Another Pippen Post

The Overdependent Labrador

I think that most dogs pick up on the routine in a household and eventually reach a point where they know instinctively where their owner is going to go or what their owner is going to do next inside the home. I think Pippen knows too, but I don't understand why he doesn't just pick a central corner in our house and watch me move from room to room on my extremely mundane THE SIMS-like movements. He comes with me no matter where it is I'm going, even if where I'm going is two feet away from where I've been. When I go to the bathroom he always tries to run past me and I always have to struggle for a few seconds to shut the door in his face or push his sixty pound tail thumping body out so that I can go in peace. When I open the door, he's there with his tail wagging, ready to accompany me to wherever I'm going next.

Pippen's dependency issues are so severe that he has a hard time separating from us to go to the bathroom himself. I rarely ever see him go outside to use his restroom. Because we spend most of our time upstairs, he has to wait until I go downstairs for something, then dash outside as fast as he can to go to the bathroom and get back in ten seconds or less. I've watched him do this before and it never fails to make me laugh.

Sometimes we throw the ball down the stairs and then we hide from him and listen to his paws scratching against the tile floors in frantic race through all the rooms to find us. One time we hid in the shower and watched him running back and forth and back and forth in a frenzy, until I couldn't take it anymore and started cracking up. I have a very hard time being quiet when something is funny. Then he found us and now that I think about it, those "games" probably make his separation anxiety even worse.

I wish that Pippen could gain some independence, however I know that I am partially responsible for his Mamitis because I baby him too much. It's just that I feel for him because we're all he's got, and labs are very social dogs.