A pup with a fetish (or two)

Steve thinks Dionne is fetishistic. He reminded me that, besides having a sexual connotation, a fetish means an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it's considered to be inhabited by a spirit.

We both thought of what Dionne has done to one of his notebooks. Steve takes notes often. A week ago, Dionne got up at his desk when our heads were turned and snatched his current notebook from it.  Then she curled up on Tucker's bed and began ripping into it. I chastised her and returned the battered but still readable book to Steve's desk. But over the course of the next several days (when Steve was traveling on business), Dionne found two or three opportunities to streak into his office, snatch the notebook, and rip it apart some more. It  looked like this....

... when I gathered up the fragments, dumped them in a bowl, and stored it high on a shelf, for Steve's return. It didn't contain anything essential (or so we hope), but it got him to wondering whether her obsessive fixation on one thing or another doesn't constitute some weird form of fetishism. (Did she see the notebook as an embodiment of Steve, whom she missed?)

In the late spring, she began going after the fireplace stones in a similar manner (which I commented on in a post.) We finally had to remove them all and store them on another high shelf. But in advance of a crop of August houseguests, I reassembled the fireplace, and Dionne didn't give it a glance -- until after she had reduced the notebook to fragments.

Now she's back to targeting fireplace stones again.

Note the telltale fireplace sand on her nose, and the stone on the carpet behind her to her left.  

The fireplace after a Dionne attack

When I decided to try to blog as often as possible about raising Dionne, I wondered if I wouldn't run out of material. So far that hasn't been a problem.