You aint nothin' but a hound dog!

Below I posted a picture of our Dog Bandit. We think that his name should be Houdini! The dog is a magician of sorts. We adopted him around Mother's Day this year. He was a rescue dog. His owner died and he was homeless so after a year of passing him around we finally came to live with us. Sweet dog! Love him dearly! Loves to have his belly rubbed. Loves attention. Great lap dog. A little big for your lap but he doesnt notice that part. He is very affectionate and loves attention. He also suffers from Seperation Anxiety. Whats that? Its when you leave him alone in the house for like 5 minutes and he rearranges it for you. He have a gate in our living room that keeps kids and pets alike out of the kitchen. It has fabric walls that are velcroed around the metal skeleton of the gate. Well Bandit was great the first few months. But then he learned how to pull the fabric down on the gate and get in the kitchen. And what do you think he goes for? Trash can, yes but what else??? Did you guess loaves of bread? You didnt? Well why not? Dont you know that dogs love to claw holes in bags of bread and eat chunks of bread? You didnt? Well now you know! So he has dug through endless bags of bread, buns included. This will actually come in handy later. So we tried everything to get him to stop. We even safety pinned the fabric on. He just tore it down and left holes! Thanks Bandit! Then we left him outside while we were gone. Well that didnt work. He dug holes and escaped and was waiting for us on the front porch when we arrived back home. We filled up the holes and placed bricks on top. HE MOVED THE BRICKS!!! Then preceeded to dig the filling out and escape again. My own lil pokey the little puppy. I loved the book as a child but this is ridiculous! On one occasion when he decided to come back through the hole his leg got caught on the fence and left a small hole in his leg. Do you think that stopped him? NOPE! he escaped the next day. Injured leg and all. Now we look like hillbillies with the tops to our kids sandbox and pool tucked under the holes. He hasnt escaped yet. And well with his injured leg he had to go to the vet. Which they charged me $70 for them to say "yes its a hole, shave his leg, add some ointment and heres some antibiotics and pain pills. have a nice day!" Ok I could have done that and saved $70! So now its time for me to pull a trick or two of my own. How to get a dog to take his meds. I tried hotdog, he kept finding the pill and spitting it out. So remember the bags of bread? YEP! I used slices of bread to get his pills down. And let me tell you, the show began when it was medicine time. The girls loved to watch as the dog did giant leaps into the air for his bread! Yes injured leg and all. Boy those pain pills must have worked great! He was a show dog! It was great! Is this the end of my story ...of course not. That would be no fun. So we decided to pin him up in a crate since nothing seems to work and I am losing dishes left and right thanks to his hound dog nose. So we got a crate. The big metal kind with a tray that slides out. We leave for church Sunday morning and come back and hes on the couch. The door to the crate is still closed and locked, the fabric from the gate is on the floor and hes laying on our couch!!!! The tray of the crate is on the kitchen floor. We figured we didnt lock it well enough and he escaped out the bottom part of the door that was unlocked but very hard for me to pull back. He is very strong to have gotten out of that. So we tried again that night. Locked it really well. Woke up that morning, hes on the couch.. AGAIN!!!!! So I fixed the gate, again, and checked the crate. the door was firmly closed and locked but the tray is out and the bottom bar of the cage is bent upward just slightly. It was probably a 2 inch opening. How in the world did that dog get out of a 2 inch hole? So this time I took Houdini's cage and and used plastic ties to tie the tray access door closed on the crate, which means if he makes a mess I get to climb in the cage to clean it. Anyone since a "yardbutt" coming on. I guess you would call it a "cratebutt" So anyways, I wake up yesterday morning and 2 of the 3 ties are snapped off! Oh heavens! What am I to do? The last tie will surely not hold up to his eagerness to escape. Well to add more to our already proud hillbilly image, I took black electric tape and wrapped around the tray access door to the crate. And this morning it was still intact! Theres hope! Or maybe hes tired of playing the escape game, or maybe hes just playing games with us. Wants us to drop our guard or tease us with the thought of obedience and then when our guard is down he springs into action and takes out the trash can. Anyway he was still in his crate today but left me a wonderful surprise! So the above mentioned "cratebutt" came to be. UGH! Will I ever get Houdini on my side???? Only time will tell!