Dog urine is my life.
Sure, I had hopes and dreams. There were things I wanted to
do. Things I wanted to accomplish. I had goals. Those are all gone now. They
have been swept aside by a tidal wave of dog pee.
Get a puppy, they said. They’re so adorable, they said. It’ll be fun, they said.
I’m not a big fan of them, whoever they are, right now.
A standard healthy puppy has enough pee issues to make you
want to cry and then move to a new house. A puppy with a urinary tract
infection is roughly four hundred times more annoyingly unpredictable,
pee-wise. That’s the kind of puppy we have right now.
Within days of bringing her home, things seemed to be going
fairly well. She was sleeping though the night and keeping her bed dry. She was
starting to understand that peeing inside the house is frowned upon. She was
even starting to clue in that we want her to pee only in certain spots in the
back yard, like the grass and the dirt, and not places like the patio, or on
our shoes.
All that has changed now that our puppy has a UTI. (UTI is
the standard acronym for Urinary Tract Infection, but could easily also stand
for Unbelievably Timed Incontinence, or Unexpectedly Tinkling Inside.)
The best way for me to describe what I’m dealing with is to
make an analogy to your children. Imagine you have a toddler that you have
successfully potty trained. They are sleeping through the night, and no longer
need diapers. A milestone has been reached and life is good. Then one day, at
Target, they pull down their pants and pee all over the Lucky Charms display in
the cereal aisle. As you rush them out of the store in your arms, they pee on
you. They pee all over the inside of the car on the way home, and all over the
outside of the car once you’re back in the garage.
At this point, your child has somehow released roughly twice
their body weight in urine, and they still manage to pee in the hallway on the
way to the toilet. Once on the toilet, however, they spend three straight days
saying they need to pee, but not producing a single drop of urine.
At this point, you gain some measure of false hope, and
decide to remove them from the potty. As soon as they are off the toilet, they
proceed to hose down the walls and floor of your living room with twelve
gallons of wee-wee during a two-minute impression of a burst water main.
It’s exactly like that, but with a dog.
The standard home remedy for a dog with a UTI is apple cider
vinegar. You are supposed to either add it to their food or their water. I want
her to actually drink her water, so I decided to add it to her food. The recipe
consists of the apple cider vinegar and plain yogurt mixed into her normal dry
dog food.
Our dog already eats sticks, leaves, bugs, grass, bark, and
seems to be seriously considering how to eat rocks. I always thought her extracurricular
diet was weird until I tried the plain yogurt and the ACV. (ACV is the cool
internet acronym for Apple Cider Vinegar, but could easily also stand for All Contents
Vile, or Actually Contains Vomit.)
It tastes like someone mixed up some chunky sour milk with
pickle juice in a blender with a rotten apple. The fact that she eats that
unholy concoction is proof that dogs will literally eat anything. I would
rather eat grass and rocks than try either of them again.
On further advice from reputable internet sources, I have
begun adding blueberries to the mixture to help the healing process. So, along
with the plain yogurt, she should be getting pretty healthy, pretty fast. I
mean, if you subbed in kombucha for the ACV - which probably taste identical -
my dog now has the same diet as most yoga instructors.
Since my life now consists only of listening for my dog to
whine about pee, encouraging my dog to pee, waiting for my dog to pee, watching
my dog pee, praising her for peeing in the correct locations, and cleaning up gallons
of pee that happened in the pee-free zones, I’m not getting much else done.
That’s why you just read a column about dog pee. You’re
welcome.
See you soon,
-Smidge
Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen
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