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When I last wrote about my wild hound dog Hannah, last autumn, I predicted she’d give me more stories to tell readers.
That dog didn’t let me down — unfortunately.

She’s been raiding the refrigerator while I’m at work.

But first things first.

When we left off, my husband and I had decided to keep Hannah outside during the day for the sake of our furniture. Hannah has severe separation anxiety, which sometimes happens in dogs that have experienced trauma or been moved around too much. Hannah was living with a foster family for about a year before we adopted her. The family had found her on the road, with a broken leg, most likely from being hit by a vehicle. She was starving and full of heart worms.

Hannah was destroying things in our house, and she seemed happier outside, so we thought we’d found a solution. We’d rigged up an electrified line around the edge of the fence to keep her from jumping out.

We were trying to figure out how to deal with the escape holes she’d started digging when a neighbor came over to chat.

He’s a nice guy, and we talked about my garden for a while until he got to the point. “Ummm ... so, I came by because I wanted to let you know that one of your dogs ...” he began. My heart sank before he could finish the sentence. Turns out, every time we’d leave, Hannah would bark, and not for just a few minutes. She howled for as long as we were gone.

“It kind of amazing, actually,” the neighbor said. (That wasn’t the first time someone’s used that word to describe Hannah.) “You’d think she’d get hoarse, but she just keeps barking.”

I found out that incessant barking is another symptom of separation anxiety, and we had no choice but to bring her back inside. We couldn’t crate her, as she’d already destroyed several crates and they made her more stressed.

We hired a dog-behavior specialist for a house visit. Unfortunately, her proposed solution — separating the dogs and giving Hannah food-filled toys to occupy her — wouldn’t work out. However, the vet had started Hannah on fluoxetine hydrochloride, marketed as Prozac to humans, and it was helping a lot. In fact, she did very little damage to the house, although we did lose our last set of blinds once she learned to open the bedroom door by herself.

Things were going well until mid-May. My husband left for the summer for a internship in Washington. Hannah truly is a man’s dog, and she sure did begin to miss the guy who’s always affectionately calling her “Stinky Girl.”

And the kicker: Two days later, my father had a heart attack. I began boarding Hannah at the kennel for days at a time. My father was in the hospital for about seven weeks, so she spent many long weekends at the kennel while I drove up to visit him.

Her world was so rocked that her separation anxiety came back big time. She gutted our couch (at least it’s a hand-me-down).

Then I came home one day and saw the refrigerator door wide open. Hannah, with her near-toothless mouth, had yanked for who knows how long on the pressure-mounted, extra-tall child gates barring her from the kitchen. She’d gotten the gate to move diagonally enough that she could jump it. Then she opened the refrigerator door. And the door doesn’t even have a handle, just an indentation on the side. She’d carefully selected some chicken legs and licked the plate clean, breaking the plate in the process. Then she went back to lay on the couch.

We were terrified but hoped that maybe she’d forget how to do it.
During the next week or two, she raided the fridge a few more times, as well as the trash can under the sink. Sometimes she ate nothing.

Then came the day the gate fell down completely, and Wilbur, my beloved and much bigger rescued hound dog, became a participant in a crime of opportunity.

I came home to a kitchen floor covered in milk, juice, plastic wrap, empty dishes and trash.

Wilbur is a bully when it comes to food, and through a mental re-creation of events, I determined that he alone ate: 12 cups of homemade dog food, a loaf of bread, half of a loaf of banana bread, a block of cheese and various vegetables.

And because of that, the worst mess was not waiting for me in the kitchen, but in the bedroom — on Wilbur’s new pillow. In a desperate moment of gastrointestinal distress, he’d gone to the bathroom all over his “bed.” The mess soaked through the carpet and into the wood floor below.

So at least until my husband returns home, I’m not making any more dog food or bringing any meat into the house to tempt “Hurricane Hannah.”

I’ve been home the past two weekends, and she hasn’t broken into the kitchen in four days. I’m using some plug-in “dog-appeasing pheromone” dispensers and considering agility training to keep her busy.

Or maybe some doggy day care.

The camp costs about $20 a day, but wouldn’t that be money well spent?

Contact Jamie Kennedy Jones at jamie.kennedy@news-record.com or 449-4610.