January 30, 2004

• Is our dog perverted or what?  or  What’s the deal with cat butts, anyway?

  
  

  This is something that, to the best of my knowledge, has never come up on Calling All Pets, the charming Public Radio call-in show about people and pets.  You see, we have this dog.  He’s your basic 75-pound lapdog, good-looking and sleek and smart and eager to please, but. . . .well, undisciplined.  Neurotic.  The vet said that he has “dietary indiscretion”– meaning that he’ll eat anything.  Lettuce, grapes, muffin wrappers, firewood, used facial tissue, banana peels–I’m mean, we are talking about a four-footed garbage disposal here.  He doesn’t like celery, though.  Go figure.

  
  

  When we got him, the owners said he was a collie-husky mix.  That’s Alaskan husky, meaning a blend of more wolf than your average bow-wow, malamute, Siberian husky, Tasmanian devil, Buick, pipe wrench, whatever.  Actually, “Alaskan husky” is a misnomer–most folks in the know, including mushers and professional dog handlers, call them Alaskan sled dogs.  That seems even more confusing to me–to me, a sled dog is any dog that pulls a sled, including standard poodle.  Yeah, one non-conformist actually ran the Iditarod with a sled dog team consisting of standard poodles.  I don’t know what happened to them, a moose ate them for all I know.  Anyway, we are talking about a seriously mixed breed, with hybrid vigor to spare.

  
  

  Anyway, as our sweet helpless little puppy matured, it turned out he was no collie mix at all, but mostly doberman.  He is short-haired and feisty, and I pity the fool who tries to get into our place uninvited. But I digress.

  
  

  Like all dogs, our guy has a brain that is mostly hooked up to his nose.  He’ll smell your feet, and  stick his nose into your ears to check out the sebum situation, and check out your pits to make sure the Ban is working–and any old crotch is fair game, too.  When I walk him, I stop and let him sniff at every patch of frozen urine–fair enough–I check my email, he checks his pee mail.  What gives me pause, and wonder about his  possible doggy dementia, is his mania for sniffing cat butt.

  
  

  We have three cats, all spayed females, the momcat and two offspring.  They all relate to the dog differently–Muffin acts like prey as a rule, but lately she has gone the hissing  and clawing route with him.  Granny takes no guff at all, and has shredded that snoot more than once, and Penny, the neurotic mouthy one, has kinda befriended him–the four of us often sleep together.

  
  

  Anyway, every darn chance he gets, he has that big old rubbery snoot right under a tail, sniffing like a dope fiend going through free coke.  That is disquieting enough, but the weird thing is the crazed look he gets on his face when he does this.  His tongue lolls and he rolls his eyes like Eddie Cantor on meth. He is usually fairly mellow, but when sniffing cat butt, his eyes get wide and crazy in a way that you only see when he is huffing heinie.

  
  

  Oh well. . .heck, none of the other six mammals that live here is within spitting distance of being sane, why should the dog be any different?

  
  

   

  • 4:54 pm
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