It all started innocently enough. The couch disappeared. Daji was actually excited about this development. He had more room to frolic about and wreak havoc, two of his favorite nighttime activities. But then other things started changing and he became worried.
Next, all sorts of boxes appeared. He was definitely concerned at this point, especially when things that used to be around the apartment started going into the boxes. "Hmmm," the little brain said, "something is amiss! I will watch this all very carefully and try to stop anything else crazy from happening." But despite his pleas from the kennel, the bed disappeared next! Now he was getting really scared that this recurring trend would continue and kept whimpering is near-quiet desperation. But he still seemed cautiously optimistic that his parents would make it right.
However, what finally broke his spirit was when he saw his beloved carpet (affectionately termed his "blanket") rolled up and set at the side of the room. At that point, he was positive his life was over and he responded accordingly. His face practically screamed "just kill me now... I can't go on without my beloved blankie!" Poor little guy. He decided at this point that it was time to pee, poop, and vomit all over the floor just to make sure his parents understood just how strongly he felt about the change in situation.
At that point, we had just a shell of a dog. He didn't even look up when we ousted him from the apartment and made him wait out in the hall while we finished up the cleaning. It was like that experiment they did with the dogs and learned helplessness except it wasn't repeated electricity that wore him down... just the demolition of his everyday world being dismantled and moved to an undisclosed location... same difference apparently.
Luckily, he seemed to feel much better when he saw his new place. It has several rooms and he soon discovered he could run around in a circle like a wild beast. Unfortunately, we didn't have any rugs yet and this place has wood floors so all we heard was click-click-click-click as he ran. The poor downstairs neighborhoods probably thought some hoard of pointy-toed elephants had moved in upstairs.
However, the new place presented its own special challenges. For instance, Daji had never encountered the wood floors that he enjoyed tearing across so much. So he had also never tried to stop on wood floors at full-speed. He went barreling through one room, right into another, and skidded all the way between the two coffee tables into the tree (which had mistaken as a potential tasty treat until that point... the needles soon convinced him otherwise).
The other major issue was the stairs. Having grown up in the city, in a very tall apartment building, Daji has only seen stairs once. And since he was just a puppy, he basically climbed one before we realized that wasn't going to happen so we carried him the rest of the way. His approach to the stairs up to our apartment in the new place was to simply throw his legs out at top speed and deal with where they fell in whatever way he could handle at the time. The result was a slightly out-of-control tipsy ball of Rhodesian jumping/sliding/running up and down the stairs for the first week. Apologies be to anyone who thought they could be on the stairs at the same time because Daji was a crazed maniac who wasn't stopping for anyone else.
In the end, though, he adjusted quite well and even let us put his Santa outfit on for a picture we posted to announce our new house to the world! :) Although, as you can see, he is still a little bit woebegone.
Santa Daji. Cutest Rhodi ever.
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