Sock Wars

Ampersand, our very special and adorable dog, has an interesting habit. He’s obsessed with our socks - especially socks we’ve just worn. I bet they smell delicious! Within ten minutes of us taking them off, he goes into our closet (which has no door) finds whichever ones we wore that day, and skulks back out to the living room. Then he either lays down with his chin on top of them, or if he’s spunky, he whips one back and forth with his mouth until it flings across the room, whereby he then pounces on it and repeats.

There’s been kind of a casual battle going on with this - we went through a phase where we tried to train Ampersand to not fetch socks, namely by saying NO firmly, taking the sock away, and/or whapping him on the nose with the sock. We had to stop the nose whapping because he thought it was a fun game.

During this phase he didn’t stop getting socks, he just got really, really sneaky. One of his favorite ways to sneak socks was (and still is) to wait until we were in the shower and then find our recently removed socks and make off with them, somehow knowing we weren’t likely to chase after him. When we happen to catch him in the act he runs as fast as he can out of the room with the socks in his mouth, doggy chortling with glee, feet scrabbling on the wood floors. Then he hides the socks. We even found socks hidden under the pillows on the couch once.

Once I wanted to wear my socks again (I know, yuck - I was probably planning on doing yard work or something) and so I hid my socks under the pile of my other clothes (shirt, pants etc). When I came out of the shower the pile looked undisturbed. Except, no socks underneath. Ampersand looked pretty smug when I came out into the living room.

Then we tried putting the socks in a big, tall basket in the laundry room. This worked unless the basket was full enough that the socks were on the top. Somehow he will always find that day’s socks - he either knows to check both the closet and the laundry room, or he has quite the nose.

Now we’ve just taken to being more consistent with picking up the socks and putting them away more quickly (we got tired of piles of 10+ dirty socks in the living room). This pretty much ruins all his fun, because he doesn’t get any attention, and the socks go away pretty quickly.

So… he’s upped the ante. The other day, after we’d picked up all the socks, we happened to notice Ampersand walking casually out of the guest bedroom. With a sock. One of our dirty socks. We can only assume it was in the guest bedroom because he took it there, and left it for future times when we’d deprive him of all other socks. Apparently, he’s part squirrel. Or he’s getting older, and understands the benefit of a savings account.