“Semper vigilo”
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Ol’ Robbo has discovered that the more comfortable Daisy the Port Swiller Dog has grown with her surroundings, the more possessive of them she also has become, to the extent that she starts barking her fool head off every time she imagines she hears or sees something violating the Port Swiller Manor perimeter. I expect the neighbors are all heartily sick of it by now. Certainly it gets on our nerves at times.
Back in the days of my misspent yoot, we had a Scottie who used to do the same thing, much to our annoyance. When you told him to shut up, he’d offer to bite you. If you moved in on him threateningly, more often than not he did bite you. Indeed, one of my books of Haydn piano sonatas still bears his teeth marks from when I tried to swat him with it for making so much noise while I was trying to practice.
Daisy is a bit different. When you tell her to shut up, she simply feigns incomprehension. (Oh, there’s feigning going on there, alright. No doubt about it.) If you move on her, she collapses into an invertebrate jelly and makes you feel like a cad.
Just like Jonah Goldberg’s Cosmo the Wonderdog had his Jacobin squirrels to deal with, Daisy is obsessed with a Progressivist groundhog who has a burrow in the raspberry bushes in front of the garden. She spend hours on the porch surveying the back yard and hoping to spot him in his comings and goings, again going into hysterics whenever she spots him. And every time we let her out into the yard for a potty break, she makes a bee-line for the burrow in order to check it out. She then goes to the spot in the fence where said groundhog is accustomed to getting through. (I did not realize before that groundhogs possess the same superpower as cats, in that they can make themselves two-dimensional for purposes of slipping through cracks. Fortunately, dogs do not possess this power.)
Amidst all the hubbub, I simply try to remind myself that dogs are gonna dog.
The Port Stands At Your Elbow 
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August 23, 2015 at 2:48 pm
captainned
My beagle-mutt lives for chasing the deer & turkeys out of the back yard. Being a dog, he hasn’t figured out that the deer have learned exactly where his Invisible Fence line is, so Oliver is barking his head clear off (not such an issue where I live) while the deer are 15 feet away giving him the deer equivalent of grade-school playground taunts.
Every time he chases something out of the yard there’s a bit more pride in his step on the way back to the house.
August 23, 2015 at 10:38 pm
Robbo
[Insert Nelson Munz “HA-ha!” laugh here.]
A doe and her twins put in regularly to nom on the pears from a tree on our fence. Daisy watches them intently from the porch but never goes after them when out in the yard. They don’t seem much interested in her, nor she in them. [i]Detente[/i], I suppose.