Meet Miss Molly Miller

Well, Miss Molly has more or less settled in and is learning the routine. She has been to our vet for a checkup and to have her stitches from her spay surgery removed. She has also been back to the Animal Trustees of Austin clinic to have the pin in her broken leg removed. She still has a pronounced limp and may always have it, but it doesn't slow her down much.
She's feeling more confident and getting into lots of trouble. She has decided the cats are too stand-offish and is trying to run them down to make friends...or maybe it's just the herding instinct..?? Uh-Huh.
Molly loves to help around the yard. She goes off into the woods and brings back fallen branches, then chews them up for mulch....on the front porch. She relocates plastic flower pots, adding a few tooth holes for better drainage.
Unfortunately, she thought Mom's inflatable wading pool also needed draining, so she chomped a few holes in that, too. Mom was not a happy person so Dad built an enclosure to Molly-proof Mom's next wading pool.

one inflatable swimming pool, 6'X10', 22" deep.
two yellow plastic flower pots with Amaryllis plants
one pink plastic flower pot with Amaryllis
three black plastic flower pots with parsley
one black flower pot with an Avocado tree.
5 small pots in a tray, empty, but reserved for spring planting.
(she carefully picks the pots out of the tray, leaving all the rest undisturbed.)
Note: a collection of empty plastic pots destined for recycling to a local nursery has been left untouched.
She has also ignored three pots filled with soil and set out for decoys.
***
two wicker porch chairs
one wooden yard ornament, hand painted by Mom,
several silk flower groupings used for garden color in off season
one beach towel (plucked from a chair inside the enclosure Dad built for the pool...the space between pickets is large enough for a Molly head.)
one towel, one shirt, one old pair of sweats used for dog crate bedding.
her large (and rather costly) dog bed from Petsmart
***
Several large pieces of styrofoam that she carefully sought out from a storage shed and brought to the front yard where they could be finely shredded and scattered about like snow.  NOT biodegradable and very unattractive.
Two large plastic trash bags filled with old insulation and other debris waiting to go to the landfill.
***
One lawn chaise cushion.
The upholstered lawn swing. (This one really hurt...Dad used to sit here with PoppyLu.)
***
Two spindles of the porch railing.
One porch support post.
One potted Mexican Heather plant brought to Mom as gift from Dad.
One dust pan. (She had to get up on a table to find this.)
One hummingbird feeder. (The kind on a metal stake that you stick in flower beds.)
***
Molly also enjoys pulling the peppers off the Jalapeno pepper plant. She doesn't eat them, she just pulls them off and drops them on the ground.
***
Molly has NOT destroyed anything of NO value, of which there is much available to her.
Lots of unused flower pots, pieces of wood tucked away for future use, pieces of toweling & rags for car washing, etc.

She has also ignored the odds and ends left behind in her wake...the plastic from the pool, broken flower pots, toweling. bits of wood, etc.
Seems like once she has broken something past further use or enjoyment, she's through with it.

Molly is without doubt the most destructive animal I've ever owned, including a couple of goats we once had who ate their way through an acre of cedar, a pair of rabbits who chewed through our deck, and a house cat who felt it was his mission to "texturize" every bit of bare wood in the house.

Molly is a VERY bad traveler. She whines or barks, won't lie down, constantly moves around when in the van. Dad loves to take a furfriend with him when he goes to town for the Sunday paper, but Molly has put herself out of the running for that treat.

I'm not going to play Pollyanna and try to tell you all this hasn't influenced my own feelings for Molly. While technically, she's Dad's dog, it is I who must deal with most of her destructiveness and spend the most time with her. It is usually still dark when Dad leaves for work, so I'm the one who finds the bits and pieces left from Molly's morning's work. (She sleeps in the house or on the porch, but is free to roam after breakfast.) I've had to remove all my "yard art" and I dare not leave a cushion on a lawn chair, a potted plant or a garden tool where Molly can reach it.
Sometimes it's difficult to supress the dismay and frustration I feel.

Looking on the bright side (cough, cough) I am put in mind of a neighbor in Maryland who got a Great Dane puppy and kept it in the garage at night. One morning he discovered the puppy had eaten one of the tires on his car.
Molly hasn't noticed tires.......yet.