Big Boy Does Not Like the Dog Days of Summer

We never quite get acclimated to July and August in South Louisiana.  It is hot and humid and those are just the facts.  We deal with it as best we can, often asking each other, "When do you think the first cold front will blow through?"  While we can go inside in the nice air conditioning and sit under a fan to cool off, the animals don't have that luxury.  Big Boy, our Great Pyrenees dog, loathes the summer.  With his big furry coat, he is not exactly cut out for this climate.  Great Pyrenees dogs come from a mountainous region bordering Spain and France.  Needless to say, the climate is a bit different in our lowland, swampy locale.

Big boy, however, has ways of trying to stay cool that doesn't include air conditioners or fans.  He digs holes.  Did I say holes?  I meant to say craters.  Although he has plenty of shade in his hangout in 'the grove' underneath the trampoline, Big Boy still seeks cooler temps.  Where does he find it?  In the cool dirt, of course.  A freshly dug hole unearths soft dirt untouched by the summer sun and heat.  I know it is hot and don't really begrudge his excavations as I know it cools him off.  He's a dog.  A Hot Dog.

It's just that it s never just one hole.  You see, that dirt he lays in doesn't stay cool.  It warms up due to Big Boy's body heat and the ambient temperature.  This provokes him to dig another hole...  And another and another.  I've gotten to the point where I have placed cinder blocks, ladders, wagons and all sorts of items around the base of a tangerine tree so he doesn't dig around it, expose its roots, and kill it.  This eyesore of a random assortment of digging barriers I've laid out would get us kicked out of a subdivision, if we lived in one.

The constant digging has loosened dirt and this is causing erosion problems during big rains.  This has caused me to use cinder blocks to build a retaining wall to keep Big Boy's dirt from washing down the ditch during big rains.  This was a lot of work and I'd be lying if I told you that I didn't look over indignantly at Big Boy while installing the erosion-slowing wall.

I just wish Big Boy would listen to the wise words of Will Rogers, who once said,

"If you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is stop digging."