A Military Veteran Tried to Train a “Highly Untrainable” Rescue Dog—And Discovered Battlefield Discipline Doesn’t Work on Canine Trauma
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When you own a dog, it’s a good idea to train the dog, and one of the first things the dog needs to be trained to do is to know when and where to do its business.
In this story, one man’s wife adopts a dog. While he loves dogs, this is not the type of dog he would personally pick out. However, he decided to make the most of it and try to train the dog.
Dog training proved to be pretty frustrating, but in the end, he could at least see that the dog was making an effort.
Let’s read all about it.
Dad and the OTHER dog story
Daddy did not do very well once he got home from Vietnam.
He kept trying to fix his circumstances, rather than himself, because fixing himself would mean no longer consuming a wide range of intoxicating substances.
One thing he tried was getting married. This was not smart.
To give you an idea of how very not smart this was, he didn’t meet the child this union produced until they were 18 and went looking for him.
OP must be a child from her dad’s second marriage.
But he tried for a while.
I can’t guess at what his first wife’s issues were because I don’t know her, but Daddy’s problem, other than Da Nang, booze, and being a nuclear level jerk, was that he had no chill.
Twenty years later, dad had chill.
He really did learn to chill out.
The first time we watched The Big Lebowskey, my brother turned to Dad and said “We are watching the inside of your head”.
And dad nearly fell off the love seat because my Dad was absolutely a very slightly more motivated version of the Dude.
But he earned that chill through decades of having to be sober during weird stuff, and he had not even started to develop it back when he and his first wife were married.
He was a jagged raw bundle of nerves, and his wife’s first attempt to heal that was to get daddy a dog.
OP’s dad really likes dogs.
Daddy likes big dogs and he likes working dogs. He spent a lot of time with the K-9s on the base.
When I was about eight he brought a great Dane puppy home, looked my mother in the eye and said “Honey, the breeder said he wouldn’t get that big.” (it did).
Plus it had been a few years since the Mai Dog incident, so when the wife said she wanted a puppy, he figured he was ready for a new dog.
What he wasn’t ready for was the long haired weenie dog his wife brought home.
He wanted to train the dog.
He probably could have adapted if the dog were responsive to training, but generations of inbreeding had erased every trace of working dog in this animal’s genes.
You picked it up and the few brain cells it had rattled like maracas.
But he figured he could train it and be kind of happy with it for the wife’s sake.
At least he could be confident he wasn’t going to come home and find it cooked up with an apple in its mouth. The tiny bit of meat on it totally wasn’t worth it.
Training the dog wasn’t easy.
So he tried to begin by training it to do its business in one little spot in the yard.
…and then he tried to train it to do its business anywhere in the yard.
But the tiny shred of gray matter this dog had only wanted to go on their porch.
After months of battle, dad had to admit the war was lost, and he covered the porch with newspaper.
Dad went too far.
Slowly, he removed one sheet at a time and got the dog used to going on just the paper.
The dog managed, somehow, to understand this request and complied.
Then Dad pulled the last surplus piece of newsprint and left the dog with one square of paper to work with.
He felt pretty proud of himself…until the dog began going six inches off the paper. Every. Single. Time. He’d come out and there’s a little brown curl of waste sitting right beside the paper.
OP’s dad was really upset.
Daddy eventually got so mad, he wanted to call his housekeeper’s Papasan back in Vietnam and get recipe ideas.
He couldn’t punt it like a football because the wife would murder him, so he just kept trying to train the untrainable.
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And then finally, one day, he caught the dog going out to do its business.
It’s not like the dog was trying to be disobedient.
He could finally see what the problem was. He watched as the dog squatted up to do the doodoo that dogs do.
Well, the front feet were on the paper, but damn if that weenie dog’s butt wasn’t six inches from the edge when he finally dropped his load.
And that’s how the dumbest animal on the planet broke my daddy.
That’s funny! The dog seriously was trying. The dad actually did a decent job training the dog, but he needs to provide a bigger piece of paper.
Let’s see how Reddit responded.
This person found the story really funny.
Another person shares a line that stood out to them.
This person comments on wiener dogs.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who feels hoodwinked after finding out the sick father she’s been supporting has plenty of money of his own.
Another person laughed out loud.
What a funny story!
I’m sure it wasn’t funny for the dad at the time. In fact, it sounds really frustrating. But it was definitely one of those laugh about it later moments.
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