 More on Rascal
Okay, now I'll tell you the long story about rascal. I had terrible accident in a car last year, actually about a year and a half ago. My girlfriend lived right in that hospital room with me after I got out of intensive care. One day she asked me "can we get a dog?". I figured, there is no way in the world that they're going to allow us to have the new born puppy of any kind live here in the hospital room with me, so I said sure. Let's just say the head nurse surprised me, and my beaming girlfriend came back from a local puppy mill with this tiny little foxlike creature. She paid $200, and for another hundred they said they would have given her "papers".
The wing in the hospital I was on was called Haskell, so we wound up naming him Rascal. So he grew up in a hospital -- got to know us all, got pretty well housebroken all in a hospital room. I had broken my neck and became a quadriplegic. Once they got me to using a wheelchair, I could be seen buzzing around the hospital with a little Pomeranian in my lap. I became "that guy with a cute little dog". My girlfriend and I got married a while after I came home from the hospital. You might imagine, our whole world was turned upside down. But all the while, all through a very difficult adjustment period, Rascal has learned how to be the best pal of a person with handicaps. He will not eat food in front of him, even meat, unless he has been given permission. My mattress is a special alternating air filled pad -- to keep me from getting skin breakdowns, the dog will absolutely not chew or play or even walk on this pad without being coaxed adamantly. He only knows me in a wheelchair.
He's a jumper! He jumps up on anybody that will tolerate it, no matter what we say. He craves affection -- he won't bark when the mailman comes, only when the mailman tries to leave. If he is tied out by the front door, and someone comes to the back door, he'll go crazy with the idea that he can't come inside and jump up on them. Sometimes, this can be very aggravating. And he runs, heedless of any danger, crazily about the neighborhood, regardless of my wife's pleading entreaties. My fear is that he will get loose and flattened by an automobile. And he does this funny two pawed begging thing --up on his hind legs, paddling his front paws together in a circular motion.
I've learned a lot here already. When I was a kid, I had a smart little mongrel of a dog. All he wanted to do was please me. It seemed like he automatically wanted to come when ever we called him. Rascal is obviously a smart dog, and I assumed simply lacked the proper training. But now I'm beginning to understand that it may be in his nature to "do as he pleases".
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