Indiana Jones and the very scary bath

Sometimes, I wonder if my dog is just too smart and similarly stubborn, or if he just likes to make things difficult.

You see, when it comes to things that Indy likes, he is much more open to persuasion. For example, fetch. When we first brought Indy home, the game was just as much about keeping the ball or whatever toy we had thrown his direction away from Mikaela and I once it was retrieved as it was about actually retrieving the thing in the first place.

However, when we made it plain that we would not continue to endlessly chase him around to try and take the ball from him and instead we wanted him to come to us and drop the ball, he seemed to catch on fairly quickly. He realized that, if he met us halfway and came to us and dropped the ball, that we would quickly respond by throwing the ball again, which would of course let him chase it down with reckless abandon. Now, he’ll even bring me toys and lay them on me as I lounge on the couch, patiently sitting down next to me, his big dark eyes staring expectantly at me and his ears perked up in anticipation.

It didn’t take too much training to get Indy on the same page when it came to that, but again, I’m fairly certain at this point it’s only because he wanted to do it. Because when it’s something he doesn’t want to do…well, it’s a completely different story.

For whatever reason, Indy despises baths. Unfortunately for him, I’m not a fan of how he starts to smell, so we come to a bit of an impasse. However, every time Mikaela and I have bathed him so far, he always seems to know what is going on before we even start. The first time we tried to coax him into the bathtub, he refused to even go into the bathroom for half an hour and even with a peanut butter treat on the line, we never actually got him into the tub. Alright, fine, I thought. We’ll just take this outside. I went out and bought the most pristine, decked out kiddie pool that 10 dollars can buy, thinking that maybe his previous owners had bathed him in a tub and he wasn’t a fan, so maybe he would be okay with a pool if he didn’t have any bath trauma associated with it. I got the hose out, filled up the pool and then waited for several hours as the sun warmed it up. But no, still not good enough, and no amount of treats could convince him that getting into that plastic pool of water was worth it.

After several other failed strategies and numerous escapes, largely because Indy somehow sniffed out the fact that we were going to give him a bath and decidedly planted himself on top of or under our deck, Mikaela and I have landed on a strategy where we fill an ice cream pail full of warm water and use that to rinse him off, he doesn’t try to sprint away at full speed but rather just sits there and looks miserable the entire time. Actually getting him to sit there in the first place is a different story, but…baby steps.

A C ERTAIN POINT OF V IEW

BY

NATHANIEL U NDERWOOD REPORTER