When he got to us, he was beyond set in his ways. I had high hopes of fixing his few deficiencies. We would try and socialize him better with other dogs, get him not to bark at dogs and people on the street and train him not to constantly root around the house for the most disgusting (and therefore most delicious) thing he could find. But I was a woeful failure in every way. To Einstein, the punishment of getting flicked on the nose and yelled at has always totally and completely been worth whatever crime he just committed. 

Shortly after Einstein came to live with us, I got home from work and did not see his fluffy white head in the window. I unlocked the door and could hear him barking down the hall. The door to our back bedroom closes by itself. Einstein had nosed his way into that room, a room I had never previously seen him enter in two months, found some Hershey's Kisses that were in a Christmas stocking, devoured them all on a quilt which was promptly ruined and, for good measure, panicked when he realized he was trapped in the room and peed all over the floor. Lesson learned? Oh no. Anytime we would forget to shut that back door, I would come home to find him trapped once again even long after all chocolate had been removed. To him, the punishment he knew he would receive was completely worth the minute chance that he would find chocolate again.

Shelbi of course was no help with my efforts. Einstein would get into the trash, I would punish him and he would run with his ears back and his tail literally between his legs to Shelbi who would immediately coddle him. 

"He looks so sad!" she would say.

"Of course he looks sad! He does it on purpose! If he walked by the room carrying a pair of dirty underwear and then winked at you and gave you a high five when you caught him that wouldn't be so endearing!"

Not long after Elliott was born, while we were still in the throes of utter sleep deprivation, Shelbi was up in the middle of the night and stepped on something hard on our carpet. It took her a minute to process it but then she started crying "No, no, no!" That evening, we had purchased a ready-to-eat chicken from Safeway. Stupidly, we left the remnants on our table. Einstein, of course, took note of this at 7 p.m. when we had yet to throw it away. And he sat in wait. Finally, at about 2 a.m., he figured we were asleep enough to act and he promptly devoured the entire carcass. He... ate... everything. The carcass was about as big as his own ribcage. We quickly googled what to do and were pretty much told that he had about a 95% chance of dying in the next few weeks.

Shelbi was sad. I was livid. That's all Shelbi needs right now, I thought. She's getting 3 hours of sleep a night and is emotionally drained and now her stupid dog goes and kills itself. My next week was spent feeding Einstein bread to hopefully absorb the bone shards and following him around the yard at night (in the middle of winter) with a flashlight, a spatula and toothpicks to pick up his feces and then dissect it like a surgeon to see if he the bones had been digested. It was lovely.

And I swear it was done spitefully to get back at us for the drastic drop-off in attention he had been receiving. Same goes for him getting up on his hind legs and dragging dirty diapers out of the Diaper Champ down the hall and into his bed for consumption. Same goes for him peeing on three different rugs by our front door, something he had done just once previously in three years. And same goes for him getting into Shelbi's $300 breast pump one night and thoroughly destroying a handful of its parts. 

I have finally realized that any efforts at changing any behavior from him is completely worthless. He will continue to bark at passing cars, waking up Elliott from his naps in the process and he will always look at me with nothing but disdain. But watching Elliott become mesmerized by Einstein's every move and watching him learn to slowly reach out and not pull the dog's hair makes me hope that Einstein lives for a long time so that Elliott can remember his first dog.