Anyone who’s ever owned a dog will tell you, our canine companions have a first love, to which all other loves come second. Food. My sister and I learned this rather…abruptly, one day a few summers back when we were still getting to know our new puppy, Jackson.
We had just discovered that more than any other treat, our Jackson LOVED peanut butter. I would coat a toy in it and watch him lick at it adorably for ages; and just opening a jar of peanut butter would send his little legs running to sit at your feet, looking up with those big, beseeching puppy eyes we are all helpless before.
And so, one day in the summertime, I decided it would be ok if I just gave the empty peanut butter container to Jackson. It was scraped relatively clean, he’d done a few tricks for it, and when I left him, he was happily licking away at the inside, with my older sister supervising.
I left him there, completely content, to answer the door; wherein I found equally adorable Girl Guides selling their cookies. I had no money, of course, so I went inside to ask/beg/steal if necessary some change from my sister. I found her where I left her, except now her phone was out and she was filming the spectacle of our puppy, running around the backyard with the peanut butter container on his head. Apparently, common sense isn’t very common with puppies, as ours thought it was a good idea to shove his head as far as possible into the container to get every last morsel of peanut butter. Being a puppy with a small head, he could do this. Being a puppy without opposable thumbs, he could not get out. Hence the running around.
My sister and I laughed at him for a bit, in hindsight ashamed to admit; before my sister’s eyes got wide, and her laugh turned to a panicked shriek which was, “HE CAN’T BREATHE!”
Begin, panic. First, of course, we had to catch Jackson, who was suddenly seeing the world through the lens of a jiffy peanut butter container and then began the tug of war to get the container off. It came, Jackson sneezed twice and went right back to rolling in the dirt, while my sister and I recovered and re-evaluated our worth as owners. I went back inside, bought the cookies from the poor girl guides who had been patiently waiting the entire time, and from then on vowed to always give Jackson his peanut butter out of the jar.
Written by: Justine Russell
