When Gizmo is bored:

After a bath, Looking like a "movie star."

         Yes, dogs can get bored.  Today, while Grace read a book and I napped, Gizmo got into our bathroom and found the wastebasket that we had hidden behind the door in the bathroom.

         He removed the Kleenex and either played with or tried to eat it, dumping most of the contents of the wastebasket.

         Then he tried to reach the fancy, never-used, gift bath salts on the side of the tub.  He had pulled it nearly to the edge of the top of the tub when Grace discovered his mischief and said, “No.”

         Gizmo slowly got down from his standing-on-hind-legs reaching position and sat down, looking back and forth from the bath salts to Grace, without a hint of guilt or remorse.  Sort of a “well, OK, this is a temporary interruption.”

         When Grace went into the kitchen and looked under the rolling cutting block in the middle of the room,          she could see that Gizmo had removed the          package of his food that was stored there.  Although there was no reason to think that he was hungry, he had taken the package (which features a picture of a dog that looks very much like Gizmo, so maybe he was having a relationship of some sort with a look-alike commercial doggy star?), pulled it out of the storage area and shaken it.  He did not succeed in opening it and getting to his food pellets.  This time.

         Grace told me about this, indicating that we have some proof of boredom in dogs and strongly suggested that “your dog” needs a walk.  We went out at dusk on a cold windy evening for a long walk.

         Why is it that, when there is any misbehavior, Gizmo becomes my dog?

  "No dog is too much for me to handle.  I rehabilitate dogs, I train people. I am the dog whisperer." Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer