Caging the Beast

Dramatic reenactment.

Life with our dog Patty is continuing on it's wobbly course. The latest issue has been at night. She's taken to peeing on the floor every week to 10 days. There's no rhyme or reason to it. She goes outside before bed and whether or not my wife can convince her to actually 'go' has no statistical relationship with what she does at night when she's alone. After the last time we made the decision to get a cage, or a crate as it's become fashionable to call them, to put her in at night. The crate sits in the exact same spot where she sleeps in her bed outside our bedroom door. She sleeps in exactly the same spot, it's just that now she's stuck in that spot instead of being able to roam around and pee in the darkness. For a dog that seems to have some significant learning disabilities she caught on pretty quick to the whole cage thing. The first night she ran upstairs happily. The second night she got half way up before she stopped and wouldn't move. By the third night she wouldn't budge off the chair. You could have baited her with a whole ham and it wouldn't have made a difference. My wife had to carry her to bed that night and every night since. Speaking of whole hams, she won't eat a treat if you put it in the cage with her. She seems to think that any food you give her is tainted with the stench of betrayal and won't touch it. Even ham.
So the cage thing is going ok I suppose and there's only really one part of the whole deal that has been interesting enough to talk about. On the fourth of fifth night everything went fairly normally. We could hear her panting and being weird in the cage but it was storming and she's a pretty weird dog so we didn't think much about it. In the morning she was let out and we went on with our day. In the afternoon I was walking by the cage and I noticed something inside. I quick peek was enough to let me know that I needed paper towels to pick it up. It had clearly been alive, but now it was not. I brought it into the light to take a closer look and figured out that I was holding the partially digested head of a young rabbit. I tried to show it to my wife but she ran away screaming. She said she was glad I was home, otherwise she would have had to just throw away the cage and buy a new one.
That's where we're at with the dog. It's still too early to tell if the long term psychological impact of crating Patty at night will outweigh the benefit of not having pee on the floor. Maybe we'll all get used to it and come to believe that this sort of thing is normal. Maybe.