Mug shot for Cooper "Milkjug" Sohl, our beloved family member who has turned to a life of crime.
I never thought I would be put in this situation. We’ve tried to be a good wholesome family. We’ve tried to raise our kids right. But what do you do when one of your beloved family members goes rogue? How do you cope?
The culprit? Cooper “Milkjug” Sohl. The background…Cooper is our beloved Springer/Cocker mix (we think) who was a rescue dog. When I picked him up, he was almost a year old, had never been groomed, had curly hair all the way to the ground, and was chained in a hot back yard with no shade, with nothing but a milk jug to “play” with.
We tried to raise him right. We gave him the best education a pup could want. We didn’t let him hang out with the bad dogs in the neighborhood. We THOUGHT we had raised a fine, upstanding citizen. But slowly, almost imperceptably…he began to change.
It started a few summers ago, when I tried raising tomatoes in a couple of containers. The tomatoes themselves would appear, grow, and start to turn ripe…but then they’d disappear. After a months long investigation, we were shocked to find tomato drool in the corner of Cooper Milkjug Sohl’s mouth. BETRAYED! BY OUR VERY OWN FLESH AND BLOOD!!
We thought he could be rehabilitated. We were wrong. He began moving to the harder and harder stuff, no longer waiting for the tomatoes to ripen, but plucking off green, hard tomatoes and munching on them like they were a chew toy. This year, once again, I thought I could have home-grown tomatoes. It’s been a life-long dream of mine. I even have tried putting a little fence around the tomatoes in the garden. But what do I find?
A Houdini dog who is SO addicted to hard green tomatoes, that nothing like a wire fence will stop him. It may be 100 degrees out this evening. It may be so miserable that no living creature wants to venture outside. But that didn’t stop Cooper Milkjug Sohl from devouring half my tomato crop just now.
MY…BOY…IS…A…CRIMINAL. I can’t ignore it any longer. I can’t hide it any more. Nothing is more sad than when a family member “goes bad”.
