One morning in the early fall, I grabbed a sweatshirt folding up near the closet floor for my morning walk with Wish. There was a hole in the pocket - a very suspicious hole. Very.
My mind immediately went to a former college residence, where the mice were so bold that we'd hear them rustling in bags on the counter while we were in the next room. Oh, no, I thought. We must not have mice. We must not.
I worried. I talked with friends. They asked if we had seen other signs of mice, and I couldn't say that we had. Then, later in the day, Josh picked it up and was looking at the hole in the sweatshirt, and he said, "You know, this doesn't look like a mouse did this at all. It actually looks like..."
And then we both looked up at the dog and said, "Wish!"
And I swear he looked sheepishly away, as though he'd listened to the whole "OMG WE HAVE MICE!" exchange that morning and was just trying to see how long he could get away with it.
Later, we found a similar hole chewed in one of Josh's sweatshirts, and we traced it to the lure of crumbs from the treats we kept in the pockets to reward Wish during training on walks. (We definitely don't do that anymore.) Poor little rascal. He has little toys that are specifically designed to teach him how to think creatively to get treats, so how's he supposed to know any differently?
By the way, I kept this post as a draft for ages just to make sure we didn't actually have mice, so I wouldn't have to write, "Oh yeah, you know how I thought Wish was trying to eat holes in our sweatshirts? It turns out we have a rampant rodent infestation!" I still don't even like typing that out, for fear of jinxing our luck. I don't think any mice read my blog, though.
And what jogged my memory recently? It was when Josh showed me the little hole in his sweatshirt pocket and told me that he now actually likes the hole, because he can thread the cord to his headphones through it when his mp3 player is tucked into the pocket. Thanks, pup.
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