Teeth marks

The following is a “pass along” article from the Retriever Journal – a nice little trip down memory lane.
RJ Pass Along
Teeth Marks
By Steve Smith

Hanging on a nail in the wall of my den is a ball cap. Nothing special about it, a cheap one, really, with the plastic thing in the back that adjusts for size. That’s where it does get special, though, the reason I keep it. On the plastic band are tiny puppy teeth marks left by my setter Jess when she was eight weeks old and I made the mistake of leaving the cap within her reach – and for puppies, seemingly nothing is out of their reach. Jess. Dead and buried now twelve years, after living to be nearly fourteen.

Maggie the Lab was our worst chewer. She chewed to get even more than anything else, or maybe I should say to escape. Once when company came, I shut her in a downstairs bedroom. She shredded two square feet of carpet trying to burrow her way under the door. Once while I was in the backyard training Roxie the new Lab puppy, Maggie splintered and gouged an eighteen-inch section of windowsill trying to find a way to join in the fun. Maggie was my son Chris’s dog, and we had an inkling of what she would be like her first hunting season. Chris parked his car on a country road and got out to scout some pheasant cover. When he came back, he found that she had dismantled the entire dashboard of his car, the remnants lying about in great slobber-covered chunks on the seat and the floor. Chris drove the car like that – the chunks reattached with duct tape – all the way through college. I think he had graduated and was on his own for three years before he could laugh about it.

I have a friend who tied up his setter pup to take a little snooze one October afternoon out in the woods after a morning woodcock hunt. He leaned his double, a low-grade Parker, against a tree and dozed off. As he snored, his pup passed the time gnawing on the gun’s grip. Naturally, my friend wasn’t thrilled; he tried to erase the marks by refinishing the stock (I know about refinishing Parkers; but like I said, it was a low grade) but they’re still visible, even today, eight years after that pup died in his arms at the age of eleven and a half. He looks at those teeth marks differently now. As we all do.

At the time it happens, you’d gleefully dice the dog up and use the pieces for salmon bait. After a time, you chuckle about it. Then too soon comes the day when those silken ears will never again be within reach, even though in your memory, you can still feel them; and you look at those teeth marks and be willing to give a lot to relive the moment they first appeared.

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Tags: dog behavior, memories, nostalgia