When Jon and I got married, we merged two households. His included
himself, and his cat. Mine included me, three kids, our cat, two rats,
a snake, and two dogs, Fiat and Mabel. Fiat and Mabel joined our family
back in 2003. The kids picked them out at the animal shelter as tiny
puppies. Fiat is an oversized Jack Russell terrier and Mabel is a black
pug mix with a severe underbite
Fiat and Mabel, while we
love them a lot, have turned out to be perhaps the two most obnoxious
dogs on the planet. First of all, we happened to luck into two puppies
who were clearly
born with...."issues." Fiat not only has the
natural high energy JRT temperament, he has it times 100. He is never,
ever, ever still - ever - for even one second. He's also extremely
neurotic. Mabel, on the other hand, is extremely lazy, grouchy and
cantankerous. She is happy when she's with us, but she doesn't like
anyone else much. Second, since they joined our family just as I was
going through a divorce, starting full time work, and having to
relocate several times over several years, they didn't get the training
consistency they should have gotten. That means that Fiat and Mabel
never learned their manners properly. Neither of them is reliably
housetrained, so they can only be indoors when someone is giving them
full attention, so we don't risk an accident.
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