What you see before you is the sorriest dog in America. His heinous crime? Getting into the trashcan and leaving a trail of garbage in the living room. For the record, I don’t physically punish Remus. I don’t have to – he punishes himself enough already. Basically he is Dobby the house elf from Harry Potter. All I have to do is say, “Remus, what did you do?” and he is ready to hit himself in the face with a lamp, or whatever other messed up things Dobby would do to himself (thank goodness he doesn’t have opposable thumbs). There is no way that I could possibly get mad at Remus after seeing his guilty reaction; he makes me feel like I’m the one who did something wrong. The way he can’t even bring himself to make eye contact with me; how he grovels for me to forgive him; that moment when he ducks under the sofa because it all becomes too much for him to handle. He makes a mess in the apartment and suddenly I’ve become Lucius Malfoy, preying on the weak and innocent. OKAY REMUS, YOU WIN! JUST TAKE YOUR SOCK AND GO! YOU’RE FREE!

I realize that this last analogy may be lost on those who don’t know Harry Potter as intensely as I do. I thought about replacing it with something more universal, and then I thought: No. If you don’t get it, you should feel bad. Like, Remus-level of feeling bad.

Is this even normal? How does your dog behave when he knows he’s done something naughty? Let me know in the comments section below!