If you think short legs and a long body are just funny anatomy, you’ve never lived with a dachshund. My dog’s name is Buddy, and his true calling is chaos. Within that sausage-sized body beats the heart of a brilliant criminal. Here are five stories that proved it to me. Buddy runs this house, and I’m just paying the bills.

Prank number one: breakfast with a surprise

It all started on a quiet Saturday morning. I decided to treat myself and made a sumptuous breakfast: three fried eggs, fried bacon, and toast. After arranging all this splendor on a plate, I stepped away for a few minutes.

When I returned, the plate was empty. The bacon was gone. The eggs had evaporated. Buddy was sitting next to the kitchen table. He looked like the most innocent dog in the world, except for the fact that his whiskers were covered in yolk and his mouth smelled distinctly of smoked meat. The table was high, the dachshund was short. What?

I investigated. It turned out this strategist was using a nearby chair. But the chair was pushed in! Buddy braced his hind legs against the wall, pushed the chair with his front paws to create a gap, jumped onto the crossbar, from there onto the seat, and from the chair onto the table.

He didn’t just steal food. He calculated the trajectory. For the rest of the day, he lay belly-up on the carpet, resembling an overfed zucchini, sighing triumphantly.

Trick two: a landscape designer against his will

My mother is very proud of her garden, especially the rare Dutch tulips she planted all fall. They finally bloomed in the spring. Mom went away for the weekend, leaving me to water them. Buddy thought the flowers weren’t planted according to feng shui.

While I was talking on the phone on the veranda, the dog went on an expedition. Dachshunds are natural-born badger hunters; their paws are built for digging. In twenty minutes, Buddy transformed a well-tended flowerbed into a branch of a lunar crater. The most interesting thing is that he didn’t eat the tulip bulbs.

He carefully dug them up and replanted them. Or rather, he buried them in completely different places: under the porch, in my sneakers that were drying outside, and three in the compost heap.

When I witnessed this apocalypse, Buddy was standing in the center of a muddy mess. A single, tortured stalk protruded from his mouth, and he was black from the ground to the tip of his tail.

It was too late to save the flowerbed; the “archaeologist” had to be washed off. Mom still wonders why two lonely tulips bloom under her porch every spring.

Trick Three: The Great Passport Heist

It happened on the day of my vacation. My suitcase was packed, my taxi was booked, and I had half an hour to go. I put my passport and boarding pass on the nightstand in the hallway and went to check if the iron was turned off. When I returned, my passport was gone.

Panic hit me instantly. I rummaged through my suitcase, looked under the sofa, and emptied my pockets. Empty. Fifteen minutes until departure. Buddy was scurrying around under my feet, wagging his tail and looking sympathetically into my eyes. As if to say, “What a shame, Master, you’re not flying anywhere.”

And then I notice a small piece of burgundy plastic sticking out of his favorite plush house. I fall to my knees. Buddy’s expression instantly changes, he growls, and flies into the house, blocking his prey. I had to coax him out with a piece of my most expensive cheese.

The passport was saved five minutes before the taxi arrived. It was slightly damp and had a couple of decorative teeth holes on the cover. They looked at me suspiciously at customs, but the document worked. Buddy just really didn’t want to let me go.

Trick number four: the quiet thief in law

Buddy has a strange passion: he collects socks. He collects only dirty ones, and always in pairs. For a long time, I thought my washing machine was eating them. It turns out, it has an accomplice.

One day, I decided to do a spring cleaning and moved the old, heavy sofa that stood in the corner of the living room. What I found there could have been an exhibit in a museum of human life.

There was a neatly arranged pile there. Twelve socks (all different colors, but sorted in pairs), three teaspoons, the TV remote we’d been looking for for a month, and a dried-out pizza crust.

Buddy watched the expropriation of his property with profound tragedy in his eyes. He whined quietly, as if I were destroying his business empire. When I took the remote control, he pointedly turned to the wall and didn’t speak to me until evening.

Prank number five: a theatrical benefit performance on a walk

Dachshunds are amazing actors. If Buddy needs attention or a treat, he’s ready to act out any drama. On one winter walk, he decided he was tired of walking alone. His paws were cold, and it was too damp.

He suddenly stopped, lifted his right hind leg, and let out a pitiful whine that was loud enough for the entire park to hear. He looked as if he’d at least stepped on a trap. I panicked, ran over, and examined his paw—nothing. As soon as I lowered him to the ground, he fell on his side and looked at me with the eyes of the cat from Shrek. People were passing by and started looking at me sideways, as if I were a sadist.

I felt ashamed, picked him up, and carried him. This contented seal rode the entire three kilometers home, his muzzle resting on my shoulder. But the most interesting thing happened right at the entrance. The neighbor’s cat jumped out of the bushes. Buddy forgot all about his “broken” paw, shot out of my arms, and ran after it at full speed. The injury healed instantly.

Living with a dachshund is a constant test of your strength and sense of humor. But despite all the stolen socks and eaten breakfasts, when that long leather nose nuzzles your palm before bed, you forgive it absolutely everything.