The Misadventures of Sadie the Rescue Pup

We came home many, many years ago with our one-year-old rescue pup, Sadie. Her name wasn’t Sadie then, the one that was given to her at the shelter was Sarah. We changed it after many a brainstorming session, scoping out potential names. My own suggestion was Snowy, after Tintin’s little white Terrier. I tried to reason with my mom that since she has a white coat and is half Terrier (the other half being Chihuahua) that it was the perfect name for our new family member. Snowy, along with many other names that only a nine-year-old me could come up with, was overruled in favour of Sadie, as you can probably guess.

So, bequeathed with a new name and new home, Sadie started her life with us.

Now that you have a bit of backstory, we can begin our tale of just how much Sadie likes to rule the house in our absence, and how far she’ll go to be queen of the castle.

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The first in a very long string of Sadie’s misadventures happened not too long after we brought her home. Being a rescue dog she had a few issues and quirks, one of which was severe separation anxiety. She would yelp and howl whenever we left the house, and you wouldn’t believe how much noise could come from such a tiny dog with tiny lungs (probably that inner Chihuahua). Now, this might not sound like a big deal, but if you’re living in a place that doesn’t exactly allow pets (don't tell anyone I told you that), it can be a bit of a problem.

So, getting ready for a grocery run, we put Sadie in her kennel, which we kept in the upstairs bedroom. It was the kind with the levers that you had to pinch together to open, and physically impossible to open from the inside. Right?

Wrong.

We get home about an hour or two later, and lo and behold, Sadie was waiting to greet us at the front door. We go to investigate the kennel, and find that the door was open. Okay, so maybe we just didn’t close her crate properly. No big deal. We just have to double check it next time.

So we did. We double and triple checked the next time we left, confident that Sadie was safely inside. We get home some time later and there she is again, loose in the house waiting for us to return. Sadie seemed to enjoy herself while we were away, napping on the backrest of the sofa. Another kennel investigation lead us to the conclusion that Sadie was the reincarnation of Houdini. Or at least his dog, if he had one. I mean, how else can you explain her escaping from a still-locked crate? Yep, the door was locked from the outside, and the walls were intact. Let’s just say we were more than a little dumbfounded.

This happened multiple times over the next couple months; unexplainable escapes by our little doggo that we couldn’t seem to stop no matter what preventions we tried.

Here’s where it gets really weird. Fed up with her apparition antics, we went for extreme measures. So, my mom grabbed the duct tape and a small wooden plank. After applying a copious amount of tape, the board was secured to the front of the crate, surely keeping the crate door closed. For added measure, we butted the door of the crate up against the bedroom wall. And so, we shut the bedroom door behind us and went on our merry way, Sadie secured in her little house. Voilá, finally dog-proofed!

Er, so we thought.

We were out a little longer than usual, for what I can’t remember. We open the front door and were relieved to see that our over-the-top precautions had surprisingly held. No jumping pup awaited us. We all let out a collective sigh of relief. Finally, no more escaping, I thought. My mom went to let loose the living tornado that was our dog, disappearing up the stairs as I started to play with my brother. One yell and a frantic climb up the stairs later, I was greeted with Sadie’s welcome home gift.

The carpet underneath the bedroom door, and a two foot radius around it, had been absolutely shredded to bits. Sadie, ever the escapist, had somehow gotten free of her incredibly reinforced kennel and proceeded to try and dig her way out of the room. Under the door, of course. Not only did she manage to morph straight through the wire door, leaving it in its still-locked position, she also somehow tore through the criss-cross mess that was the duct-taped board. All the while, the kennel door remained shut and the lock still intact. After escaping her crate, her next objective was to escape the room. She ripped up the carpeting so bad that you could see the plywood beneath. You could even make out claw marks in the wood of the floor and on the bottom of the door. Of course, she decided to do her own little renovation two months before we were scheduled to move out.

*insert slow clapping here*

Bravo Sadie, bravo.

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Fast forward a year. We’re settled in our new place, an adorable single-story house with every kid’s dream climbing-tree in the fenced front yard. We’d gotten a second dog named Roxy, and Sadie had come a long way since we first brought her home; her separation issues had improved to the point where we let her loose in the house whenever we left, and we trusted her to be out and not tear the place to shreds.

Yeah, about that...

Upon our arrival back home from a impromptu ice cream run, we discovered that Sadie had decided to enact her best Spider-Man impersonation. No jokes here. Our little doggo had dug out some of my mother’s yarn and, quite literally, strung it across the whole living room.

Three skeins of it. Wall to wall.

I was half expecting her to be standing upside down on the ceiling, wagging her tail like nothing was wrong with this image. But no, she was perched on the couch with her sister Roxy, which they weren’t allowed to do, yarn draped haphazardly across them and the surrounding cushions. She also decided that, after a bit of Spider-Dogging, a little bit of TV was a great way to spend the rest of her afternoon, somehow turning on the television to a cartoon channel (but not without gnawing a bit on the remote first, obviously). She also had quite the affinity for markers, if the ones we found half-chewed on the couch were any indicator. Apparently they’re very delicious.

These were just a few small glimpses of what kinds of mischief our little girl had done over the years. Now, bordering on the age of nine, she spends most of her time napping by our fireplace, or hanging out with our newest fur baby: Fenrir. And even though most of her trickery has died down, she still likes to surprise us with a little fun now and then.

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Thank you for reading!