I have three dogs. Two labs, one silver lab, who’s a girl, named Luna, and one chocolate lab, Scout who is Luna’s brother. The two labs are around 1 year and 3 months old right now. The third dog is a chihuahua pomeranian mix, named Daisy. She’s a brownish orange color and she’s about 8 years old. The two labs live at my mother’s house and the chihuahua lives at my father’s house. Luna and Scout are a little over two and a half feet tall and Daisy is under a foot tall, and these measurements are from their feet to the highest part of their head while standing on four legs. I love to play with both of the labs with a variety of toys, ranging from rubber sticks, tennis balls, or plastic toys shaped like food. They will play with me inside and outside, but they love to just run and chase each other around outside all over the yard and field. Daisy, however, is almost the exact opposite. She will bark at literally anything she sees or hears. Someone stands up too fast or walks too fast, she will bark at them for a very long time and she does not stop until the person she was barking at completely stops moving and just looks at her. She will not run around outside or play with anybody. Although she does have some chew toys, they are just stuffed animals that she’ll just sit with. She won’t chew them up or play fetch or tug o war with any of them, but she will get very angry and aggressive if you get too close to her when she is with some of her stuffed toys. Daisy and the labs have almost nothing in common with each other, and no matter what someone tries to tell me, I will always prefer Luna and Scout over Daisy.

There are some interesting stories from all the dogs, but I’ll start with all the stories and habits of Daisy. She will almost never eat her own dog food out of her bowl, she always has to take a few pieces at a time and bring them onto the carpet and eat it there. Now with Daisy eating on the carpet, there's a couple things that go wrong just about every time: She is really protective over food so she will bark and bite at someone if they get too close, and she leaves crumbs all wedged into the carpet for people to step on making it harder to vacuum the floor. Even though she has a bowl for her food and water both right next to each other, she still feels the need to eat all of her food over the carpet. Another thing that Daisy does is that she will walk right by someone’s feet, which is not very good  because a majority of the time, they trip over her or accidentally kick her. She will also steal someone’s spot on the couch if they get up even if they are just going to sit right back down. This itself isn’t the bad part, it’s the fact that if they aren’t careful sitting back down, they could sit on Daisy and potentially get bit. I have a personal experience that is pretty similar to this occurrence.  I sat down on the couch to watch some basketball and then Daisy came over. She didn’t sit right by me, but she sat close enough where I could reach over and touch her. As she sat there, she didn’t have any toys or anything with her, and she wasn’t lying down trying to sleep. She just sat there, staring at me, not moving for a solid 10 minutes. This kind of scared me because I did  not want to find out what she was about to do, so I got up from the couch and walked into the kitchen. And as soon as I got off the couch, Daisy just got up, walked over to where I was just sitting, and she laid down and started to stare at me again, just rubbing it in my face that she stole my seat. I went to go check on the basketball game, and I saw Daisy was still sitting on the couch, staring at me in that one spot. I went to sit back on the couch, just a few minutes later, but I was not going to sit very close to her obviously. Daisy noticed me going to sit and her eyes followed me to the couch. As soon as I sat down, over ten feet from her, she just got up and walked away. Not just out of the living room, but out of the kitchen too. This was not just a one time thing, it has happened many times before and not just to me, it has occurred with my brothers and my sister before and it most likely will not stop any time in the near future. Daisy has made an impact on my life that will probably last a lifetime. Because of her, I will presumably never enjoy the presence of a small dog ever again, but I am subject to change if the opportunity presents itself.

