Bad dog: The trials and triumphs of life with dogs and cats

[DoozyDog]

By JULIE BIRKEDAL, Of The Globe Gazette

Pets pull the most incredible stunts. Some of them are cute and others are costly, but the tales of those family members with tails surely do entertain.

While the experiences may confound the owners at times, the stories are so funny you’re virtually guaranteed to laugh out loud. But go ahead, just stifle the laughter if you can. Do North Iowans have stories to share about the dogs and cats who have stolen their hearts! Pet lovers will enjoy the antics of their neighbor’s pets and those who don’t want to pet proof their homes will have plenty of evidence to promote the merits of vicarious pet enjoyment.


There’s Aidan, who came into the home of Deb, Richard and Zach Hartley of Mason City “to rule the roost and test our patience.”

The ad in the Globe Gazette said, “Wanted ... good home for 5-month-old blind Husky.” Adopting Aidan meant an end to the quiet life they knew.

When Deb played with a ball with a bell inside with him, the dog decided they should do it every night at 2 a.m. When no one wanted to play on his schedule, he’d “promptly tear down anything in the garage within jumping range.”

Venetian blinds, curtains, fishing poles. He chewed door molding and railings and ripped the siding off the back of the house. He shows no sign of his blindness indoors or out, Deb Hartley wrote.

“He can dig a hole to China in 10 minutes. He goes through snow and ice better than any ice auger,” she said.

Yet “his heart is tender and he loves unconditionally,” Hartley said. When their aged shepherd died, they found Aidan with his head resting across her body.

He “wags, hops and howls” to welcome them back home, sleeps with them and rests with them.

“Yes, he is naughty, but he is a Hartley and we wouldn’t trade him for the world,” Deb Hartley said.


Dickens the cat “hasn’t met a cupboard or a closet he can’t open and is often found sitting among the canned goods,” said Karen Dole of Mason City.

Although named for the English author, he also lives up to his name in other ways, Dole said. One day she came home to find the refrigerator freezer wide open with food thawing inside. The cat is also a bit of a thief. Last Christmas, the baby Jesus went missing from Dole’s Nativity scene.

“Since there was no ransom note, I assumed the kidnapper had four legs, so I looked in his customary hiding places,” Dole wrote. “Sure enough, the kidnap victim was found behind the sofa cushions.”

After two more kidnappings, the Nativity found a new home atop the entertainment center, one of the few places Dickens doesn’t venture to visit.


Don Gage of Osage has said goodbye to his dog Tora, a mixed breed who will always be his favorite.

Other than eating a half a bag of dirty diapers and living to continue her tricks, Tora was best known for the time when she was about 2 and ate “an entire front seat of a 1984 Mazda pickup,” he said.

Gage and Tora took off one morning to help a friend pour a patio deck. Tora stayed in the pickup while the concrete was poured. Gage said he had forgotten all about his trip to the grocery store the night before and snacking on a box of cereal on the way home.

After they poured the deck, Gage went to his truck to see why Tora had not come out to investigate.

“As I approached the pickup, there she was, sitting behind the steering wheel ever-so-happy to see me. As I went to open the door of the pickup, I looked in to see the entire front seat was gone,” Gage said.

Tora had gone after every crumb of cereal she could find. All that remained of the seat was the wire frame and about a half a grocery sack of seat stuffing, Gage said. After regaining his composure, Gage wrote that he decided it was his fault for leaving the crumbs in the seat.

The vet never figured out the key to Tora’s longevity, but she lived to be 18 1/2, he said.

“I think about her now and again of the good times and naughty times,” Gage said. “There will never be another like her.”


Shaun and Toni Gonnerman’s cat Moonlight prowls their Mason City home at night looking for forgotten drink glasses to tip over if her water bowl is empty. She once got her head stuck in a glass of eggnog, but that didn’t stop “her nightly quest to quench her thirst,” they wrote. Instead of purring, she drools. In the morning, she bites the ankles of the first person up to communicate that she wants her chow.


Nicole and Josh Clausen’s wire-haired fox terrier watches TV at their Mason City home, especially enjoying the hunting channel.

“He stalks the animals on the screen, especially deer and turkeys,” their letter said.

When a hunter gets ready to shoot, Tiger lays low and still. When the hunter shoots, he lunges full-speed at the TV and has knocked it over countless times.

If a running deer disappears off the screen, Tiger will hunt for the animal in the next room and return to paw at the entertainment center, assuming the animals are hiding behind its doors.


When Mason City’s Teresa Garlock got out her Christmas decorations the day after Thanksgiving, Murphy, her nosy black and white cat, hid in the tree branches. For the next week, she removed ornaments while her humans were at work, putting them on the rug in front of the kitchen sink. Then one day when Garlock was using her computer, Murphy took a new skein of yarn out of a sack near a living room chair and swatted it across the room along with another stolen ornament. Garlock took the cat to task for her behavior and said she was ‘telling her dad.” When Garlock returned to the room about an hour later, the skein of yarn was back on top of the sack. “She must have thought, if I put it back, she won’t tell on me,” she said.


One hot August day in 1998, Virginia Shaffer of Mason City came home from work to find the refrigerator door ajar. Thinking she must not have closed it tight at noon, she pushed it shut. Then she started to look for Pepper, her Lhasa apso. He usually slept on her bed or in the bathroom.

Shaffer said she hunted everywhere and was starting to panic, unable to understand how he could simply vanish.

“The more I looked, the more my eyes kept going back to my fridge,” she wrote. “Finally, I opened the refrigerator door and there was my Pepper.”

That was just the first time Pepper decided to chill for a while, she said. Shaffer took photos of the dog pawing open his cool perch.

“He’s gone to the big dog house in the sky and I miss him to this day,” she wrote.


