My Dog is an Art Thief

We used to have pet rats, and they are known for stealing things. They would take whatever they could get their tiny little hands on and hide it away behind the books on our bookshelf (after nibbling hundreds of little bites in the edges of the pages). But I have never had a dog that stole anything. Chiqui is different. She loves to lie in her crate and chew on a bone or some other treasure she has found. We have discovered all sorts of interesting things in her crate, and we aren’t always sure where she got them. Once we found pay stubs under her mattress from a job I held some 15 years earlier (she is six years old).

One day I forgot to take out the trash, and left the bag by the front door. I remembered just as I arrived home and braced myself as I opened the door. Sure enough, she had strewn the contents of the bag all over the living room, including coffee grounds, a few green beans and some rice. I thought I got it all cleaned up, but a week or so later, we found an empty tin can she had hidden in her crate (luckily with no sharp edges).

But the pièce de résistance was when we discovered her love of art. A somewhat narcissistic love of art, actually. Stephen was cleaning out her crate one afternoon and starting laughing. He told me I had to come and see it for myself. When I crawled into Chiqui’s crate and saw what she had stolen, I cracked up too. There, leaning up against the wall of her crate, was a portrait of herself. I attended Artfest and in a class I took from Carla Sonheim, I created a charcoal and acrylic portrait of Chiqui. I had left it on the dining room table, and Chiqui must have pulled it off the table and taken it into her crate. Unlike everything else she takes into her crate, she made no attempt to destroy the picture. I guess she just wanted to admire herself.