Tongue-In-Cheek … Foot-In-Mouth

I don’t know about your dogs but our dogs spend huge gobs of time lying under the living room coffee table engrossed in noisy personal K-9 hygiene.  And when they are not busy with this, they are busy making huge Cecil B. Demille-like productions over going to the bathroom.

Take for example our Cocker Spaniel and Poodle mix named “Bella” (a.k.a. “Dawg”) who resembles a throw rug with eyeballs and a tail.   Before Bella will do her business, she MUST first sniff every piece of grass in the northern hemisphere, twice, because God forbid if she ever did her business in the wrong spot.  And then she MUST spin herself around-and-around-and-around in ever-tightening concentric circles in what looks to be a determined effort to corkscrew herself all the way through to China.

And for Bella to find just the right spot can take several weeks, sometimes years.  So, while she is sniffing and spinning, I’m standing on the porch patiently, gently, softly cheering her on to do her thing, like any good dog-loving master would do.

Me: “Bella!  You four-legged-flea-bag!   Let’s go…TODAY!  Don’t make a career out of it!  Enough already with the sniffing and spinning—GO ALREADY!  Get it done with!  I’m late for work, you mutt!”  (Point and tap watch).

Bella: “Oh, yeah, well, you try doing your business behind the garage next to the propane tank with the cute Shiatsu next door watching your every move out their picture window.  Not to mention some lunatic standing on the porch tapping his watch and yelling at you.  And another thing; these weeds tickle.   What do you say you stop pestering me and instead cut the grass?  That might help matters, don’t ya think?”

Then there’s “Pebbles,” (a.k.a. “Rat Dog”) an almost five-pound Yorkshire Terrier and Poodle mix, who is best described as being a scrawny nervous shaky hairball with an attitude and teeth.  In fact she shivers, shakes, and trembles so much you would swear that someone removed her blood and replaced it with caffeine.

Now Pebbles, on the other paw, takes way less time to do her business than Bella, which is a good thing.  But she also gives us way less of a warning, and therefore we have way less of a reaction time to react when she needs to do her business, which are bad things.

Basically she barks, waits 1/1,000,000,000,000th of a nanosecond, and then squats at your feet.  I’m totally serious here.  She will look at you, bark, and if you don’t immediately leap from wherever you are, scoop her up in a Walter Payton fumbled football-like fashion, and make a mad dash for the nearest end zone, you’ll be knee-deep in doo-doo.

Okay, you’re right; I might be exaggerating just a little.  Given Pebble’s puny size, admittedly, Pebbles’ “deposits” don’t amount to much, but what little doo-doo she does do is always deposited in just the right longitudinal latitudinal landmine location for me to step directly in.  Thank you very much, Rat Dog.

Anyway, let me leave you with this important warning that has absolutely nothing to do with the content of the column above, but it is about dogs: if you decided to own two dogs, make sure that they are both roughly the same size and weight.  And the reason for this is centered on the activity of “patting.”

If you own a medium-sized dog that weighs roughly 30 pounds, you can pat this dog with some nice sturdy pats to its back, which will result in some nice sturdy tail-wags requesting for more “loving” from its master.  However, if your miniature-sized dog that weighs approximately negative 3 ounces, wanders by while you are patting the medium-sized dog, and you momentarily forget that you are patting the medium-sized dog and start patting the miniature-sized dog with the same nice sturdy pats to its back like the ones you were delivering to the medium-sized dog, you run the risk of accidentally pounding the miniature-sized dog into a furry flapjack, which will then have to be scraped off of the living room floor with a spatula while your wife and kids yell at you for “playing too rough with the little dog!”  Not that I’ve ever mistakenly done this before or anything.

Copyright 2009 William Drury.   All Rights Reserved.