“Life is merrier with a wheaten terrier” is the family motto in Allison Stevenson’s home.

Stevenson, of Mason City, said Ellie, their first wheaten, brought such joy in the summer 2000 that they added another whom they eventually bred.

Isabelle gave birth to a litter of one and Beau Michael changed the entire family’s life.

“He was the oldest and he was the youngest ... He was the pick of the litter and he was also the runt,” Stevenson said.

Spoiled and confused by his birth status and reared by one canine and several human mothers, he soon became the alpha dog.

As a puppy, Beau was found sleeping in the refrigerator more than once. His chew toy collection includes the usual socks, shoes, belts, newspapers and letters. He chewed up a black pen “which scattered blobs of black ink all over our beige carpet. He chewed Isabelle’s fancy leather collar right off her neck,” she said.

Several sets of orthodontic retainers, CDs, a cell phone antenna and hairbrush bristles have known his teeth. The family’s learned to “Beau proof” their home and to go on “Beau patrol” when their “Beastie Boy” is outdoors where he’s eaten a weeping mulberry tree branch by branch, chewed up boards of their deck and left his mark on the edge of a concrete bench.

Last summer, Stevenson said they decided Beau would never outgrow his puppy stage and sent him to boot camp with the Dog Whisperer. When the rehabilitated dog returned home six weeks later, it quickly became “evident that our family needed a little more training.”

Although dogs can be naughty, “the things they ruin can be replaced,” Stevenson wrote. In return, they offer “unconditional love, trust, affection and forgiveness.”


Cheryl Kramer, of Mason City, spent a full afternoon baking Christmas sugar cookies with her daughter and her nephews. When Spencer and Drake Hadacek tired of cookie decorating, she persuaded her husband, Kevin, to help.

“He gave Santa blue eyes and a red suit with black boots and belt. He put some creativity into at least a dozen cookies,” she said.

Cookies were left on the dining room table so the boys could choose some to take home while the Kramers started getting ready to go out for the evening. While blow drying her hair, Cheryl said she heard pounding, a sound Kevin also heard from the basement shower.

Then, she heard Kevin yelling, “No! Bad dog!” The masterpiece cookies had been rendered tiny, unrecognizable crumbs.

“Dusty, alias the cookie monster, is generally a very good dog, but he is still a puppy so he is still curious,” Cheryl Kramer said.

The pounding was from the 96-pound golden retriever’s front paws swiping cookies off the table and landing on the floor.


Buttons, a 9-month-old schnauzer, lives in Greene. The pup loves to empty the wastebasket by the desk when it is full of paper.

In Buttons’ words, “I tear it into pieces and leave a paper trail. I guess I do not like clutter, as I remove any clothing left on the bed or dresser and drag it to the hallway for company to see. The bathroom is off limits these days, as I take great delight in unrolling the toilet tissue with my little paws. I must run, as someone has just stepped into the shower and left a towel on the floor” which needs attention.


Sasha is a sheltie who will be a year old in February. She has all kinds of chew bones, toys, balls and treats, wrote Nancy Michel of Britt, explaining that she used to block the pup in the entry way when she would go somewhere. That stopped, however, when Sasha began chewing the linoleum, wallpaper and corner trim. She’s chewed holes in the couch, the carpet, pillows, toys, Christmas ornaments and a comforter.

“I wish I knew how to stop her,” Michel said.

Dolly is a “sneaky tissue snatcher,” wrote Barb Sowder of Mason City. The 2 1/2-year-old half cocker spaniel, half border collie brings laughter to residents at the IOOF Home by cozying up to be petted and emptying their pockets of tissues for a snack.


Bax, a German shepherd “diplomutt” belonging to Mason City native Hava Hegenbarth, and Bax’s girlfriend, Spotty, who belongs to the neighbors, recently destroyed a toy cat, strewing stuffing all over the lawn.

“The hapless toy cat put up a terrific struggle, but the dogs won in the end,” wrote Hegenbarth, who is in the U.S. Foreign Service at the U.S. Embassy in Mauritius.


Kimberley Bingham of Osage, figures her shih tzu, Jack, makes mischief while she’s at work because he misses her. Even though he has plenty of chew toys, he seems to get bored.

“He chews up everything. Yesterday morning I went to work and came home to find my Chevy blazer book chewed up,” she said.


A beagle/basset hound with a sweet tooth named Junior got herself into several sticky situations, wrote Corrine Bolz,of Mason City. The dog ate herself sick when she spotted a bar of chocolate almond bark on a basement shelf that her owners didn’t think she could reach. They came home to find an empty wrapper on the living room floor and their 6-month-old puppy so ill she had her stomach pumped and spent four days on IVs. Years later, Phillip and Corrine Bolz learned Junior could open the china cabinet door when cookies and candy disappeared from the shelves. The dog again wound up in the animal hospital.


Whenever he thinks he’s unobserved, Teresa Roth of Mason City said her dog, Beau, takes a seat on the computer desk as if he’s doing no wrong.


Tom Swenson, of Mason City, had a dog a couple of years ago who liked to open the mailbox when he lived in the country. He would take out the mail, chew it up and it would blow over a half-mile area.

After destroying two mailboxes, Swenson said he put a lock on his mailbox, but came home one day to find his dog sitting under his neighbor’s mailbox. After that, the dog found his freedom curtailed.

Gypsy, a rescued Saint Bernard, is the mascot at Maxine Beckner’s boarding kennel, Griffon Point Boarding Kennels, Clear Lake. Over Christmas 2004, Beckner said the kennel was so full that she brought the dog home to stay.

“I came home from work one day to find her in my living room, happy as a clam, eating flour and sugar out of cannisters she had dragged out of my lazy Susan in the kitchen,” she said. “Her drool mixed with that flour would have wallpapered an entire house.”