Of Sticks and Gates

Everybody knows that dogs like sticks. We throw them, the dogs fetch them and bring them back. Cookie likes sticks as well. Not for fetching mind you, for chewing.

Not long after we first got Cookie we realised that he could probably climb up the wood pile in the back yard and leap over the fence. This led to the wood pile being de-piled into a broader, flatter mound:


The pile has provided Cookie with an excellent source of sticks, and logs, and bark and other forms of debris, that he can then gnaw and drop all over the place. In line with his penchant for chewing large bones, some of the logs he favours are quite massive:


Others are more your standard sort of stick:


Some can be quite small sticks, like my new carpenter's pencil that I inadvertantly left in a closed toolbox on a shelf that was apparently not quite out of Cookie reach:


Some sticks don't even have to be left lying around. In his efforts to gain illicit access to the house, the old gate fell victim to this. Cookie discovered that sticks can be made out of gate parts, if one is persistent enough, and if you have the right dental equipment. This is a picture of the old gate, following its decommissioning in favour of the new Colditz gate:


The gate was originally erected to keep toddlers from falling down the back steps, and, in hindsight, it lasted pretty well under the Cookie onslaught. These are the sticks Cookie created out of one of the bars:


In the photo of the gate (which is in the trailer on the way to the rubbish dump) you can see a couple of running repairs I did to replace the sticks Cookie made out of the bars on the gate - metal strapping. Sadly, while the strapping was chew-proof, Cookie figured out that he could squeeze between the straps and get in, so the whole thing was retired. If you look carefully, you can also see an amount of gnawing of the bottom cross-bar of the gate, where Cookie was trying an alternative way to tunnel in.

With the arrival of the new gate, Cookie was rather dissappointed to discover that all he can do now is peer in through the lattice-work at the side of the back porch:

Poor puppy!