Tuesday, August 4, 2009

The Screaming Explained

Last night we had one heck of a thunderstorm. Rattled the windows, knocked out the power for a while, the thunder kept waking me up. I'm thinking that this might explain Gizmo's little tantrum last night; he hates thunderstorms, and it wouldn't surprise me if he could sense it coming. That, along with it being his "bed time", was frustrating enough to make him have a little melt-down. Anyway, after such a noisy storm, all the critters were tense and twitchy this morning.

Gizmo sleeps in the house in a very large dog crate, the kind meant for "giant" breeds. It gives him plenty of room to move around at night, but it also gives us a way to keep him safe indoors at night, and prevent him from creative acts of destruction while we're asleep. We've even built a shelf into it so that he can sleep a little bit up off the ground if he wants to.

Well, this morning, I went in to let Gizmo out of his night crate, and he gave me his usual big smiles and wagging tail, the "I'm so cute open the door and let me out to play!" look. I got his leash, kneel down and went to open the door, only to have him start screaming as loud as he could and digging at the door.

At that point I got up, turned around, and left the room; I'll let him out, but not when he's behaving badly. Ducking out of sight, I waited on the other side of the doorway. He screamed one or two more times, then went quiet. I waited about another ten seconds, then turned and went back in to let him out. This time he didn't scream; just plowed into my lap and started kissing my face all over.

I've learned that Gizmo is a lot easier to deal with if you can figure out why he's doing what he's doing, and act accordingly. In this case, he was screaming because I wasn't getting the door open fast enough, so I simply left the room. He's a pretty bright kid, and the conclusion "I better not scream or she'l leave instead of letting me out" wasn't a hard one for him to come to.



I've had a request to post more pictures of the kid, so I'm going to start adding a picture or video of him to the end of every post! Here's today's picture:


Picture Taken On: October 7th, 2008.

1 comment:

  1. Beautiful fox at you. She always at you in the house lives? And strongly she shouts at night?

    ReplyDelete

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