Let's Talk About Dogs

 I once saw my Labrador fart into his own mouth.  Buster, probably 8 years old at the time.  A huge derpy goofball of a dog.  He was supposedly bread for hunting but the only thing the dog ever hunted was chicken nuggets and the dirty dishes in the sink.  This all happened years before we left to become nomads.

Derp derp

This picture is classic Buster.  Hope that defies reason.  Literally.  So full of hope the dog was devoid of all reason.  And he had a partner in crime.  Beezus.  

I am too allowed on the table!

Pure evil, this one.  Truly an arch-criminal.  If she weren't so cute, she'd be a hat by now.  I've reminded her of that many times.  She doesn't believe me.  

Beezus guarding the house.

Odd name, Beezus.  It comes from a children's book "Ramona and Beezus".  Because we had a dog named Ramona who we bought after Buster but before Beezus.  My wife named them.  I renamed them.  All of them.

But Ramona was my favorite.

Daddy's perfect little girl.

Buster was an American Hunting Lab.  That sub-breed is much taller and much higher energy than their English counterparts.  He actually was an amazing hunter.  More than once he chased down an adult rabbit in our yard, killed it, then pranced around with it limp in his mouth like he was Mick Jagger  strutting in leather pants at a Stone's show.  Ramona, a black lab shepherd mix, could catch the rabbits but had no desire to kill them.  Her one sin was jumping the back yard fence nearly every time we let the dogs out to pee.  She could clear a 4 foot fence from a sitting position without making a sound.  Bad!  She'd always come home, always covered in horseshit.  We never found the horses she was communing with.  But we could smell them, couldn't we, Ramona?

As with all small females, Beezus had a Napoleon complex and needed to conquer everything.  She was truly in charge of the 2 other dogs.  So much so, in fact, that she used to hump Ramona while Ramona was laying down.  It was ridiculous.  Beezus' paws didn't even touch the floor when she did it.  She'd straddle Ramona and then just hump her with all her being.  It was like watching a little fat man try to kick-start a Harley Davidson.  And my gentle Ramona?  All she could do was growl her disapproval.  The humping made the growl sound like an engine being kick-started.  No lie:

For nearly 14 years Beezus would occasionally hump Ramona (daily, same time too.  I called it Hump O'Clock).  That's just proof that God is good.  But poor Buster didn't live past 10.  He had a congenital heart defect.  Not sure he'd have faired well in an airstream anyway.  But we loved his goofy ass. 

For almost 5 years it was Beezus and Ramona traveling with us.

I have a habit of costuming my animals for the shame value.

Then around Christmas last year or so we had to put Ramona down.  It was truly a traumatic event but we had to let her go.  We feared how Beezus would react since she was the last of their little pack.  Sometimes dogs will die when their life-long companion dog dies.

But not Beezus' rotten ass.  No, she almost immediately took over the spot beneath my wife and I where Ramona slept.  Never once looked for her, showed no sign of being aware that Ramona had passed.  Hard as nails, this little beast.

"Hey kids, want some candy?"

Years ago I renamed Beezus  (she's a puggle or pug/beagle mix).  When she used to run after the two big dogs during a rabbit round-up, I noticed her back legs made her look like a cornish hen.  So I started referring to her as The Chicken.  It stuck.  Beezus is The Chicken.  It's sort of an alter ego.  Not like Batman and Bruce Wayne.  More like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  Only Beezus is 100% Mr Hyde.  She used to climb on top of the crates the other two dogs slept in just so she could pee in them (we kept the doors closed because she used to saunter in and pee in them).  Arch-criminal.  She was an artist.  An activist.  She protested with her pee.  Not like Turk 182.  More like a toddler protesting by smearing feces on the kitchen wall.  Don't cross The Chicken.  My wife pissed her off once by not letting her cuddle in bed anymore.  Beezus proceeded to pee on a pile of coupons my wife spent hours cutting out.  Don't.  Cross. The Chicken.

When Ramona passed and The Chicken had the rule of the rig, no more peeing.  She was 100% in control of her space now.  But age caught up with her.  She's a bit incontinent.  She leaks.  And if you couple that with her obsession to lay down on anything but the hard floor, well, things get unintentionally owned by way of pee pee.

