Taffy the Laffy Samoyed Stories

Well yesterday I had an emergency appointment with my dentist. This came about because Sunday night I took my lower partial out and was stupid enough to lay it on the end table next to my chair and then left the room to get a cup of coffee. I had jut been eating some chocolate covered peanuts (which the new dog (Taffy) is not allowed to have, chocolate is not good for dogs) and took it out to rinse my mouth from the little bits of peanuts. When I came back to the room the parcel was gone, at first I though it had just got bumped down on the floor so I got down on my hands and knees and in doing so my knee hit a small piece of what felt like stone.

WELLLLLLLLLLLLL....... it wasn't stone it was what was left of one tooth, OH OH.....! Over romps the dog prancing around with a piece of paper in his mouth and when I grabbed it out it was what was left of the empty candy bag which was laying right beside my partial. I then went to the end of the hallway where the dog lays on his G.I. Joe blanket and flipped it up in the air........raining down came more little stones.......itty bitty tinny little pieces of beautiful pearl white teeth and one piece of pink plastic........!

I guess the temptation was to much for him, well I became slightly hysterical, OK a LOT hysterical! I am screaming and yelling and jumping up and own, flinging his blanket around like a Spanish bull fighter. The dog meanwhile thinks this is just a super game even though in his short four month life with us he has never heard some of these commands, and yes some of them were physically impossible for him to do and all of them were obscene!!!

Finally I realized that the "little bigger than a grain of sand" white pieces of plastic were all that was left of my partial and the rest had gone to doggie hell. Now I am completely insane ,so I rush into the kitchen and grab his food bowl and fling the contents out into the snow........no more food for Fido......I want my partial back and I have the patience of a vulture! I start stalking him, demanding he pass them right now ,he bounds away at top speed which is fast for a 45 lb- 22 inch high Samoyed with 3 1/2 inch wide paws!

Meanwhile Charlie, who was in the other room and does not have his hearing aids in, finally realizes that the sound he is hearing is me and not water roaring over the dam across the river from us, it did however have the same roar. About this time me and the dog round the corner with the dog barking his head off in fear.

Now first off without my lower partial I can barely talk and have a VERY pronounced lisp, making it even more impossible for Charlie (the deaf guy) to understand me, this was compounded by my mixture of hysterics and obscene comments shouted at the top of my lungs while waving a G.I. Joe sleeping bag over my head and commanding the dog to use the bathroom right now and I mean now!!!!!

Charlie has no clue what is wrong as the dog hits the waterbed (where he had been laying down reading) at about 20 MPH .Now I know I flunked out of 8th grade science but I recently saw on TV the effects of a tidal wave on a complete nation, which was nothing compared to Charlie when the dog hit the king size waterbed at top speed, it almost flung him up to the ceiling fan. NOW of course Charlie is upset and starts yelling at me while the dog leaps and turns trying to dodge the sleeping bag. Charlie tries to get out or get off or anything to get away from us. Although he can not make a lick of sense out of what I am yelling he understands my TONE of voice and demands to know what in the world is wrong? WELLLLLL this sets me off on another tirade about HIS dog while the dog is still barking and trying to dig a hole to hide in under Charlie. By this time the bed is almost walking across the room and the floors start creaking. Charlie finally manages to get out of the bed and I let him have it with the sleeping bag while the dog escapes between us. That made me even madder!!!

I am now screaming in Charlie's face, crying hysterically and yelling obscenities about his bloodline clear back to the first Caveman Bowyer to crawl out of a hole in a rock! I finally realize by the blank look on his face he does not hear me and/or can't understand me with this horrific lisp. I break into hand signals like I always do when he is too cheap to put a new battery in his hearing aids.

I realize I need to use more visual aids, so I shove the pieces of sand in my hand into Charlie's face, open my mouth and point, then point to the sleeping bag and give him one of my more common hand signals involving only one finger.

Well at this point I am near a state of complete insanity, I run to HIS wallet, whip out HIS Platinum Discover card and point to my mouth and start yelling WOOF WOOF.....the site of the credit card strikes fear in Charlie mind. He frantically shoves his hearing aid in his ear, turns the volume to full blast and grabs both my arms to shut me up (since I was using hand signals ).

Yesterday morning I get a phone call back from the dentist office and in between huge belly laughs he tells me to come it at 11am to have new impressions made for a new partial. I arrived with the small grains of sand and the other two teeth that passed at 4am, as I stayed up all night hovering over the dog and did not allow him out. Well no surprise they can't use them because they are afraid of stress fractures. Hey it was worth a shot.

