If Gollum had been a dog…
Last night, I gave Hannah a Nylabone dog treat. These are made by Nylabone, but rather than being indestructible chew toys, they’re similarly-sized edible hard-as-a-rock substitutes for rawhide treats. She’s had them occasionally before.
Last night, however, she didn’t seem interested in eating it. She carried it around in her mouth for a while, and I watched as she leaped on the couch and attempted to bury it under the cushions. When I interfered with this, she trotted down the hall to peer into the bedroom. Unfortunately for her plans, the bed had nothing but a sheet on it ’cause I’d just put the clean sheet on. No mounds of blankets and pillows– foiled!
So she came back to the living room and lay there with it between her paws, eyeing the cat down the hall nervously. Soon after this, I went to bed. Hannah came and joined me at the bottom of Kevin’s side of the bed. At one point when I got up to get some water, I noticed she’d brought the bone with her.
Later, I heard her growling very quietly, probably at a cat. Not allowed! But when I scolded her, she stopped.
This morning, I was woken up at 6:30 by a curious sound: sort of a thump-squeal-skitter-skitter noise. It wasn’t loud enough to be something the cats had knocked over. I tried blearily to figure out what it had been… and realized it sounded an awful lot like Hannah yelping and racing across the kitchen floor and losing her footing and skidding. Hmmm.
A few minutes later, there was unhappy whining. I thought about this for a while, and then got up to go see what was going on. Hannah was on the couch again, with both the original bone I’d given her and the other bone in its package (which I’d left somewhere only marginally out of reach), trying desperately to bury them under the couch cushions (but the couch was covered with a sheet so she had no gap to shove them into), whining all the while. She didn’t even stop when I approached her, so I got to see her nudging the bones into place, trying to get them out of view.
When I reached down to pick them up, her tongue lolled out happily. It was clearly an act of mercy. She almost seemed relieved when I patted her and went and put both bones way way out of her reach. I could just imagine her saying, “Oh, thank God, Boss! I couldn’t protect them! You should have seen those wicked cats! They wanted my treasure that you gave me!”
And I suspect she didn’t sleep all night, frantically trying to guard her treasure.
I’m very glad we’ve taught her that all her belongings are actually ours (or any human’s) and we can take them back when we want, because she did occasionally growl at Kevin or Kirby way back when if they approached her while she was gnawing on a yummy treat. She also happily shares her water with the cats and I’ve never seen her be protective of her food bowl with the cats. But any item we explicitly give to her… oh, it’s a treasure. While she doesn’t stay up all night protecting her puppy-doll, she has been known to watch nearby cats fiercely while cuddling it, or grumble when they get too close, and I’ve noticed the cats taking a wider course than usual around her when she’s in one of those moods.
But man, those bones. Her super-special treasures. Tricksy cats! Paranoid dog!