"Don't let your blankets touch the floor or The Chicken will pee on them!", says my wife to my boys.  Not on purpose.  She just loves nesting like a naughty little bird on any soft item.  I once saw her lay down on a shoe.  A shoe.  That can't be comfortable but, hey, it's not the floor, right Chicken?

For years my wife would taunt The Chicken by threatening to buy a puppy who would torment her like she's tormented the rest of us.  And this year, she made good on that threat.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Charlie-Bear.

Beezus is now 15 years old.  That is beyond the golden years for dogs.  She is now entering legendary age status.  She can't hold her urine, can't jump out of the rig, sleeps most of the time, is very grey, and has more knots and knobs on her than Home Depot lumber.  She lives by sheer force of will.  And now she has to contend with what we were told is a Siberian Huskey Golden Retriever dog (known as a Goberian Retriever).  The saga of attempting to "rescue" a dog is a story all its own.  Suffice it to say that if you want to get a good free dog, go to Texas.  

So here's Charlie's dossier:  we got her at 6 months old.  Very friendly dog.  Very curious.  Absolutely fearless.  Took to crate training and potty training very easily.  Is EXTREMELY food aggressive.  I mean we're talking aggressive like a hyena on the Serengeti.  Her food aggression eclipses even that of The Chicken who would kick her own mother down the stairs to smell an empty dog food bag.

Being from a taller breed, Charlie was Beezus' height at 6 months.  I can't help but think this gave her false confidence from the jump.  I don't know if it was that or just the fearlessness of her husky side or what but from day one The Chicken tried to tell her off with growls and snaps and Charlie just didn't care.  She'd jump up and slam both her front paws into Beezus' back, nip at her behind, bite the fur on her back and sides, anything to get a rise out of Beezus.  The wife loved it.  "Payback is a bitch, Chicken!", she'd say.  Oh if she only  knew....

But things went from WWE to MMA with the dogs at dinner time.  We've always owned Labradors.  They are notoriously food motivated.  To say that they can eat fast is an understatement.  There's dog bowls created specifically to help a lab slow down when eating.  But Charlie takes fast eating to a new and alarming level.  Did you ever play the game Hungry Hungry Hippos?  The hippo heads are like little plastic steam shovels that just scoop and devour marbles all in one violent motion.  That's Charlie.  Only she does it so fast you can't tell what's kibble and what's teeth in the blur.  I mean, there was smoke coming off the bowl.  I was so disturbed by how fast she ate that I immediately went and bought one of those odd looking maze-like dog bowls that's supposed to slow them down and "stimulate their mind".  Yeah right.  The only thing Charlie was stimulating was her velociraptor brain stem.  Every night after dinner, she chews the bowl.  Not kidding.  Both her plastic one and Beezus' metal one.  She's such a food psycho she will chew the metal bowl the food was touching at dinner time.

So a fast eater is bad for their digestion since they absolutely do not chew their food.  And most puppies have the digestive system of a goose with dysentery.  But beyond that, if they're especially food motivated (meaning food is my reason for being), they'll search out extra food after they've finished their meal.  Guess who has "extra" food when Charlie is done eating?  The Chicken.  That's right, folks, Beezus didn't know she was in a dog penitentiary and Charlie was coming to shank her for her chow.  

Charlie wolfs down her last bit of kibble and flies across the rig like a rat with its tail on fire, sticks her face directly in Beezus' bowl, and attempts to do her best black hole impression.  I'm not sure what happened next because it was almost cartoonish.  Like an angry dust cloud with teeth and paws flying out of it, they fought.  I was impressed with both the pup and The Chicken.  Who knew the old girl still had that in her?  And how can such a young dog throw a beat down like that?  And it sounded like alley cats fighting or maybe a werewolf fight from a sci-fi film if you sped it up real fast.  Just an awful noise.  We grabbed Charlie by the scruff and lifted her off.  She does this daily, or tries to.  Neither ever end up injured but I've seen Charlie pull off some almost doggy jui jitsu on Beezus.  

Both Charlie and Beezus would steal the crack right out of your ass if they thinks it's food.  The Chicken will beg and bark for food.  Charlie will lurk and use her ninja jumps and super-puppy speed to just snatch your food.  She's totally obedient except for matters involving food.  The wife says The Chicken had it coming.  I think if The Chicken could speak she'd sound like Gilbert Godfried.  But Charlie would sound like Joe Pesci after someone tells her to go get her effing shoe shine box...