He's the reason we can't have nice things.....

I never imagined when my boyfriend, Tom and I picked up our little eight week old Australian Shepherd puppy that he would change our lives so much, for the better and make us so happy. But he did and he has also made us angry, worry, scared and so much more. Meeko came into our lives right after we said goodbye to my first dog, Kina. She was almost 15 years old and her health was failing. We made the hard decision to let her go be in peace and my heart was broken. Tom and I had been talking about getting a dog for a while, Kina had been living with my parents since 2008 when I moved. After losing Kina I told Tom that I didn't want to get another dog and at that moment I didn't know if I would ever want to get another one again. The thought of having to feel this pain all over again would be too much. We left it at that and didn't talk about it anymore.

Fast forward exactly one year to the date that we said goodbye to Kina and as I scrolling on Facebook a memory popped up. It was a picture of Kina from the day we had her put to sleep. I immediately broke out into tears, Tom, of course having no idea what was happening, asked me what was wrong. I told him, through the sobs, that it was exactly one year ago that we said goodbye to Kina. He said some comforting things and tried to ease my pain. All of the sudden I yelled " I wanna get another dog." I don't know where it came from or if I even really meant it, but the words were out. Tom looked at me, sort of puzzled, and said "ok, well I joined a group on Facebook for people who sell Australian Shepherds, if you wanna check it out." Without any hesitation I jumped on his page and immediately found the group. He had posted on the group page asking if anyone had any puppies for sale in Michigan. A few people had commented that they did and a couple even provided pictures. As I scrolled through the comments, one of the photos provided caught my eye and I instantly fell in love.

Those eyes, that face. Who wouldn't fall in love with that fluff ball. I looked at the date the message was sent. Over a week ago. I showed Tom the picture and he told me to reach out to the person to see if the puppy was still available. "Yea right," I said. "That post is from last week. There is no way someone has not taken that puppy." He told me to just try and see. So I sent a message and within minutes a reply came in stating that there were a couple people looking at the puppy but no one had put down a deposit yet. I didn't even ask her how much he was. I told her I would take him and would send her the money now. We made the transaction and decided that we would go down the next day to pick him up. My heart was overjoyed as I looked at the picture of our little boy for pretty much the rest of the night. I was so excited.

Within a couple of weeks of getting him home we started to realize what a little stinker this guy was going to be. He loved to chew on anything and everything (and still does). We had to make sure to put away anything that he could possibly get his mouth on, remotes, shoes, books, cat toys, etc. We made sure to get him lots of toys and chews to keep him occupied. The problem was that with most of the toys, he would destroy them within minutes, especially if they had a squeaker in them, and then would roam around the house until he found something that caught his fancy. We made the mistake of not putting him in his kennel when we would leave the house for just a couple hours, thinking he would be ok. After one outing we returned to find that he had secretly selected a number of books from the books shelves, we're still not sure how he choose his victims as some of the books he picked out were on higher shelves than others. A couple of the lucky ones only had the corners of the covers chewed off slightly. There were about four books that he appeared to have started to read and got bored so he tore them in half. Of course there was one book that he really did not enjoy and destroyed the book from cover to cover. This incident resulted in me throwing out a total of six books and landed him in Kennel-jail for a long time. In July Meeko decided that it was time for me to get some new shoes so he kindly chewed up three pairs, two of which were actually brand new and had only been worn once each. Again, the shoes were thrown out and Meeko was back in the Kennel.

The thing about Meeko is he has this way of looking at you that makes you think he's a good boy and sort of lulls you into a false sense of security. You think, I need to go to the store, as you look at him, his big eyes staring straight into your soul, and you can almost hear him say, "it's ok mumma. I'll be fine. I'll be a good boy. You don't need to put me in the kennel." And you fall for it every time. Or maybe it's just me and I'm just a big sucker for those blue eyes. I would start letting him stay out if I was only going to be gone for a short amount of time and soon we started working our way up to longer periods of time. He had been doing really, really good for a few months and then "Meeko the Beast" appeared with a vengeance.

