child-proof lock proved to not be Ida-proof. Finally I made a low-tech doggie lock:
I hooked one bungee cord to the door handle, another to the grate on the back, and hooked them together. It worked, but only if everyone remembered to hook the cords when they closed the refrigerator door. I needed a more permanent solution.
If she associated a loud noise with the refrigerator, I thought, she would be scared and stay away from it. I put a can of pennies on the counter and hooked the cords to the can and the refrigerator door. When she opened the door, the can would crash to the floor and a rain of pennies would come down on her head. Supposedly she would associate the fridge with the noise and avoid it forever. “That will fix you,” I said to Ida Jane. This was going to be fun. I set the trap and left the kitchen. Less than a minute later – CRASH! I found Ida Jane away, guilty but not scared in the least.
Oh well. Back to the bungee cords.
14 years ago
1 comment:
I remember your Aunt Ida...sweet lady. My cat (one of them) can open any door (regular door with a knob--not refrigerator) If there is a piece of furniture near a door, Sandy will jump on it, then take both paws and actually turn the knob and open the door.
You said on your FaceBook status update to tell a funny pet story. Mine concerns my other cat, Rugby. This sounds like a fiction story, but it is true. When we first got Rugby, she was only a kitten. Actually, someone dropped her off near our house. My children were very young and were thrilled to have a kitten, so we kept her. She is now almost 15 years old.
Rugby was an outdoor cat and my husband insisted that we were not going to have an animal inside the house. That winter was extremely cold and we have not had a winter like that since that time. They were predicting snow, followed by a "hard freeze" that would last several days. The TV weathermen kept announcing that pets should not be left outside. We decided that we would bring Rugby in and put her in the laundry room before the bad weather blew in. We went outside and called her but she did not come. We knew that there was a small area where she (and other neighborhood cats) could get under our house near the furnace. We could often hear them meowing at night down there. Truth be told, they were probably warmer than we were! When Rugby did not respond to our calls, we decided she was enjoying the warmth of the furnace under the house and we didn't worry about her.
The next moring we woke up to a blanket of snow covering the ground and it was beautiful. I poured a cup of coffee and went to the window to look at it. Then I saw her: Rugby was on her back in the snow, stiff as a board, legs straight up in the air! I ran outside, grabbed her, and brought her in. I woke up my husband. We put her on the hearth. We laid her on her side. She was just like a statue. The fire was roaring in the fireplace and the children were still asleep. We sat there discussing what we were going to tell the kids and trying to decide were we were going to put the frozen dead cat until we could give her a proper burial. About that time, we saw a slight movement, she was still stiff, but at the end of her legs, her paws started moving. In a few minutes (as if the heat was slowly moving up her legs) she started moving her legs. A few minutes later, she got up and started walking around! Needless to say, from that day on, Rugby was an indoor cat!
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