I like to live in a happy bubble, where everybody loves everybody. I read the news about the Middle East with one eye shut, plug up one ear and go LA LA LA LA LA when the radio talks about the budget cuts, and try to read one happy animal story involving puppies/baby chickens/marmosets for every tsunami/nuclear reactor/earthquake story reported in the New York Times. I somehow stay medicated enough on coffee and dog agility to have the ability to make it out of the house every morning to another day in a world of inequity, poverty, climate change, and mean people. Deep breath, one foot in front of the other, and off we go, repeating over and over, I am SuperLucky. Maybe I haven’t won the lottery yet, but I sure do like most everything about my life.

Except, there’s this one member of my family has the ability to stab through my hermetically sealed John Travolta bubble with a boxcutter and let out my pink easter bunny scented air.

Otterpop.

Otterpop has a sordid past. I am not kidding when I say she is an ass. She’s a lifetime parolee who works hard on being a better citizen because I work hard on her being a better citizen. And overall, she is. Otterpop has come a long way in her 7ish years. Except for when she backslides. Which she can. And which right now, she is. All the way back down that cliff over there. And I got to catch her, fast, before she plops into the sea of evil.

Otterpop can be reactive. When she came into my life, she had the ability to be a complete and utter shithead. If she had been a big dog, I don’t think I would have been able to figure out what to do. 12 pounds of satan that you can snatch up and tuck underneath your arm is a lot easier to manage than 50lbs of evil dragging you down the street. I got lots of help from people, books and videos, learned many amazing things about animal behavior, and she learned how to exist in a life that involved other dogs. People she didn’t like. Trucks that she wanted to KILL. Basically, she had to learn how to control the impulses that told her to fly off the handle at the drop of a hat. She’s wicked smart. She got it. She likes the program. It’s like AA. It goes on forever, because we both know what lurks underneath her bumpy surface.

Most of the time, I’m happy that she can be like a happy dog. The regular kind that plays with a toy and goes on walks and doesn’t want to eat other dogs. Or that she can at least play one on tv, thanks to the magic of dog training. I give dog agility a lot of credit towards this. One day at a time.

On a dreaded backslide though, I become her Dr. Drew and she is checked back into rehab. Once something triggers the latch to her darkside, that trap door comes unglued and Hannibal Lector pops back into our lives. And we have to go all the way through the process again of erasing the bad again.

It can start with subtle signs. She’s a little more agro and a lot more over the top. Plays rough around the house. Not relaxed on a walk. Jittery. Gets weirdly manic with her toys, and obsesses on her special objects, which currently include a plastic bone, and inexplicably, a ratty old tupperware. Which then have to become MY special objects. The tupperware of my dreams. I see hackles go up when dogs on the beach come too close to her personal space universe. There’s more barking. Lots more. It’s like she transforms into some kind of meth creature. She just becomes a pain in the ass.

The very, very worst of this, is that, if triggered sufficiently, she loses it on Ruby. Her beloved, joined at the hip compadre of all time. Sister Mary Woo. Mary Poppins amongst dogs. This pattern started a few years ago when I had one of the best dogs in the world here moving through the small dog underground railroad, chihuahua Black Beauty. Black Beauty’s mere existence in our house hold tweaked Otterpop’s already sensitive brain. Addled it like the rotten toothed, black hoodied meth guys that pick through the trash and steal kids’ bikes off porches. Just not right, with pretty much zero reasoning abilities.

That darkness can still be unleashed. Dog fights amongst other dogs in Otterpop’s presence will do it. Not even a fight. A snarl, a big snark, a scuffle, if Otterpop is backsliding, will trigger her instinct to turn from beloved sister to horrible, fanged frenemy and try to get Ruby. It happened over the weekend, after their first ride in BFF fancy Jetta, on a forest walk with their good friends. Dogs they always walk with, in their favorite forest. A minor scuffle amongst the other dogs triggered Otterpop and she flew off the handle on poor Sister Mary Ruby. Nobody was hurt, no blood drawn, but I am sure that in that moment, the intention was there.

Why? Maybe the sudden disappearance of their second home, beloved Honda, and the week of car borrowing and the new car may have had something to do with it. The other dogs, are all, whatever. New car. Nice seats. Otterpop, just doesn’t work that way. I dunno. I might be wrong. Change is hard when you’re a neurotic dog. Hell, it could just be the weather. It just makes me very, very sad. And I go back to working my hardest at making it extinguish another time. But knowing, that months or years away, it could all come back again.

Just like Courtney Love, another trip back to rehab. We’re there now. I can tell she’s not right. I am flummoxed and in disbelief that our happy, lucky family drops into discord like that at the drop of a ax. It’s shameful. I won’t talk to many people about it. I know some other people with multi dog households, with high drive dogs, who have problems like this, but i never thought this could happen to me in my world of rainbow unicorns. I want to go back to being one of the people with all happy dogs in a happy dog household, where everybody loves everybody and we have a white picket fence and the monkeys poop flowers out of their butts from the palm trees.

Where honestly, I thought that we were again, without the blackheart dog ever making another appearance. Problem solved. Case closed.

Not the case.

Life goes on, and this is what we’re working on today.