An addition to the family

We adopted a retired greyhound a few weeks ago. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present Duke:



This is generally his normal pose. Unless he's outside, when he like to destroy rubber squeakie toys:



We've been talking about getting a dog for over a year now. Since Ms. stu graduated with her MLIS last fall and my hated masters program has its end in site, it seemed like the right time. We had a few requirements in our search for a dog.

• Bigger than thirty pounds (we've got two cats, why would we want a cat sized dog?);
• A dog that could handle steps (we've got a lot of stairs in the house and intended to kennel him in the basement);
• We wanted a dog that wasn't very hyper;
• We preferred a dog that didn't shed a lot;
• Ms. stu wanted a dog that could wear sweaters;
• A dog that didn't mind being home alone for 8-9 hours while we are at work.

A classmate of mine said that a greyhound would be the perfect fit for us and I thought that was the dumbest thing I'd ever heard of. I figured that a greyhound, being a sprinter, had a high amount of energy and would be bouncing of the wall. But, it turns out that greyhounds are really laid back and sedate. The bumper stickers marketed to greyhound owners read, "Adopt a greyhound, lose a couch," and "the 45 MPH couch potato."

And, for the most part, Duke is just as advertised. He tires from a short walk, he's gentle and sweet, and gets along/ignores the cats. The first two weeks went great, but the last week has been extremely stressful. Duke suffers from a mild separation anxiety. He cannot stand to be even one room apart from us and when he is kenneled at night and during the day he is urinating in the kennel. At night he whines and barks for twenty minutes straight, takes a break for a few minutes, and then starts again. He's in the basement, were on the second floor, and it keeps us up all. Night. Long.

The Minnesota Chapter of Greyhound Pets of America has a message board, and I've been asking questions on there. Most of the responses have told us to let the dog sleep upstairs in our bedroom. At this point, we are resisting this. We decided to make the second floor of the house a dog-free zone so the cats had a place to get away from the 75 pound hound.

So, tonight we unveil a drastic plan: I'm going to camp out on the concrete basement floor, in an area where Duke can't see me. The first time he whines, I spring into action. The action? I toss a coffee can half filled will marbles at the cage. Then I yell in my deepest voice, "NO CRYING!" And here's the genius part, the can is attached to a rope, that allows me to pull the can back to me, without the Duke seeing me, thereby not making him scared of me. This plan was sent to me, via e-mail, by one of the MN-GPA members. I assume he sent it to me by e-mail rather than posting it to the forum because most of the people on there would disapprove. I'm going to do it anyway. I need to have him learn not to do these things, and if I sleep upstairs, come down the stairs and spray him with water saying, "NO CRYING" it won't work. Why? By the time I get down the stairs he's stopped whining, because he's gotten what he wanted: attention.

I think I'll blog a bit about the progress. We start obedience classes in two weeks.