In August of 2018 my brother, Dan and his fiancé, Amanda came to visit. Tom and I joined Dan and Amanda as well as our parents for dinner one night. We decided to let Meeko stay out because he had been doing so good. We went to dinner and then we decided to go play Putt-Putt golf. At this point we had only been gone about an hour and half and we had been leaving him out alone for a few hours at a time, so we thought it would be fine. Well, when we finished our game, Tom and I returned home to find the house in shambles. Meeko had pulled one of my duffel bags off the table and somehow emptied it of everything that was inside. There were pages from magazines all over the place as well as a couple socks, that now had holes in them. As we looked around the room to see what else he had gotten into I noticed some little round things on the floor. As I took a closer look I suddenly realized that they were Ibuprofen and there had been a full bottle in the bag. Tom and I were filled with a mix of anger and fear. We had no idea what Ibuprofen would do to him and what we should do. We started by looking it up online, which was a bad idea. Things always end up sounding much worse when you look it up. I remember there were a bunch of words on the page of the website, but all I saw was "DEATH." I immediately started to panic and told Tom we needed to call the Vet.

We called the after-hours number and as we told the Vet what had happened, he asked us if we could estimate about how many of the pills Meeko had eaten, if he had eaten any. Well, the bottle normally has 100 pills, but I may have used some, but then I might have filled it up with the pills from another bottle, so really we have no clue. Our best guess was that he could have eaten anywhere from zero to 15 pills. The vet said if he only ate like one or two, he would probably get sick but it wouldn't be life threatening. If he ate more then two, then we might have a problem with some of his organs shutting down. He said the only way to know for sure was to have him admitted to the hospital to flush his system and to run tests to checks his organ levels/functions. Ok, so do we have him go stay the weekend at the Vet and spend a shit-ton of money to make sure he doesn't die or do we roll the dice and hope for the best? These were our choices.

Obviously we had him stay the weekend and get his system flushed. To this day we still don't know if he actually ate any of the pills, but I would make the same decision if we were put in that situation again. Luckily when we first got Meeko, I made the decision to get Pet Insurance for him and I thank God everyday that I did.

After that hospital stint Meeko spent all of his alone time in the kennel again and it lasted a very, very, very long time. He would go in his kennel if I was just going over to see my parents, who live right around the corner from us. We weren't going to take any chances. As it was, he had gotten a hold of another bottle of Ibuprofen while I was in the shower one morning. Luckily we were able to determine that if he had eaten any of the pills this time, it would only have been one or two, which we now knew how to deal with. From the previous incident we knew to give Meeko some peroxide to help induce vomiting and after we called the Vet again, we were told to keep an eye on him for the next day or so to make sure that he didn't start acting strange. After this incident we managed to go almost a full two months without any more medical emergencies or chewing disasters.

Between August of 2018 and December 2019/January 2020 we had a few chewing incidents- a couple Roku remotes, the corner of an iPhone, two iPhone cases (one of which was for the iPhone 11), a brand new iPhone 11 (he only managed to crack the screen, but not for lack of trying to destroy the whole thing), a couple more books, another pair of my shoes and a number of our socks. With the exception of the iPhone 11 the items were mostly inexpensive and replaceable. Since he had starting to chew on things when we were home we began to utilize a muzzle as a form of punishment in hopes that he would learn to stop chewing on things other than his toys. It worked for a little bit and he definitely did not like wearing the muzzle.

In early January Meeko had been getting to stay out of the kennel when we were gone for work during the day because again, he had been doing really well being alone and hadn't chewed on anything for a couple of months, at least nothing major. One day I had returned home at lunch time to let Meeko out to go potty. As I exited my car I could see him setting in the window and could see something blue on his face and a cardboard box laying right by his head. I entered the house expecting to see a huge mess and there was nothing, or at least that's what it appeared at first sight. As I turned to walk into the living room I immediately see yellow ink all over the floor as well as blue paw prints on the floor and all over our brand new couch. As my eyes follow the trail of blue, it leads me right to Meeko, where I now notice that both of his front paws were blue as well as the white patch of fur on his chest, the side of his face and the top of his nose. Meeko had decided to chew the side of the printer box that had been sitting by the front door to be taken out to the garage. He found a number of extra ink cartridges and decided it was a good idea to chew them up. He also got a hold of my external hard drive that I had used during my time in graduate school. Completely destroyed the hard drive.

Meeko still chews on anything and everything, and I'm sure that will probably never change.