My dog...my enemy!

Ok...so I know I have a digger. Squiggy loves to take things outside and bury them. Once, after we forgot to put away the left over pizza one evening, we awoke to find it all gone. We presumed he had eaten it all until a week or so later when a very dirty, very nasty piece of the pizza resurfaced on our family-room floor. Then another a week or so later.

In all fairness, I did know I had a digger. So I had been planning to put a fence around my garden to keep him out. However, he had not been digging so much recently, and the last few times I had planted stuff last summer...no digging at all.

So, I had decided to try out a "training" regime to protect my garden, rather than a fence. I also thought I would plant slowly, so that if he started to dig stuff up, I could remind him (if necessary with muzzle therapy...which is a major Squiggy time-out), that when mommy puts something in the ground, he does NOT get to dig it up.

I planted in phases, to kind of test him...see what he would do. I started with potatoes. Not even a paw mark. I waited a couple of weeks and put in some other plants. Still nothing. I even played in the soil just to see if he would get interested in what I might be doing there. I could tell he had been in the beds because there were paw marks. So, I told him "No Squiggy!" every time. But still, no digging...anywhere.

So, I put in the rest of the plants. In fact, by yesterday afternoon I had put in almost everything that my beds could hold. I have officially been digging in the dirt and burying things...without incident...for an entire month.

What goes through the mind of the dog? That is what I want to know. This morning, he had dug around my artichoke plant. Just a little...and not at the root of the plant...a few inches off. After a month of no digging anywhere, the area 3 inches South of my artichoke is suddenly interesting to him and intensely in need of being dug up?!?

Then, this afternoon when I went out to check the garden. There was nothing new in the digging department. One of my squash plants looked pretty thirsty, so I watered it.

But this evening....when I went out to cover everything against the cold, I found that he had MURDERED two of my corn plants and a spaghetti squash! What happened between 4:30 and 8:00, that made him want to dig in a place that I had not even touched in over 24 hours?!?! What goes through the mind of the dog?

That dog is very lucky he is cute...and that his dad stopped me from killing him with a shovel!