Lucky: Meet my dog...

I have a dog. More specifically, I have a female yellow lab named "Lucky".

More honestly, I have a walking garbage disposal that is 50 percent nuclear excitement, 65 percent clumsy enthusiasm, 43 percent constant hunger, 53 percent large white teeth, and 127 percent unconditional affection.

Don't bother checking the math - it's right, and believe me, I know.

She's also pretty damned smart for a dog. By my count, she recognizes about 72 words that she reacts appropriately to - I think mainly because they fall within her idea of Things That Are Important - and I suspect she also understands pretty much the rest of the English language - when she so chooses - but normally blows it off as unimportant yakkity-yak.

She can also spell at least three of them. We've experimented.

At the moment, I'm teaching her to count. So far, we've gotten up to "2" consistently, and I think we'll hit a breakthrough point soon, and "3" thru "5" will come rather quickly together. I'm teaching her by telling her to "gimme five" (as opposed to "gimme your paw") 1 or 2 times when I give her a treat, and more often than not, she gets it right.

Sometimes, though, she gets excited if there is some especially good "treat" material around, and she's go through her entire begging repertoire whenever she thinks there's a chance that one or more of them may work. So far, it consists of:

"Gimme Five" - laying her left paw in your hand briefly while in a sitting position.

"Gimme Other Five" - same thing, but with the right paw.

"Down" - getting "down" as flat as she can, but still vertically oriented, and with her chin on the ground between her front paws and tail straight out (if it's not wagging uncontrollably).

"Half Up" - sitting, with both paws in the air, often cutely 'posed', one just above the other.

"Half Down" - Similar to "Down", but with her butt sticking up in the air.

Believe it or not, she taught herself half of these tricks - we just supplied names for them. She also housebroke herself in the course of about 2 days (she's NEVER peed or shit in the house since then, even once when she got stuck home alone for a weekend when a day-trip turned into a 3 day ordeal when our car broke down in the middle of New Hampshire. Ironically, one of the problems was that I had left my cell-phone home so we couldn't easily contact people we needed for help (and there was no help readily available where we were). It was the only thing that she destroyed during that weekend, and I think it was not an accident that she chose that particular object.

She also taught herself to grab a toy or a bone in her mouth in order to contain her extreme joy at special occasions, such as when I come in from bringing out the trash or come home from shopping, the kids come home from school, some visitor stops by, or we're getting ready to take her out for a walk. It seems that she's not so "jumpy" when she has something large in her mouth, but still, according to the laws of thermodynamics, the energy that would otherwise go to jumping up on a person 234 times over the course of 3 minutes or so still needs to go "somewhere", so it's released as kinetic energy in other ways - you should see her body wiggle and shake - her tail seems to be wagging HER instead of the other way around!

And speaking of her tail...her tail has to be one of the single most powerful hind appendages of any animal in this world (or any nearby). At its base and for about 6 inches out, it's nearly as thick as my arm, and about a foot and a half in length in total. When it's going at full speed in close quarters it DOES leave marks - bruises on people, dents on anything less solid than galvanized steel.

Sometimes, when my mother visits, she smokes in the dining room (my wife doesn't allow me to). When my wife wants to clear the air after she's gone, she just calls in Lucky and says, "Who's the good girl??" That's enough to get that tail wagging, and in a minute or two, the air's as fresh as it can be. Of course, there is also some displaced furniture and a number of pieces of mail and magazines scattered about the room, too, but that's to be expected when you have a yellow lab anyway - or so I'm told.

//to be continued...//