The Doggy Door
From Chicken Soup for the Soul: What I Learned from My Dog
By Kim Engelmann

In order to really enjoy a dog, one doesn’t merely try to train him to be semi-human. The point of it is to open oneself to the possibility of becoming partly a dog.
~Edward Hoagland

I had just finished installing a doggy door in the back of the house, and I couldn’t wait to show Linda. Linda is my rescue dog who is about the size of a small elephant. She is gangly and brown with spikey fur and a bulbous nose. She loves everyone and everything — mostly. However, she had a bad habit that may have been why I found her in the pound. Linda was notorious for sitting at the door and whining to go out, even if you had just let her out and back in five minutes before. She had the knack of knowing right when you had settled into the comfort of your armchair. That’s when she whined. She wanted you to get up, open the door, and let her out. She did this five times an hour.

There was more. Sometimes, after you got up from the comfort of your chair to open the door, she wouldn’t go out. She’d look at you, eyes smiling, and dash away back into the house. It was a game that she made up all by herself, for people to play when they were extremely tired at night. Linda won every time. If you didn’t get up, she increased the volume of her plaintive whine. If you still resisted, her whine turned into a primitive, wolf-type howl. No matter how much you didn’t want to, you did eventually respond. (Keep reading)