Silly Ass Dog

It is 10 PM and I am defeated. Today was a day full of negotiations with Bucky. Despite his easygoing nature, he can be finicky and strong willed, and he is very difficult to convince to do anything. Earlier this evening I was lifting weights and invited Bucky upstairs to join me in the air-conditioning. After some brief paranoia of flying weights I opened the door and let him go downstairs if he wanted to. Well...he didn't want to. A couple of weeks ago I let him sleep upstairs before Matt came to bed (again in the air-conditioning; poor boy pants an awful lot. When Matt came upstairs to retrieve him for his final nightly walk, somehow Bucky started down the stairs and fell, paw and face first (Matt said he was imitating Superman), into our 2nd floor landing. I was mostly asleep but heard a loud thud and the bellow of Matt's laughter. I think ever since that episode Bucky has been gunshy to descend stairs. I even tried to trick him with a treat that was slightly out of reach for him to come down. He dipped his toe as if he was testing the temperature of the pool, but otherwise no dice. Ten minutes later Matt carried him down, but there was a pool of drool on the top stair.

The second negotiation was trying to get him to eat his immunization pills (we went to the vet today). I tried to make a beef liver peanut butter sandwich which was too big for his mouth. He did manage to eat 2/3 of the pills. Then I asked Matt to put the rest of the pills down his throat (efficient but not the most pleasant thing to watch), but Bucky kept hucking the pills up! Matt, Imee, and I realized that the horse pills smelled like penicillin and Bucky was having none of it. We then put it in chicken stock (his Achilles heel as far as we know so far) and he drank the stock but avoided the pills. Finally, I pulverized the suckers with a hammer and then mixed it with more chicken stock but that smell never went away and he just wouldn't have any of it. So I gave up. The last third of the medicine is just not to be. I hope that he isn't struck down with... Measles? Rubella? Bloody hell, I don't even know what he is being immunized for.