625 - Innsbruck
Today we drove into Austria and met an erratic dog.
After spending the past couple of days hiking around lasagna land, we decided to head back up to Austria to meet an old friend for a couple days. And before we even arrived, a text landed in my inbox: “Just a heads up- our dog is crazy.”
A line that’s been by billions, if not trillions of people over the course of humanity.
But is this dog ever truly crazy? Or is it just a dog that’s got too much energy and not enough love? I found myself convinced of the latter and brushed it off like the plaque on my teeth.
That is, until I met Lucy.
A beagle Austrian shepherd mix, which, if you know anything about dogs, is the equivalent of mixing fire with gasoline. Let me explain why.
Beagles, originally bred to be rabbit hunting dogs in 18th century Great Britain, have one of the most developed senses of smell in the entire species of dog. But this particular set of skills comes at a price. According to Stanley Coren's 1996 “The Intelligence of Dogs,” they ranked beagles among the lowest in terms of obedience intelligence. This, paired with the fact that they are primarily pack animals, means they often suffer from intense separation anxiety.
Australian shepherds, on the other hand, come from a long line of ancestors in New Zealand and Australia, who, you guessed it, spent their days herding sheep. This led to the development of an incredibly athletic build featuring an endless stream of energy.
Combine these two breeds and you have a dog that will follow his nose to the end of the earth, and lose its mind if you don’t follow it.
Cut to us, walking in the door and being trampled by a dog that’s seemingly lost its mind. The catch was that the dog was adorable, so you felt obligated to let everything the little menace did to society slide.
Some of which include but are not limited to: biting the waitress serving us beer at a hut, sending kids running away screaming on hiking trails, and barking at damn near everything that came close to it.
My favorite instance of puppy evil this weekend was when we were hanging off the side of a cliff on a via ferrata somewhere near Innsbruck. My friend got a notification on his phone that detected movement in their living room, so he opened his camera app to see what’s happening.
I slide over to see, and in the dead center of the frame is Lucy, tearing his couch to shreds.
The color drained from his face, but not because we were hanging onto a steel cable hundreds of feet in the air. The couch, now halfway reduced to foam pieces, was losing a battle.
He began talking into his phone, which was somehow synced to a speaker that was connected to the camera in his living room. Apparently dog technology has advanced rapidly.
“LUCY, NO. NO. LUCY… NO!”
She perked her head up on the 5.7in phone screen and listened for about 3 seconds before proceeding to rip the couch up again.
Not rapidly enough, I suppose.
The rest of the day had a bit of a cloud over it, but not because their dog had just decimated their couch. The peaks around here were popping like candy:
…
I know. It feels in bad taste to be showcasing my photography in the middle of a story about my friend being figuratively eaten alive by his dog.
But after the initial shock of the incident, my friend couldn’t seem to care less. The moment we got back to his place, he began sewing the couch back together, and by dinner the couch looked good as new.
The entire incident inspired me, besides the fact that it was low-key hilarious. The idea that a dog could terrorize one’s life as much as it did this weekend and you could still find a way to love it, awakened something in me.
Anyway. That’s enough sentimentability. Not sure if that’s a word, but stay tuned- in the next adventure, we’re heading back to Italy to visit a famous lake at the crack of dawn.