When the office assistant asked me how I planned to pay for this, I whipped out Charlie's Discover card, in shock she asked me "You want to pay for all of this "she asked, "EVERY FREAKING DIME" I told her, "It is HIS dog!". To add insult to injury she gave me a senior citizen discount.

So here I am just waiting for my new partial from the lab, which cost more than the births of three of my four children or 1/2 of the junk racecar he bought in 1969. AH HA you thought I forgot about that frivolous purchase didn't you, HA a woman never forgets these things!!! Needless to say Taffy the Tooth Fairy dog now follows Charlie around like a shadow staying well away from me!

Well if some of you watch cop shows you may be familiar with the term Officer Down, this is when an officer needs assistance and calls for back up. I doubt there are many police reports of officers being attacked by Samoyeds and I doubt that this incident EVER got reported to anyone.

Our dog Taff likes to play a game called "untie the shoe". This is when our landlord, (the honorary Mayor), comes over to visit and always has his shoes loosely tied. Taff likes to grab the end of one shoe string and ,with amazing dexterity with only his teeth, he will pull one lace completely out of the shoe and run off with it. This is on the top ten list of games he likes to play. However most of the 1/2 dozen or so guys who come here to the railroad wear slip on boots so it is a rare treat for Taff to play the shoelace game. Now having just moved over here we have been in a state of confusion with stuff everywhere. In the process of moving we were given some photos to copy by one of our local Twp. Police Officers. One night on his lunch hour, which happens to be after most restaurants are closed, he stopped down to pick up the pictures and I offered him some coffee and donuts. So here he sits in our new dining room, far more comfy than being crammed in the caboose, and of course I am doing my Martha Stewart imitation, offering my fancy cups and little plates with napkins to this nice young man. The whole time the dog is sitting and looking like a stuffed animal, what a relief!!!! hahaha.

Well never take any situation for granted when you live with a Samoyed, or I should say OUR Samoyed. Just about the time the officer gets his teeth into his donut the dog spies his shoes. Now I suppose there is some OSHA code for tying shoes if you could possibly be called upon to burst into a foot race with no notice, or else this young man got a scout badge in knot tying in his youth. Whatever as soon as I saw the dog go for his laces I jumped out of my chair yelling NNNNNNOOooooooooooo!!!

Well next thing I know the nice young officer is on the floor, in full gear, gun and all, while my dog is dragging him across 10 feet of vinyl flooring and shaking the poor officers foot like a rag doll, which is a lot of force if you know Samoyeds, it was like a slow motion movie clip from a horror movie. My whole life flashed before my eyes, all I can see is trying to explain to a judge how my dog had maimed an officer because his shoes were tied too tight??? Lame really lame...figured I was probably looking at 20 years easy!. Now meanwhile to compound matters, as if things are not bad enough, Taff realizes that the now incapacitated officer, when hitting the floor, had also drug his donut down with him. In this house anything on the floor is his, police officers, toys, food, shoes whatever. Never one to pass up a treat, Taff now decides to switch from appearing to rip the officers leg off to going for the gold, in this case glazed. So he promptly lets go of the shoe lace, pounces on the officers chest, (Taff is about 60 lbs), drools all over his uniform, grabs the donut out of his hand, and races to the other room at top speed, which is somewhere around 20-30 mph.

Now if you want to stare death in the face, grab a police officers glazed! OH MAN was he upset, and knowing he probably had 14 rounds in the clip of his gun I figured Taff was a goner for sure....!!!! I am not sure in the book of Emily Post's etiquette just exactly how you are to "properly" address a raving police officer, but since I figured me and the dog only had seconds to live ,I shouted at the top of my lungs.....DRUGS....HE IS ON DRUGS.....DON'T SHOOT!!!

Actually he is only on flea medicine, it is a drug... sort of....anyhow I figured we could out run him since he now had a pronounced limp....ooops.. and would probably trip over his now 8 foot long shoelace that amazingly was still tied...! Of course any sane dog would have headed for the hills, but then "Charlie's" Samoyed is not known for his quick mind. While I am helping the officer up off the floor and apologizing profusely (and mentally calculating what my liability insurance will sky rocket too over this), idiot fur ball Taff then decides to race back to the dining room with what is left of the glazed to shake it in the officers face, "Samoyed speak" for chase me!!!!! Words can not describe the fear that gripped my heart.......!!!! Now I am screaming at the officer, "shoot me- just shoot me now"!!! At this point he recovered faster than I did, of course he is trained to handle crisis, although I doubt they cover "Samoyed incidents" at the academy. Anyway I managed to corral the dog, lock him out on the front porch and then proceed to apologize again. All the officer wanted was to leave, which he did without his photos. What a break from a dull night of patrolling! Remarkably he has actually returned, and in fact brought donuts for the dog, needless to say as soon as we saw him drive up we put the big webbed leash on the dog and tied him to the chair leg my 200lb husband was sitting in, not that that would stop him from charging for a shoe lace, but it would give us few milliseconds head start.

