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.
15 years ago