Luna and Scout are very much alike but together, they are vastly different from Daisy. They will play and fight with each other and sometimes get someone else involved, whether it is by jumping on them anytime they feel like it, or running on top of them while they are sitting down on the couch, forcing the person to interact with them. And these dogs weigh quite a bit and they are pretty strong so it takes some muscle to get them off, especially if there are two dogs on someone, it is even harder. When they aren’t trying to get someone else to play with them, they will just lay on the couch, except it is not a very normal way for a dog to lay like they do. They lay in all different ways, but some of their favorite positions consist of laying with their front half down on the couch with their back legs standing up off the couch or the other way around with their back half laying down on the couch with their front legs and their head standing up off the side of the couch. Another way they will lay is on their back with all four of their legs up in the air and their head upside down on the couch. When they lay like this, it almost looks as if they are playing dead like an possum. And even though they are just laying down resting like this, they almost always beg for a belly rub. Even those two positions are still used quite often, their favorite of all time is, in my opinion, the weirdest of them all. They will sit on the couch like a normal dog would sit as if they are getting a treat, but then they will lean up against the couch, put their front paws up on the couch cushions and their back paws are spread out on the couch. Scout sits like this the most out of the two dogs, but Luna will still sit like that regularly as well. When the dogs aren’t lying down and resting, they are wanting to play with anything and anyone that they can. Whether it’s playing catch with a ball inside, wrestling with each other or someone else, playing fetch outside (or trying to without getting the ball or frisbee stolen by the other dog), or just running around the yard. Luna is the most athletic and the best listener so she is a good dog to play catch or fetch with because she will catch the ball or fetch the toy and bring it right back to you. Scout on the other hand is not very good at either one of these. Granted he will still catch a ball from time to time, he just has more drops than catches and he doesn’t exactly bring it back on the first try. His main goal when someone is playing fetch with Luna or both of the dogs at once is to tackle Luna, grab the ball, and just run with it in the opposite direction. So to him, any game is basically “keep away”. Although we have a big enough yard for them to play in, they still find the need to run through the muddy field filled with squash and other vegetables, or they will run through the tree line into the neighbor’s yard or into more muddy fields that are mainly corn and beans. There’s a story that I have from the fall of 2021 that involves the dogs running around in the fields behind our house, and it may be pleasant for the dogs, getting to run around and play, but it was not very fun for me, who had to go out in the mud and hunt them down and clean them off. So  I was letting them out and I didn’t intend on playing tag mixed with hide and seek with them, but they insisted and took off running around our backyard as soon as I let them out. As I went to chase them, they would just keep running and running around in the field right behind our house. After about ten minutes of chasing them around our property, they decided to extend the playing field and they ventured out into the numerous fields behind the tree line. All of the acres of corn and beans with rows in between them  made one big maze, and Luna and Scout were somewhere in there but I had no clue where. I started walking down the rows in between the acres, calling their names, hoping for them to return to me. Ten minutes passed and I started to get doubtful, then I started to hear one of the dogs running back to me, lower half covered in mud, and Luna jumped on me, getting mud everywhere. My plan after this had happened was to take one dog back to the house at a time, then come back for the other so I didn’t have to worry about having the dogs chase each other again. So I started back up to the house through all the fields, and out of nowhere, Scout jumped through the bushes and joined Luna in jumping on me, and of course Scout was also covered in mud, so everyone was a muddy mess.. So now that I have both the dogs walking with me, we slowly but surely make our way up the hill back to the house, where I can clean their paws and let them back inside. Of course not even fifteen minutes after this had happened, Scout rang the dog doorbell, wanting to go outside again, and I was not going to make the same mistake I had just previously made. So I ignored his request and made him wait to go outside and when I finally took him outside, I put them both on leases to make sure that they would not be going anywhere without me holding them. And this wasn’t just a one time thing, this happens quite often, in fact. Not every time will they run a marathon and hide from you, but they will still run off to the back yard. And most of the time, they will come back when called for, but only when it's a good time for them. The dogs love the outdoors and they loved it even more when we went camping out west with them. Over the summer, we took a big road trip with multiple overnight destinations, such as St. Louis to see the big Arch, Omaha to watch a College World Series game, the Badlands, and the Black hills. Around the first few days, Scout and Luna were a little excited and would bark at almost anything that moved, which was not very pleasant for any nearby ears. But this habit quickly got broken as eventually they calmed down and just watched everything and barked only at a small number of people or cars, rather than barking at everything they saw. But overall, they enjoyed the trip and enjoyed seeing everything they did outside of the camper.

Now there are some things that contradict what I was saying about me not liking Daisy at all or me liking Luna and Scout. I enjoy Daisy when she is quiet and not near me, which happens quite often, actually. But whenever she is close by, then it just gets worse after that. But with Luna and Scout, I mostly enjoy their companionship no matter what. But the very rare exception of when I am getting dressed up, whether it's for a basketball game and I have to look nice during the school day or something else, it seems as if they always jump and put their dirty paws on my nice, clean, and ironed shirts. After their first jump, they mainly stop and let me be but they still leave a lot of little strands of dog hair on my clothes, which are extremely hard to get off. One more example of when I don’t like the two labs a whole lot is when it’s late in the evening and I just want to sit on the couch and relax, and then they rush to me trying to get me to play with them and they just come at me with all their energy. Normally I would enjoy playing with the dogs, but not when I am trying to wind down. Other than those two exceptions, I love being with them all the time. Even though I feel numerous ways about all three of the dogs, at the end of the day, Luna and Scout will always be my favorites and Daisy will always be on the lower end of the spectrum.