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GarbageNovember 27, 2008 The garbage situation at my house is, shall we say, not well controlled. Ordinarily my garbage and that of my landlord/neighbors goes into two big metal composting cylinders. We dump garbage in one cylinder while the other one "cooks." Every six months or so, we switch. Trouble is, several months back one of the cylinders sprang a leak. Puppy Traveller quickly realized that the stuff hanging out the bottom made for good eating. Over the summer the leak got bigger, as did Travvy. Now the leak occupies the top third of the cylinder -- if the composting cylinder were a globe, the leak would cover most of the area from the North Pole to the U.S.-Canadian border. The border area is piled high with fresh garbage. Trav has reached the point in his training and/or maturing where I can let him out unaccompanied to do his business and he will come back when he's done. Rather, he would come back if not for the lure of fresh garbage. At basic obedience class (which we completed this past Monday), I learned the importance of payoffs. My dog will do what I want, even if it isn't his first choice, if the payoff is good enough. So far I haven't been able to come up with a payoff that is better than fresh garbage. On one hand, this is a little humiliating; on the other, if Ray and Lorna Coppinger's theory is correct, dogs were scavenging garbage before they developed close relationships with garbage-generating humans, so I probably shouldn't take this personally. The trouble is that when Trav ingests too much garbage, he needs to go out in the middle of the night, and since he can't open the front door I need to get up and let him out. A couple of nights ago he got me up twice. The third time I stayed on the deck, opened the kiddie gate, and said, "You're on your own." I tracked him with my flashlight. He was on his way back to the stairs when a rabbit crashed through the brush and he was gone. Short of crashing through the brush in hot pursuit, there was nothing to do but wait. Wait I did. I couldn't sleep, of course, and though I turned the computer on, thinking to get a little work done, all I could focus on was Spider solitaire. Finally I went out on the deck and panned the area with my flashlight. My missing puppy was at the compost bin, standing on his hind legs, chowing down. Eventually (I hope) my neighbor will weld a sheet of metal to the compost bin, and the garbage will be left to cook, instead of unsettling the stomach of my scavenger puppy. I should note, however, that this afternoon when I went out for Thanksgiving dinner, I left Trav alone and uncrated in the apartment. Talk about suspense! When I got home, long after dark, I wondered what I would find at the top of the stairs: ransacked wastebaskets? shredded papers? a mangled remote or a well-chewed boot? None of the above, as it turned out: my left-alone puppy was a model citizen -- though he did knock over a nearly full water dish in his headlong rush to greet me. Oh, well, the kitchen floor was long overdue for washing anyway.
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