I have a confession. My dog Biscuit is a thief, and somewhere along the way I started rooting for him.
It began on a Tuesday. I pulled a blue-gray sock out of the dryer, set it on the arm of the couch for exactly one second, and turned around to fold a towel. When I turned back, the sock was gone. Not under the couch. Not in the basket. Gone, the way things go when a magician is involved.
I found it twenty minutes later in Biscuit’s bed, laid out flat like a museum piece.
I laughed it off. Dogs pick things up. It happens.
Then it happened the next day. Same time, same color sock. And the day after that. Within a week Biscuit had a collection. He takes exactly one sock per day, never two, and never before three in the afternoon. I can only assume that is his business hours.
Here is the part I still cannot explain. Biscuit does not chew his loot. He does not play with it. He carries each sock to his bed with the seriousness of a banker handling cash, sets it down, sniffs it once like he is checking the merchandise, and lies on top of the pile with the smug look of a CEO who just closed a deal.
I have tried everything. Hidden the laundry basket. He found it. Closed the bedroom door. He sat outside and sighed, loudly, until I opened it, because I am weak and he knows it. Bought him expensive toys with squeakers and rope. He looked at the toys, looked at me, and walked straight to the laundry basket. The message was clear. He knows what he likes.
The vet says it is completely normal. Socks smell like us, which is the canine version of a love letter. Once I started paying attention to his body language, the whole operation made sense. If you have a dog with a weird habit, How To Speak Dog: Decoding Your Dog’s Body Language for a Stronger Bond is a good place to start figuring out what they are actually saying.
So we have an arrangement now. I buy socks in bulk. Biscuit runs his collection service. When guests come over, he proudly shows off his haul, and every guest says the same thing: “Oh, he’s so cute.” Nobody asks where the socks came from. I think they already know.
The other day I caught him mid-heist. He had a sock in his mouth and was tiptoeing past me with the careful steps of a dog who believes he is invisible. I said his name. He froze. We stared at each other for a long moment. Then he dropped the sock, wagged his tail, and picked it right back up, as if to say, “You saw nothing.”
I did not have the heart to take it from him.
Some people train their dogs to do tricks. Mine has trained me to leave one sock on the stairs every afternoon. He has taught me more than any obedience class ever did, and honestly, I wrote about a few of those lessons in 9 Life Lessons from My Four-Legged Friend. The sock economy did not make the cut.
Every day at three, Biscuit makes his rounds, and every day I pretend not to notice. He is the best thief I have ever known, and I would not trade a single stolen sock.