Recona’s Whoop-de-doos

Recona is a very funny dog, and Tom and I sometimes wonder if she didn’t receive a good bit of coaching from Mel before he died since she does so many things just like he did. For example, since we’ve been keeping her on the porch at night, she’s been very good and hasn’t bothered to chew shoes or anything. But, one night earlier this week, we came out in the morning and found that she had taken our mini-binoculars off the rail, neatly out of the case, and had removed one eyepiece. The same night, she took a pair of my reading glasses apart. When Mel was a puppy, we were always baffled by how his destructive efforts always had themes, and he would collect things to chew and then leave them in a pile. One day I came home from work and he had apparently jumped up on the counter and taken a wooden spoon, a small plastic bowl, and a cookbook, and then he’d gone in the garbage and pulled out a bag that had contained flour. Apparently he was planning on a baking project. Another time, shortly after we’d moved into our Canadice house, he gathered a hammer, a jar of nails, and a few pictures in frames we had left propped next to a wall. I guess we weren’t decorating quickly enough for him. So, when we found that Recona was following his tendency to use themes for her destruction, all we could do was shake our heads.

The other thing she does is what we call Whoop-de-doos. Whenever we fed Mel, he would jump around on his hind legs, doing circles and pirouettes. Recona has taken this a step further, and she leaps, spins, and dances when she knows dinner is coming. She has a few distinct moves – the double spin-reversal, the pirouette-horse buck combo, and some pretty snazzy side to side moves – and I’ve been trying to get her to do specific moves on command by giving her a cue as soon as I can tell what she’s doing.

Tom says it’s as funny to watch me as it is to watch her, and he’s trying to figure out how to get our camera to get a video.