Ramblings

My friend the other day was telling me all about her dog she had in high school. It was a little terrier, purebred to be as hyperactive as possible so it could run around all day in the woods chasing birds. Unfortunately, this dog was also clearly a moron.

Maybe it was because the dog was so hyperactive that it had an uncontrollable appetite. One time he ate an entire 12-pack of beer, including the aluminum of the cans and the cardboard of the box. Despite the fact that chocolate is supposedly poisonous to dogs, he managed to eat an entire pan of brownies, and despite the fact that fluoride is supposedly poisonous to everything, he managed to eat an entire tube of toothpaste.

Another time he ate through an entire garbage can worth of trash in order to eat a family dinner’s worth of chicken bones, which even he couldn’t digest fully, resulting in a terrible, nasty, bony, bloody mess all over the carpet. He seemed to be fine though, and sat there smiling while the humans cleaned it up for him.

Every year he would eat the bulbs and tinsel off the Christmas tree. Another time he managed to eat an entire glass corningware bowl that had steaks marinating in it, and another time he managed to eat a significant portion of the dashboard off a Ford Bronco. He had no problem passing any of these items, however, unlike the chicken bones. And, of course, like all dogs, he liked to go to the cat box and eat a pan full of cat turds whenever the opportunity presented itself, which was quite often. Later though, he did get abscesses on his anus from licking it too much, and he had to wear one of those cones around his head while it healed. That must have been pretty embarrassing, even for a dog that eats cat litter.

Later in his life, my friend’s father took the dog out on a hunting trip, and upon seeing a flock of birds in the distance, he took off after them. Maybe his age had finally caught up to him so he wasn’t able to jump as high, which is why he ended up severely slicing his testicles on a barbed wire fence.* He was in pretty rough shape, as you might be able to imagine, but the vet managed to save his balls, thankfully, but he had to wear one of those cones on his head for another couple of weeks, again.

Dogs are pretty silly, I think. 84,439 out of 100,000.

*Dog balls are actually surprisingly—impressively—large, so I can see how they could easily become entangled in pretty much anything. I was never really given an opportunity to appreciate it until I traveled abroad and saw how common stray dogs, and dog balls, are in a lot of cities around the world. It’s just not something you encounter too much in the suburbs.