Housebroken
Open bedroom doors allow frightened animals to escape during the night
Most folks who have pets allow those pets to live in the house with them. Though my dad really believed dogs should live in a doghouse in a fenced yard and not inside the house, we kids, with our mother’s backing, insisted our dogs lived inside our house with us.
Not just the dogs lived inside our house, but the cats did too. On occasion we had dogs that resented having cats as housemates, but those differences were soon settled, usually by our dad.
If any of our pets didn’t get along or didn’t behave properly, they were put outside in the backyard until they adjusted their behavior. That punishment might have been effective if it ever had a chance to work. More often than not, our pets were sneaked into our house and kept quietly in our bedroom.
One year all our pets were sleeping in our bedrooms and were kept quiet enough that they were not discovered by Dad. That’s what we thought, but Dad actually knew about our having our pets inside with us. Since our pets were behaving well and staying quiet, that’s all Dad wanted.
The problem developing was the younger kids involved in all this were getting very careless about keeping their doors shut. Because on this one night, when a rather fierce thunderstorm hit, the pets began to panic, and those that could escape from the rooms they were in began to run everywhere they could.
Laura Moore can be emailed at lehmoore1@gmail.com.
