The Case of the Dog That Didn't Chew

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The Case of the Dog That Didn't Chew

A short story by Ryan Cartwright - CC:By-SA

By Ryan Cartwright

Roboteers

Published: Sep 2018

Publisher: Crimperbooks (crimperbooks.co.uk)

Categories: Roboteers, Short-stories, Ages-6-and-up

Original URL: https://www.crimperbooks.co.uk/roboteers/the-case-of-the-dog-that-didn't-chew/

License: Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC-BY-SA 4.0).

You are free to share, copy, distribute and adapt this material under the same license terms.

1. The Dog That Didn’t Chew

This short story is one of the adventures of the Roboteers. It is written in the style of a blog post by one of the gang. You can read more of their adventures on the Roboteers page.

Some of our cases are quite tricky to solve, some are quite simple but most of them end up having quite a simple answer. The problem is that people often miss that answer because the evidence doesn’t fit their assumptions. They follow how they think or imagine it must have happened and try to prove that, rather than investigate what’s in front of them.

If you look at a problem with an answer in mind you will often try to fit the evidence to that and if that isn’t the answer it becomes a mystery as to how it happened. If you look at the evidence without trying to fit it to a particular solution you often find the actual answer becomes quite obvious.

A good example of this is the case about the dog that didn’t chew.

We were approached at school one day by a girl in year 7. She seemed quite upset about something and at first we thought she just wanted help with a bully or something (we get a lot of that). Her name was Isabella.

“Are you OK Isabella?” I asked as she approached.

“Not really.” she sniffed. “It’s my dog.”

“Has it gone missing?” Martin asked eagerly, thinking this would be a missing pet case - he liked those.

“No, no. He’s at home.” Isabella replied through a snotty nose.

“Oh, OK.” Martin said dejectedly, “So how can we help you then?”

“I don’t know if you can.” she replied. “But I’m desperate.”

“Wow thanks!” muttered Martin, “Nice to know you think we’re that good!”

“Martin, hush!” I hissed and then to Isabella, “Why don’t you tell us what the problem is.”

Isabella explained that she had been nagging her parents for a dog since they moved into their house, three years ago. They were in a flat before and the landlord didn’t let them have dogs. Anyway a month ago, her parents gave into her constant nagging and bought her a dog. They got it from a rescue centre at the other end of town.

“Chocolate is gorgeous,” Isabella said, “He’s two years old and he came here when his owner moved to another part of the country but their new house was too small.”

“What type of dog is he?” Tim asked.

“I don’t know.” Isabella said with a shrug. “I think he’s a mixture of a lot of different breeds. He’s called Chocolate because of the colour of his fur.” With this she whipped out her ‘phone and showed us endless photos of the dog. He was lovely but I’m not sure we needed to see all the photos. Clearly Isabella loved him.

“So is he a good dog then?” I asked.

“Oh he’s brilliant. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.” she replied excitedly. Then her face dropped as she said “At least I think so.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“My Dad says he’s naughty and that we…” at this she started bawling and we couldn’t understand what she was saying. We calmed her down and eventually we got her to speak without crying. It seemed her Dad had laid down strict rules that they could only get a dog if Isabella helped looked after it and if it was well behaved. Everything seemed to be going fine until two weeks ago when Chocolate started barking at all hours of the day. No matter what they tried he wouldn’t stop and he only barked when they weren’t in the room.

“It was like he was being good while we there but as soon as our backs were turned, he would start barking again.” Isabella said. “Then one morning we found the legs of Dad’s armchair had been chewed. Dad was furious and he put Chocolate outside overnight as a punishment. Two days later, Chocolate had been back in the house again and another chair got chewed. Then we found one of the bookcases chewed. Eventually Dad said that if Chocolate didn’t stop chewing things he’d have to go back to the rescue centre!” at this she started crying again but to be fair, I could see why.

“So I guess you don’t think Chocolate is chewing things?” Tim asked.

Isabella shook her head. “But Dad does and Mum has said that it must be Chocolate so unless he stops we’ll have to send him back. She says that if we don’t our furniture will all be ruined. Yesterday the bottom of our curtains got scratched as well.”

“So what do you want us to do?” I asked.

Isabella threw her arms around me “Oh thank you!” she exclaimed. “I knew you’d help me!”

“Wait, wait” I said pushing her off. “I didn’t say we would or even if we could. I just want to know why you are telling us. What do you think we can do?”

“Oh sorry.” she said. “I just want you to find out why Chocolate is doing this.”

“But won’t that prove he’s doing it and then you’ll have to get rid of him anyway?” Tim asked. I glared at him in case it upset Isabella again but I knew he was right.

“I’ve been reading up on this.” Isabella replied,”Dogs tend to chew furniture because they are stressed or upset about something. If we can figure out what that is then maybe we can help him stop doing it and then I can keep him.”

“Have you suggested this to your parents?” Martin asked.