Our dog in a nutshell

As this edition’s Sun Day features a story on a proposed dog park in Sun City, now is as good of a time as any to let you in on our home’s best-kept secret, one I’ve only mentioned briefly before: our dog, Ruppy. Actually, Ruppy is a secret only if you consider a secret bold and brazen and barking loud enough to send echoes to Arizona and back.

Here’s the rundown:

Ruppy is a female corgi-Chihuahua mix.

She weighs approximately 25 pounds.

She has reddish, almost sandy hair with a white belly and a few additional white spots, including a semi heart-shaped patch on the topside of her neck, which is a perfect symbol of her nature: semi-hearted.

She’s 12 or 13, making her eligible in dog years for Sun City status, but with the exception for a small patch of gray hair on top of her head and that she seems, if at all possible, to have gotten a little grumpier over the years (especially in all matters concerning her food), she’s anything but a senior citizen. She is, in fact, wilder and more rambunctious than a puppy. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not kidding.

Opposed to the standard notion that, like people, animals slow down as they get older, Ruppy sped up.

She’s spectacular at multi-tasking (as most women are) in that with her hind leg she’ll scratch her ear while licking her front paws.

She stretches like a cat and more often than a cat. Ruppy does not go outside for a walk or move from any laying position (no matter how brief) without first stretching her back and then her legs.

She has allergies, sneezes often and when excited, and blows her nose between her paws (or sometimes on your clothes if she happens to be laying on you).

She’ll stand by the front door or sit and stare at the front door or at least lay with herself pointed in the direction of the front door when she wants to go outside.

She believes she is to eat whenever Erika and I eat, and sometimes before and after too.

She is not fed on any schedule and instead “asks” for food when she is hungry. By “asks,” I mean she claws Erika to death, swats at any furniture within paws’ reach, then runs to her food bowl and swats it for extra measure. (And if that doesn’t work, she knocks our decorative dish towel off the stove, which somehow translates into “Feed Me NOW!” in Ruppy-speak.

She views Erika as the alpha and me as the omega, which is about right and therefore makes her my boss.

She’s never whined for food at the dinner table, but recently she’s taken on the habit of letting out quick little pathetic-sounding groan-whimpers, like she’s the dog’s version of Oliver Twist and hasn’t seen food in days.

When she gets excited, she hops around and sounds as though she’s developed a hundred legs with a hundred little paws with a thousand claws tapping on our hardwood.

Her favorite song, no matter how poorly sung, is Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star. The first note practically puts her to sleep, and she never fails to lay down and close her eyes when it is sang.

She loves kids and is very gentle around babies, but she hates a man in uniform and all living adults, for that matter, save for Erika and I and Erika’s brother and my mother. And if you smile at her or enjoy yourself in any way, have any fun at all, she puts you on her List and will let you know it.

She likes to walk on the tops of brick walls.

She’s an expert fly catcher. And their buzzing, along with the blare of a smoke alarm, is perhaps the most annoying noise that needs to be barked to death. Only she doesn’t realize she’s barking our ears to death, too.

Perhaps her greatest transformation in life was going from the world’s pickiest eater to eating everything in sight, including dust, if the mood suits her. When we first got her, if it wasn’t wet or moist, she wouldn’t eat it, and canned dog food didn’t suit her tastes. We wanted her on dry food, as it’s supposed to be healthier for dogs, but she wouldn’t take it. We tried everything from adding water to her food to grinding it up into a powder that, when mixed with water, created an awful-looking (and I can only imagine awful-tasting) paste to feeding her out of our hand, to finally throwing our hands up the air and “making” her eat dry food by only giving that to her. And, if she didn’t eat, she didn’t eat. She outlasted us in that game. Today, though, as a result of making her food from scratch (a mixture of chicken, rice, vegetables, oatmeal, homemade chicken stock, and sometimes a one-a-day vitamin for added nutrients), she’s acquired an insatiable taste for, well, anything.

But despite her love of food, she is entirely trustworthy and can be left unattended with bags of groceries (even lunchmeats) or filled trash bags and will not ever touch them.

And she loves to collect…bones. Every morning, she asks for a rawhide twist. She takes it with gusto and runs off to gnaw on it twice, then leaves it on the carpet under our coffee table. She currently has collected eleven of them, and in a few days, we’ll have to boil them enough to make them soft, and then she’ll eat them for real.

I could go on and on with other items, but I’ll leave her introduction there. That’s Ruppy in a nutshell…which she’ll eat if you let her.

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