Drama Queen

My beagle is currently sulking under my bed.

You see, I've started an endurance training regime, which involves alternating between jogging and walking for between twenty and thirty minutes every other day. (I found the routine here, if you're interested.) Partly because it rains so often here and partly because I'm embarrassed to let everyone in the neighborhood see that I can only jog for one minute at a time, I usually do my jogging inside the house, since my kitchen/living room is enormous.

My dogs, of course, love it when I jog around in circles (actually figure eights). They jog along behind me and wrestle with each other as they do. That's fine with me, even though sometimes they get in my way, so I have to vault over them or dodge around them. Blitzkrieg, however, is not always a terribly well-behaved dog. Despite my efforts to teach him otherwise, he still thinks it's okay to jump up on people and playfully nip at them. This is exacerbated by the fact that sometimes, when he gets excited, he doesn't realize that his bites get hard enough to really hurt. (Incidentally, this is a sharp contrast to Akela, who absolutely never bites humans, even lightly or playfully.)

Two days ago, Blitzkrieg nipped my leg hard enough to leave a bruise while I was jogging. In response, I told him "NO!" and used the top of my foot to swat him in the shoulder. (Before you freak out about my kicking a puppy, please be aware that I don't think it's okay to hurt children or pets and that I very deliberately made the swat sharp enough to let him know I was serious, but gentle enough that it wouldn't hurt him, okay?) The swat knocked him a step to the side, and he stood perfectly still where he was, staring at me with a look of utter betrayal on his puppy face. With his ears twitching between lying back and pricking forward, he took a step backward, then a tentative step forward. Then he turned and trotted away, down the hall and into my bedroom, his head low and his tail drooping.

I felt like an absolute monster. Five minutes later, during one of the walking periods, I walked back into the bedroom. He was hiding under the bed, and when I called him, he army-crawled halfway out and stared up at me with his huge brown eyes, looking so sad you would think I had beaten him up and stolen his candy. I picked him up, and he wrapped his front paws around my neck and buried his head in my neck, exactly like a little kid who had been picked on at school might do when his mother hugged him to make it better.

Freaking dog.

After I hugged him and brought him back into the living room and started to jog again, he started running around and playing with Akela again, acting like nothing had ever happened.

Apparently, swatting him like I had didn't teach him his lesson, though, because today when I was jogging, he jumped up and bit me right in the butt about thirty seconds after I started. I didn't touch him this time, I just snapped "NO!" and kept going. When I rounded the couch and started back toward the kitchen, I saw him backing toward the hallway, and when I rounded the island in the kitchen and began heading back to the living room, he was gone, hiding under the bed again.

I'm not apologizing this time. He started it. Furry little melodramatic drama queen. I swear, he abuses the power those big brown eyes grant him.

UPDATE: I walked into my room to get a book, and when I walked out again, he followed me and is now curled up beside my chair.