Face of Evil Update.

It's three months since my last post about Larry, The Face of Evil. Larry is now seven months old and weighs nearly sixty pounds. Basically we are expecting him to end up as a small, black wolf. Larry is a pretty well trained wolf, he'll sit, stay, come, leave etc. as long as it is worth it to him, which seems to be most of the time. His general attitude is one of intense friendliness, he loves everyone immediately and unquestioningly, and he loves them intensely and physically. This is fine about 60% of the time, but I am collecting good data on the prevalence of dog phobia.

Larry now sleeps through the night, or at least doesn't bound through the house leaving a deafening racket of destruction in his wake. No, now Larry is generally quiet except for chewing on something quietly. If you have never tried to sleep with the sound of chewing somewhere in the dark, I don't recommend it. There's something about the sound of chewing in the dark that produces questions. "What is being chewed?" is a common one. "Why can't I stop listening?" is another. "Should I get up and check?" is the bad one as it leads to thought and debate. Then there's always the primitive ape portion of my brain that screams, "Something with big teeth is chewing on something somewhere out there!!"

I wondered three months ago if I would love Larry by now. The answer s "No." I feel responsible for him, I have some affection for him, he's a good dog. But love is not what I feel. Larry has increased my stress, my workload, certainly the amount of anger I feel. Often he is simply a living chore. But other times it is most pleasant to walk around in the sunshine with a dog scampering about at one's feet. It's getting better, the battle of wills in our conditioning of each other is going the right way (as far as I can tell, TFOE's schemes are deep and subtle) and in another two years Larry will probably be a great dog that I can really appreciate. Two years.