Introducing Shoebert

When Hilbert was young, I would take him to doggy daycare.  When he was about a year and a half, I was planning to have him castrated while I went to England for the Christmas/New year’s holiday.  A few weeks before, the postman whose route included the daycare left me a message.  He wanted to breed his rat terrier bitch with Hilbert.  I spent the evening of my 40^th birthday watching my dog have sex.  If you haven’t watched dogs having sex, it is actually quite enlightening.  I won’t go into details in case children are reading, but there is a certain part of the dog anatomy that can stretch even further than his tongue, much further, shockingly further.

The result of this union was three puppies.  The last I heard, Oreo ended up with a woman in McLean Illinois.  The other two were Albert and Shoebert.  Shoebert came home with us once he was weaned.  Albert stayed with his mom ... for the time being.

Shoebert and his shoe

The litter - Oreo, Albert, Shoebert.  Oreo apparently just let out a very loud fart!

Rat Terrier teething

I adopted Hilbert just a week before starting a new job. 

Hilbert was teething when we first got him.  Even though I gave him plenty of chew toys, he preferred my hands and forearms.  People without dogs wondered if I had been hugging rose bushes, but one woman in the HR department was clearly a dog lover.  When I came to her desk to fill out my new employee forms, the first thing she asked was, “What kind of puppy do you have?”
He not only left my arms covered with painful scratches, he also chewed the kitchen wallpaper down through the sheetrock, the legs on the kitchen table and the frame of the sliding glass door.  I still have some of his baby teeth in a jar.

Shoebert wasn’t so bad on the arms and hands when he was teething, but he did find a loose spot on the wallpaper in the living room.  He managed to get his teeth under it enough to get a hold and pull.  He was able to rip off a strip over a foot long!  I think it helped him that he has an underbite.

Intro to Hilbert Continued:

Hilbert spent his first 20 weeks living in a barn.  When Hilbert came home with us it was his first time to live in a house. 
He quickly learned to go out in the backyard to pee and poo or wait until we went on one of our two daily walks.  It was quite comical the first few times it rained.  He would go to the backdoor, go out then run right back in.  He would then go to the front door and beg to go on a walk.  I would hook him to his leash and he would be surprised and disappointed to see that it was also raining in the front!

Here is Hilbert not long after he joined the family.

Welcome to the Rat Dog Pack!  Let me start by introducing you to the pack.

My first rat terrier was Hilbert.  It’s his picture on the cover of How (Not) to Kiss your Dog.  He was a purebred, “Teddy Roosevelt” from a farm near Decatur, Illinois.  Hilbert was the inspiration for many of the more disgusting stories in the book.   

The name Hilbert was very fitting for him because there was a mathematician named David Hilbert who was known for (among other things) posing very difficult problems.  That was my Hilbert, too.

Hilbert died from liver failure at age 13 on March 13, 2012.  He was a very good friend and I will never forget him – especially when I look at the table leg he chewed up as a puppy!