Life with Tess and other casual observations.

By now most of you know that I have adopted a Border Collie. She is an older dog and I decided to call her Tess because she reminds me of Shirley McClain in her movie Guarding Tess. The longer that she lives with me the more she really is like the crazy old bird. I've also decided that she has some personality characteristics that definitely could be classified using human diagnosis.

First: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: She keeps her dog bowl, her dog bed and her possessions in some kind of order that only she can understand and keeps track of them all the time. She thinks I am one of her possessions. Which ties into the next trait.

Passive Aggressive: She whines and carries on if I leave her in the yard when I go to the barn, when I take her with me she follows me and gets in my way constantly trying to herd me around to where she wants to go. She hates when I lead the horses around and she doesn't like when I go in the stalls. When I start riding the two year olds later this year I am pretty sure she is going to have some type of complete breakdown.

Shoplifting: She started out with a few toys that I bought her on the trip home which she promptly tore to shreds and ate. Now she gets Hannibal all upset stealing one toy, and when I get it back for him she steals the rest of his toys and guards them on her bed.

Control Freak: The Horses are not allowed to run and play. She barks her ass off. The corgi's are not allowed to play fetch, she chases them and grabs them by the neck and makes them stop. Usually causing a fight where one of the offended individuals wont let go of the grip they get on her. Whatever seat she is riding in while in the truck is hers and Hannibal must then ride on the floor.

Thursday while I was she was unable to steal a toy from Hannibal to tear up and decided to rip into a box on the floor full of natural health products leftover from the last rotten job that I had. She settled on a bottle of deTox pills. Eat one pill and drink with 16 oz of water. She ate all the pills in the bottle, and was guarding the bottle and the cap when I got home. Nobody wanted it but her, but it was hers and she wanted everyone to know it. Well aside from drinking volumes of water, Thursday night and Friday went by pretty uneventful. That is until Friday night when I chose to sleep upstairs and she chose to shit fifty times in my bathroom. I no longer have rugs on the floor in the bathroom because they were too nasty to wash. Not only was this terribly stressful for Tess, and me, I really don't like to have to clean up dog shit first thing in the morning, but it was especially difficult for Hannibal. You see it was hard to teach Hannibal not to shit in the house and after many spankings and a few beatings I finally lost my temper and physically rubbed his face in it and he wore shit outside in the yard for a day. Nasty but effective. The result is Hannibal would blow up before he would shit in the house and he reacts very aggressively when one of the other dogs has an accident. Growling and shaking and such. I don't blame him this time. Tess really made a mess and I'm sure he didn't want me to use him as a mop.

Aside from that I have very normal dogs.