The Dog's Point of View

Sometimes the difference between a prized possession and a money pit is simply a matter of perspective. For instance, I have a pure bred dog. She's a Belgium Tervern...Turvyuren...turveyon...a Belgian Turv. Her given name is Bora, which I think is Belgian for "expensive". I call her MooCoup Bucks, because that's what she cost - about twelve hundred of them. Her nickname is Moolah. She arrived as a puppy, making her worth about two hundred dollars a pound. I thought that was excessive. "Ah, but she'll grow" the breeder assured me with a twinkle.

You'd think that certain undesirable traits could be bred out of a dog - like chewing, barking, digging, and running away. But Moolah does all of those. Mostly though, she chews...and chews...and chews. She chewed the bark off the peach tree, which then died after making only one peach. A three hundred dollar tree. She chewed the seat-belts out of the car...all the seat-belts - nine hundred bucks. She brought back a neighbors shoe and chewed it in half. They won't sell you just one shoe so we replaced the pair. A hundred and fifty bucks. She chewed several toys, my gloves, a pillow, 2 dog beds, a shovel handle, her own leash and an old hat on the same day.

She also digs. And after pulling a handful of my son's beloved plastic dinosaurs, all with their heads freshly chewed clean off from one of her excavations, I knew I needed to find a new way of thinking about Moolah. So she became an investment.

To protect the neighbor's footwear, I surrounded about three acres of land with Invisible Fence. It cost about two grand and increased her value accordingly. I added everything up including her crate, air fare, collar, training, the tree and the other chewed items and figure she's still worth $200/lb...only now she weighs about 70 pounds.

I now look for ways to increase her value, like tying pork chops to 100 bills and leaving them in the lawn. I smeared peanut butter on the rest of the fruit trees, hoping she'd debark them and further add to her mounting worth.

In all truth, I know that I'd take a beating if I tried to sell her, but the bank doesn't know that, so I took out an equity line on her and if I do sell her, I should be able to declare the loss on my tax return.

The breeder was right. Moolah has grown. She's grown from a soft fluffy ball of liability into a beautiful full grown asset. And no matter what,she’s still beating the stock market over the past three years. See? It's all about how you look at it.