bonabonegood/nice/pleasing

"Good dog! Who's a good dog? You're a good dog!" Georgia spoke words of encouragement to her dog as she gave him a bone-shaped treat. Georgia believed strongly in using only positive reinforcement to train her dog. Forget the stick, she'd just use the carrot, thank you very much.

But soon the treats weren't cutting it. Her dog seemed uninterested in showing good obedient behavior in exchange for the little bone-shaped treats she gave him. She tried other treats, but he didn't seem interested in them either. Finally, she hit on the solution: it was the bones her dog loved, and he would do anything for them.

The bones and "good dog" words of encouragement worked for a while, but soon those became ineffective as well. In a short time, Georgia had a hypothesis. Up until this point, she'd been giving her dog rawhide bones. Perhaps he would respond well to real bones.

She began by using scrap bones from the dinner table. It worked better than she had hoped. She didn't even need the "good dog" words of encouragement to get him to behave. But Georgia feared that this soon would end.

And Georgia was right. Her dog's behavior didn't remain good indefinitely, even with the scrap bones. She couldn't bear the thought of having anything but a good, well-behaved dog. So she made the next logical step: she went looking for bigger bones. At first, this was easy to do. There were places that sold the bones of larger animals. But soon, that too became impractical.

Georgia could no longer afford her dog's bone habit. She didn't know what to do. She couldn't bear the thought of having a bad dog. But she also couldn't bear the thought of giving him away or putting him down; that would make her a bad person in her mind. So she acted in desperation. She began to rob graves.

This might seem unbelievable: a perfectly normal girl digging up human skeletons to feed to her blood-thirsty dog. But you have to understand that it had been a very long and gradual process that had brought Georgia to this point.

Now, if we left the story there, it would be incredible enough. But, that wasn't the end of it. Even the human bones after a point failed to produce the good behavior that Georgia so desparately desired from her dog. She needed bigger bones! And there was one place to get them: museums.

Georgia began burgling dinosaur bones from museums. The authorities were puzzled by the thefts. She wasn't stealing the valuable or rare fossils, just the common bones found in the paleontological archives.

Georgia was no longer acting rationally at this point. Her dog could not do anything with the massive bones. He couldn't chew on them, nor could he bury them. The irony of the situation was lost on her. She had worked so hard to try to make her dog a good dog that she had turned herself into a bad person in the process.