Dogs aren't stupid.

When I rescued Penny from the Puppy Prison I was told she was housebroken. That really didn’t seem to matter since we would be living on my sailboat docked at Marina Bay in Fort Lauderdale.

Penny is a “Benjie” type of mixed terrier mutt. When people asked what kind of dog she was I told them she was a “Roof Top Terrier” since she lived on the roof of my boat’s cabin. She hated being inside the small, cramped cabin. I think it reminded her too much of the Puppy Prison cell she had spent months in before I came to her rescue.

We lived rent free through an arrangement with a yacht repo company and all of the boats on the dock, except for mine, were for sale. I worked at a small boat yard directly across a one-lane road from the dock so, despite being house broken Penny became an outdoor dog having free reign of the yard during the day and living, under a canvas cover, on top of my boat’s cabin at night. She was able to poop and pee anywhere she wanted.

The problem was, she did exactly that. She peed and pooped wherever and whenever she wanted and piles of poop on a dock where people came looking to buy a boat simply wasn’t acceptable either by the yacht repo company, the prospective buyers or myself. No number of “bad dogs” would deter her since, when training a dog, corrections must be made at the moment of the infraction or the corrections are ineffective. In spite of the extreme frustration of not being able to convey to her that pooping on the dock was not acceptable I couldn’t, and wouldn’t, beat her in my frustration. After all, in her housebroken mind what was she doing wrong? Wasn’t she out in the open air where pooping and peeing were acceptable? She wasn’t “inside.”

One hot August afternoon as I went down on the dock to do some work on one of the repoed boats I caught her squatting to take a dump on the dock. “Ah Ha,” I thought. “Gotcha!”

She had strategically chosen exactly the wrong spot. The pile was perfectly placed in the middle of the dock and exactly in line with two cleats on either side of the dock. I got two pieces of line and tied each one to a cleat and positioned Penny directly over her latest land mine. I got her water bowl and put it under her nose so she could drink and left her there for two hours under a blazing summer sun. It was the last time she pooped on the dock. But it wasn’t the last of her poop incidents on that dock.
*****
Penny was an asset at the dock barking at people at night who might try to get on the dock after hours. She was a lady during the day around the yard, though, never barking at the many people strolling through the yard looking at the repoed inventory but ever curious about them.

At the time there were several people from the recently-freed eastern European countries who bought the repoed boats, fixed them up and shipped them off to places like Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia. There was a couple, Misha and Connie, he a Serb and she an attractive lady of indeterminate origin and ethnicity. They didn’t like Penny and would constantly shoo her away with extravagant hand gestures if she tried to approach them.

They bought a 60 foot steel sailboat at an outrageously low price and had plans to redo the interior and return the boat to its original purpose of working the charter trade.

Generally when the repo company sold a boat it was required to leave the dock within a week of the sale but Mish and Connie had worked out an arrangement to keep the boat at the company’s dock where it languished for several months while they returned to Eastern Europe on business.

One day the company’s dock tender asked me if I’d been on Misha and Connie’s boat recently. Of course I said I hadn’t since I had no reason to.

“Go down and take a look at it,” he said. Their boat was at the far end of the dock, as distant from my boat as it was possible to be. I went down with the dock tender and went aboard and broke out laughing. Scattered all over the deck were nearly two dozen piles of poop. Whenever Penny needed to take a dump and wasn’t able to leave the dock she’d walk down, jump aboard her antagonist’s boat and do her business there. She didn’t do it on any of the other boats at the dock. Only that one.

Just because a dog can’t talk doesn’t mean they’re stupid.