Dogs appreciate comfort. Most living things do. Maybe not snakes: snakes don’t seem to appreciate anything. But dogs do. We like having comfy places to sit and sleep as much as Peoples do. We can be trained to stay off the Peoples furniture — especially if we have furniture of our own to be comfy on. But training dogs to respect the property rights of other dogs in the house is harder to do. We pretty much figure a dog bed is a dog bed and we’ll take whichever is available and looks most comfy to us.

We sometimes get a little opportunistic about things. Like the time HairyFace was going to vacuum the den and stacked all the dog beds from that room across the hall … and that looked pretty choice to Volt.

The thought that we can sit or sleep wherever we choose has gotten me into a pickle once or twice too.

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But that was resolved easily enough. I’m not unreasonable … I can be bribed.

Now that Volt is sleeping in the bedroom with the rest of us at night they don’t put a snuggle bed in Volt’s room any more: just a folded up blanket. He only stays in there when The Peoples go away for a while and when we eat meals.

We do (technically) each have a dog bed that is “ours” and at night we do tend to go to our own place and get into our own bed without having to be told. But there is no hard-and-fast rule about that. And, if one of us gets up in the night, we will probably come back to find our bed occupied. But that leaves the usurper’s bed available, or we can go into the den: there is a bed in there all the time, or we can go to the living room: there are two beds in there. So it’s not like we don’t have options.

Of course we CAN make a fuss about having our bed stolen: whine about it until a Peoples wakes up and sends the bed invader back where they belong, but that tends to make Peoples cranky, so it’s usually better to just find another spot to sleep.

During the day, there are no property rights. We sleep wherever we want and no one can lay claim to anything. And we’re usually okay with that.