Wednesday, September 13, 2006

Bolinha

As most of you know, we have a dog named Maple. Maple is a rather hyper dog, but she's smart, and she almost never barks. She's a lousy guard dog, but then, we keep her penned up most of the time where she wouldn't be able to attack a robber anyway. So much for our reason for getting a dog! Maple has a tendency to dig up the yard and chew to bits anything that she can get her jaws around. Maple used to be so proficient at escaping from her huge "pen" at the back of our property that the kids actually started to call her "Houdini." Now that she's big she doesn't even try to escape any more.

Actually, when we moved here there were only three houses on our street without a dog. Our home, and the two homes on either side of us. About two months after we got Maple, the neighbors at the end of our street got a puppy named Bolinha (bo-LEAN-ya) which means "Spot" in English. In the first 24 hours that they had Bolinha she managed to escape the neighbors and come to our house. This has been a pattern that would repeat itself hundreds of times over (and it still happens.) Here is a picture of Bolinha on her first visit to our home as a puppy.
At first, we were happy to see Bolinha because she had a calming effect on Maple. Bolinha would escape from her "pen" and come over to Maple's side of the fence and the two would play for hours and hours. However, Bolinha was beginning to spend ALL of her time with Maple and although we didn't complain (not that we knew the words anyway) the neighbors figured it out that we probably weren't thrilled about feeding and cleaning up after a dog that wasn't ours. Thus attempts were made to stop Bolinha from crossing the fence.
This is the barrier that now exists between our back property and the neighbor's. But, believe it or not this barricade does NOT stop this little dog from coming over whenever she feels like it. We have watched her scale the wall and believe us, we are convinced the dog will eventually kill herself coming over. But even though she falls at least ten feet onto hard concrete, she gets right up and says hello to Maple. The biggest problem with Bolinha is not actually her amazing ability to defy being contained. She yaps. She yaps incessantly, often hours at a time. If this dog isn't happy she just will not shut up and she is INCREDIBLY annoying. The neighbors, we can tell, are pretty much fed up with her. Not only is she a noise nuisance, but she has dug up the neighbor's back yard worse than any armadillo or other digging rodent could do. She has basically trashed their previously-perfect lawn. We're not aware of what the plans are for this dog, but we'll keep you posted. We know enough about our neighbors at this point to know that the dog isn't going to have a long future at this rate.