Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Sebastion: Mr majestic- Part 2

I was at  a Café the other day. I was in a hurry and just wanted to order chocolate, so they stuck me on the corner near the bar. 

I was still feeling kind of depressed about my little guy (My Pomeranian Sebastion)  dying. As I ordered  I looked up and saw a blackboard with the drink of the day on it.  My eyes started to tear up. In big bold letters it said “Love Bug”. Our nickname for Sebastion was Buggy.
From the moment we got him as a puppy, he would bug us nonstop for attention,(He would nuzzle our hand until his little snout  fit perfectly into it)  Bark (A dogs version of saying (HEY! HEY!!!!) for  a chunk of hot dog or beef or chicken or anything,(Even sometimes for stuff my huz or daughter didn’t even like, he would eat) if it was food, it was fair game.
I found out not long ago that Whit would give him whatever food she didn’t like under the table. He was like a canine doggy disposal.  When we were eating, we knew two little eyes were fixed squarely, on US.  
When he was young, If he wanted to play, he would let us know in no uncertain terms, that it was TIME. SO, he was called, buggy, probably more times than Sebastion.  Sebastion turned into a kind of abbreviation, “Bastion”
But Buggy came out of our mouths more than not.
My cat Jezabel came along about a year after. 

She was meowing by the back door of our house  for 2 days before I finally got a bit of cream and put it out for her and grabbed her to see if she and Sebastion would  be friends. They warmed right up to each other. The big kitty went up and rubbed up against him right away, and they were instant friends. 

She would try to give him a bath every once in a while. He would tolerate it and she loved it. But it was funny to me, that long  hair would stick to her tongue and the “lick lick liiiiiiiiiiick” would be followed sometimes by sneezing and shaking her head.
A Before and AFTER story…
Most Poms will do almost anything for affection,(Including acting out to get their masters attention if they’re desperate for it-) and they are sweet little dogs. From what I’ve seen what it comes down to is what the master, buddy, and ceremonial pom owner teaches  them  makes their tendency towards being sassy, spirited, inquisitive sharp eyed busybodies  either work for them, or against them.
They have a real sweetness but a  tendency towards yappyness- and my lil Buggy was no exception. It almost feels a bit like story of the Golden retrever  “Marley” but with a before and  after.
Poms are SMART, sweet, speak their mind kind of dogs, and if they are trained the right way, they are intelligent, sweet dogs. If not, they can be, yappy, snapping at everyone, and can be VERY loud, annoying little dogs.
Pom puppys are busy little guys. From what I heard before I decided on a boy or girl, Pom boys are mamas girls and Pom girls are little princesses. So I had decided on a boy.

The Toddler Phase 
Sebastion was a busy lil fella. The pictures I have of him as a pup are all of him busily going somewhere, holding a stick in his teeth, holding his own leash, or grabbing a hold of my daughters tee shirt and playing tug a war with it, to the delight of my daughter. Sebastion and Whitney seemed more like they were siblings than anything else. At the time he came to us Whitney was around 5. There were times that Whitney would pull his tail to uncurl it . From what she told me, she would tease him when I wasn’t looking, (Sometimes when I WAS looking) and one time, in return for her  teasing him, he actually went and peed on her pillow. (TAKE THAT you HUMAN!)
He would chew on all kinds of stuff, including Joes toenails. He would chew them down to the nub….Joe would actually encourage it. SO weird:p Sebastion would sleep on your clothes if you left them on the floor (Not a problem for me but Whit’s clothes probably  smelled like dog more than anything else)
As he got older we realized there were problems.
Whitney would be sleeping in her bed, Sebastion would jump up on her bed to sleep by her, or on her, but every time she moved, he would growl, sometimes even snapping at her. There’s only so many times you can walk into your daughters room with a dog perched on top of her like he’s” king of the mountain”. :p I knew something needed to  be done. There were times that people came to visit, and the minute the doorbell rang this little Tasmanian devil would run at the door like it was a thing possessed. Heaven help the person behind the door! I was worried,
So… I started to look into dog behavior. I had wondered about that in the past because I had some experiences with dogs. Some good, some NOT good, but I wondered WHY dogs acted the way they did. I just knew this couldn’t continue. That and I had to follow him from room to room because we hadn’t had him fixed,(He’s a registered Pom ) and being a boy,(lol) he had to mark things. Hmmmmm…”This is mine, and THIS is mine…and cool! This is MINE TOO!” Not only did he mark carpet and furniture, I have guitars, basses, amps…and I found out that he MARKED THEM TOO! Ew.:p (Imagine if he was a big dog. Good thing he was a lil guy!) SO, I realized, ok…this is his…
Teen  Phase.
(Don’t teens have that problem? :p) The EVERYTHING is mine problem…You find things missing, broken, worn, or mysteriously found in a strange place? He would run the other direction when we called him, (Also sometimes like teenagers:p  growl or bite at us when we tried to pick him up. (GRUMPY! ALSO like teenagers) So I decided, better put everything up and away,(too bad you CAN’T do that with teenagers lol)  and started looking little by little, bit by bit looking things up on what to do. The only thing I could never stop him from doing after all was peeing on things. I just couldn’t CATCH him doing it.
So…heaven forbid, I was resolved to wearing a GOOD pair of shoes, following him with a good can of Lysol and hoping I wouldn’t slide into something in the middle of the night. But I hoped there was some way to train him, I just wasn’t sure how to do it.

No comments:

Post a Comment