Once a year our local police have a fund raiser, not to sound like a Hollywood celebrity, but we plan to write an embarrassingly large check, who says money can't buy you out of trouble, I only hope..... hahahaha.lol mary

Well we have not had a dog for years, the last dog we had over 20 years ago was a LAP dog, part poodle, part miniature schnauzer. He was little, had curly thin hair, was a couch potato, about as far as you can get , breed wise, from a Samoyed, if in fact our Taff is a Samoyed, which we strongly suspect now after doing hours of research on the breed. So now I got this big bouncy fur ball, and told my husband maybe I should sign up for obedience classes as he seems to be a "tad" will full and I have no experience with dog training, sounds like a plan. I sign up for classes and then rush out and buy everything I think we will need which included a good leash, body harness, choke collar, overnight bag, which I actually had embroidered with the dogs name, it's blue no less. I then pack up bags of 6 different kinds of treats, rolls of paper towels, freezer bags for doo-doo, bottled water in case he gets thirsty, pens and paper to take notes, 5 different leashes and 4 collars and off we go to "school" carrying 30 lbs of gear.

Well number one I had no idea that "the Taffer" was ,what appears to be, afraid of other dogs, I no sooner arrive at the school and get him out of the car then he goes totally ballistic barking in a high pitched yelp till I am almost deaf. This he kept up for about 20 minutes while we checked in and got all our papers in order and were assigned a spot, between the big Newfie and the boxer, both really beautiful dogs. The Newfie was actually a graduate of this same school puppy kindergarten. The trainer walks out in the ring to a circle of yapping dogs and instructs us to quiet them, which they all did but Taff and one spaniel. OH this is going well..... the trainer then informs the class that the way to quiet a barker is to squirt them in the face with water which she promptly does to the Taff, it worked for 10 seconds. Water to Taff is like air to an airplane he was born to be wet, he loves water, he takes this as a signal we are going to play a water game and goes from yipping to arooooooing.....who hooo. I had to practically sit on him to shut him up and I have only been here 15 minutes!

Moving along, the trainer hands out a sheet of exercises we are to do with our dogs and asks if we have any specific problems with our dogs....hahahaha well seeing as she was probably in her thirties and would die of old age before I could list all of the Taff' problems (which I stupidly attributed to his being a foundling) I settled on his pulling on the leash when I walk him hahahahahaha. If you could solve that problem with a Samoyed you could be another Bill Gates, rich beyond imagination! She practically brushes me off with "well it is a matter of training you to make him mind".....ohhhhhhh KKKKKK.

After a few simple displays from a disgustingly attentive and freeze trained Corgi, class is dismissed for us to go home to do lesson one homework. How hard can this be? hahahahahahah READ ON. First of all since Taff did not respond to slight "corrections" with a regular buckle collar, it was suggested I try the choke one. Now the very word "choke" makes my skin crawl as I am claustrophobic but as Taff was finally getting a fair amount of fur back on his neck I figured if I was careful I could not hurt him, how did I know that a Samoyed will pull till their eyes bulge and their tongue turns blue???? So here is what you do, you place the collar on the dog and hold the leash in your hand and when the dog tries to pull you stop walking, give a little jerk and it startles the dog, after two or three times the dog learns that he needs to keep slack in the leash to avoid the little jerks as it "snugs" the choke collar up on them.

WHAT DRUGS ARE YOU PEOPLE ON? I go out the door, with our choke rig on, and as soon as we hit the bottom of the steps TAFF THE ROCKET MAN takes off like a space shuttle being launched. He hits the end of the 6 foot leash, the "choke" collar "snugs" up, he never even slowed down but actually picked up speed until his eyes looked like pizza pies and his tongue was blue. I am running full speed yelling, STOP STOP but he is belly down and flat out, we are now doing somewhere around 14 miles an hour, my feet only touch the pavement once every three strides, and I am petrified I am going to kill my dog while he is nose to the pavement and gagging but still going. Finally I just let go of the leash and go back for the car, cause I know he is going straight for "Miss Casey" (the neighbors border collie), house about 3 blocks down the road.

