Izzy Found a Hamburger

Little dog, little mouth, no big deal—right?

Ummm, nope.

My little dog has a ridiculous amount of pressure per inch in her mouth. How do I know this, you may ask? Well, a few evenings ago Izzy and I left our training facility after a really good class. I mean it was really good. Izzy was on, I was on. We worked together like a couple on a ballroom dance floor (or so I like to think). I was so proud of both of us and was kvelling in our success as I was walking Iz around the perimeters of the parking lot before we buckled in for the ride home. And then I saw it: an open Styrofoam hamburger container. Unfortunately, while I noticed only the container, Izzy noticed the HAMBURGER lying nearby and grabbed it.

I panicked. A dog had been poisoned in the parking lot a couple of weeks earlier; an open container of green liquid was left on the premises and a dog had gotten into it. (A fast-thinking instructor had given hydrogen peroxide to the dog to make it vomit, and sent the owner to an emergency vet. The dog is fine now.) I was sure that somehow this soggy disgusting hamburger in my dog's mouth had been poisoned and left for an unsuspecting bottomless-pit greedy chow-hound like mine. I told Izzy to drop it, but no fool, she. No way she was going to let go of that prize of a soggy burger. So I bent down and pulled away the sections of bun and burger that were outside her long little snout. Then in a frenzy, I stuck my hand in her mouth to try to scoop out the rest.

I was able to get my fingers inside her mouth, but the second they were there, Izzy clamped down hard. And I mean HARD. My left index finger was lodged in the back of her mouth, between her jaws. I tried putting one hand over her nose, hoping that I could make it so difficult for her to breathe through her nose, she'd have to open her mouth; it didn't work. I don't know how I got my finger out of there, but I did. I tried again to open her mouth, but failed this time. I yelled, "Drop it" again, tried covering her nose again, and again was met without results. If I was reading Izzy's expression correctly (and I think I was), she was saying, "Drop dead, sister, this burger is MINE, and I mean it." Then I had the teeniest moment of clarity and thought to myself that I was probably being hysterical and the burger was most likely someone's left-overs and not some evil item of dog destruction.

So I sat back on my heels, and watched Izzy gulp down the remaining hamburger. The second she was done, she looked at me with soft happy eyes and pranced over to the car. Sure, she was in good spirits--she just topped off an hour of working for treats with a burger, but I was still so wound up my legs were shaking. When I tried to start the car, I discovered my right pointer finger hurt so badly that I couldn't put any pressure on it at all. I had to cross my left hand over the steering wheel to actually turn the key. I was shocked that I was in that amount of pain from my own little dog.

As we were driving home, I started to worry that maybe I had hurt Izzy's jaw by all the yanking and pulling on it. So I threw her a treat to see if she would eat. She did. Iz was bright eyed, and seemed fine. And every time I looked over at her, she was looking right back.

Then she did something she's never done before in the car. She crawled into my lap. (Yes, I know she should have been secured in the car, and she usually is buckled in.) She leaned back against me, and put her head right under my chin and sighed. My heart, just like the Grinch's, grew three times its size right then and there. Seriously, I felt it. She stayed like that for a couple of minutes until I came to a stop and had her go back to her seat.

A behaviorist would most likely disagree, but that gesture, that little bit of contact she initiated, felt to me like a true-blue apology. And maybe it wasn't the "I'm so sorry. I ate that hamburger and I know I was stupid and dangerous and I'll never do it again, never, ever, ever." kind of apology. But she was definitely checking in, making sure all was right with me, with us, with the world. And at that moment, it really was.