Pug Life | Tragic Comedy

A friend recently contacted Kelly and me out of the blue to ask if we could take care of her dog for six days while she was on vacation, since the arranged sitter was suddenly unavailable.

Neither Kelly nor I have experience taking care of dogs, and we're definitely not dog people. I was attacked by a dog when I was little and I've never been comfortable around them, especially any dog large enough to leap up from the ground and reach my face with its teeth. Kelly has been dealing with a foot injury and would be limited in how much she could walk the dog or just take him to the back yard. Our cat is terrified of, well, pretty much everything, and we knew she would spend the six days hiding in Kelly's home office, a hardship for her. We prepared to tell our friend that we couldn't help her and would recommend finding a local boarding facility before she left on her trip.

Then we re-read her message more carefully and realized that she was already on vacation, and the dog was stranded with no one to take care of him. That changed things: Sure, we could take him in. He was just a pug, and we were told by our friend and the person who we picked him up from that he mostly just slept all day and would tell us when he needed to potty. How hard could it be?

Well, the sleeping part was mostly accurate. The dog attached to me pretty quickly since I'm home all day every day, and he followed me wherever I went in the house, barking loudly if I shut the bathroom door to pee in peace, but all that he wanted to do was sleep beside me non-stop. The famous breathing problems that I've heard about pugs are true: He snored 24/7, even while wide awake and looking at me. Kelly did not want the pug in our bedroom since he kept pulling out her clothes with his teeth and making piles of them to sleep on, so I took to sleeping alone in the guest room with the door open so that the dog could find me and alert me that he needed to potty, which meant a constant snoring around me at all times, night and day.

But the dog only alerted me a couple of times that he needed to go outside. Mostly I would just find piles of his waste in the house. Even when I would find him hanging around the back door, put on his leash, take him out to the yard, stand there with him for half an hour waiting for him to lift a leg or squat, and finally give up when he did neither, I would soon discover another pile of fresh waste on the floor where there hadn't been any a few minutes earlier. It's like the dog gave up on trying to go outside and just made peace with going wherever he wanted indoors, since he left a puddle or a pile in five different rooms while he was here. Picking up his waste in a bag when I took him on his daily walk was bad, but at least that didn't require me to scrub with disinfectant. I gave up counting but it must have been a dozen times in six days that I cleaned up another pile of #1 or #2 or both. The worst was when he broke into Kelly's home office, made a mess chowing down on the cat's food, and peed directly on Kelly's things instead of just the floor.

Was the dog at least good company as a dog? Well, no, but that's on me since I don't know how to have fun with dogs. I bought him some balls and a chew toy, but as a pug he was slightly too little for these larger toys and he wouldn't interact with them. I played some dog videos on the TV and he briefly got excited, but soon ignored them. Kelly could get him worked up while playing with him and had some hearty laughter at the dog getting silly running in circles and being a goofball, but that's as far as we managed to go with him. I did enjoy having the dog curl up beside me while sleeping, snores or not, and I could see how the constant company could be soothing.

I'm sincerely glad that we were able to help out our friend and take care of the noisy little guy when he had nowhere else to go. I'd be relieved if we had been in our friend's position and someone who didn't like cats stepped up to take care of ours. But also, I'm pretty sure that my first experience taking care of a dog has not converted me to a dog person.

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The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »

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