Arriving at the neighbors yard I find the neighbor woman holding Taff by the leash and laughing at me, this will be repeated many, many, many times in the near future, the laughing. I am so mad and so upset and the big white lug is sitting there with his bluish tongue and his dangling "choke" collar. The neighbor woman asks me if he had been eating berries???? THIS is not going well. I tried again with a combination of body harness with one leash, and the choke collar on a second leash, figuring if I corrected with one and held on with the other, I could actually lift him off his feet with the body harness and not kill him......I live such a rich fantasy life.......I've been watching WAY too many episodes of "The Dog Whisperer" on TV.

Our "training" walks evolved into-run-jerk the choke collar tight-stop-get some slack-run again- wait for mom to catch up-run till ya gag-stop, I never had a chance to give the little "jerks" ,if I stopped walking he would just sit down till I decided to move again and he would bolt right to the end of the leash, we could sit in the road 15 minutes and once I took a step forward- OFFFFFF we went like a thoroughbred at Belmont. HELLLLOOOOOO this is not working, I gave up the "choke" collar and went back to the body harness, I put a short leash on it and when he jerked I would stop and pull him up off his feet and then drop him some slack.......ooooooohhhhhhh this was an even more fun game, now it is a direct challenge to his brute force which he has a lot of hahaha. So he would bolt to the end of the leash and anticipating me yanking back he would hunker down and leap up in the air, playing I can fly and so can you. This little spectacle the neighbors call the "snap-crackle-pop" walk, this is when he snapped out to the end of the leash, crackled the roadside branches when his body hit them, and the pop was my arm trying to dislocate out f it's socket at the shoulder. THIS IS NOT WORKING....! These walks became such a source of amusement, the neighbors put up a roadside bleacher, opened a lemon-aide stand and sold food, finally I turned them in for not having a outdoor concert permit and they quit!

I am telling you I racked my brain with devious ways to break this dog of bolting, I tied his left rear leg to his right front leg with a long bandana and he can run 10 miles an hour in that rig. My husband got the hairball idea to tie him to his chest, borrow the neighbors bicycle and let him run, see page 3 of the picture pages for this fiasco, note the tension on the cable to the idiot man's chest, Charlie was reduced to holding his feet away from the peddles and screaming STOP HIM as he raced by me and I took pictures while laughing my head off....brakes? Sure he put the brakes on but the bike was burning rubber and wobbling and he was being pulled over the handle bars by the body cable he rigged up hahhahaha that was the last time "mr wise guy" made a suggestion. To this day Taff jumps up and down when he sees a bike, that was fun.....pant pant pant!

I spent days and days diligently trying to work with this dog, we spent weeks at school where he progressively got louder and more disruptive ,finally the instructor informed me he did not seem to be "able" to respond to their training methods and suggested he needed private lessons, so I'm a flunky dog owner and he is un trainable, well this is going well.

My personal thought is, it was the treat thingy, I am telling you they shove treats in those dogs mouths. Now Taff loves treats BUT he loves flushing rabbits and birds more, he would run for 6 hours without a drop of water or a bite of food it the game was out there, the 1 oz snack will not bring him back from the "Game Zone", this dog has food out all the time and most of the time he don't touch it except in the early evening or sometimes early morning, a lot of times he evens buries treats in his G.I. Joe blanket, however he never seems to understand what happens to the ice cubes.....DA.

Anyhow I was hoping to get him to respond out of respect and devotion......told ya I was a nut case...I knew the treats would not work with him, Samoyeds are head strong, you got to out wit them. It was pathetic to see those little dogs just hang on a command for a pinch of liver, pathetic, don't they feed them? Taff has been known to woof down a 1/2 lb steak just for a snack, then snub ya for 1/2 hour. Maybe he is too well fed for the training methods.

However I have not given up my attempts to out wit him, it is now a game. I hit on having him drag some 4"by 4" studs up the hillside one day for my garden with his body harness, and he made a left turn and ran 1/2 mile with one behind, you never saw such a happy dog in your life as him with that big log bouncing down the pavement of the dead end road YEEEEE HAWWWW. OK now we're on to something hahaha. LOG him and walk him...this might work. You'll never see us in the AKC Obedience trials but you might see us on Sven the Logger TV!!!!! hahahaha Stay tuned lol mary