We have brought a giant dog butt into our home. This, as it turns out, was a mistake.
As I mentioned a week or so back, my wife and son have been determined to get a dog. I had my reservations, but the reservations were outvoted, and so we drove into the godforsaken land of Indiana and selected a greyhound of our very own. His name is Sunny, and he is roughly the size of a small rhinocerous, or perhaps a large deer. He can put his head in the kitchen garbage can, or on the kitchen counter, or really anywhere where there is food. Food is his primary interest. If precautions are not taken, he will down giant bowls of expensive cat food in a single gulp. Then he goes back to looking for food.
So, the dog mouth, obviously, is a problem and a concern. But again, the real problem is the other end.
If your giant greyhound eats an entire bowl of cat food, it turns out, there are consequences.
There are also consequences if he eats a bowl of dogfood. Or maybe there are just consequences if you move him to a new place. Greyhounds are overbred dogs; their bowels do not work right. Or at least this dog's bowels do not work right. The first day or so he was in our house, he lay about largely inert, exhibiting all the personality of a giant sack of mops.
A giant sack of mops that farts.
The dog is not especially personable, but the farts are distinctive, not to mention omnipresent. We have not obtained a dog so much as a biohazard.
I could live with a dog that does nothing but eat and fart, I guess. That wasn't really what I was sold in terms of "joys of dog ownership" by my loving family, but you learn to adjust. He's fairly cute when he's unconscious, I'll admit, and I can learn to just hold my breath for the rest of my life.
Unfortunately, the dog's butt has other surprises. The farting was just a preview, as it turns out, a warm up for the real dog butt performance.
Which would be shitting giant dog piles of diarrhea in the house.
You hope for man's best friend, and instead you wake up every morning in fear and trembling. You look about the house, wondering where. In the kitchen? In the entryway? Will I step in it? (The answer to that is yes. And yes. And yes.) Will it be a sort of semi-soft ice cream consistency? Or will it actually be liquid?
These are not questions you want to ask yourself first thing in the morning.
Even outside, the dog's butt is a problem. Most dogs, I'm told, like to do their business with some measure of circumspection; in the grass, or at least off the main thoroughfare.
Sunny's butt, though, has other ideas. I take Sunny onto the grass, in the lovely concealing, forgiving snow, and I say to him, "This would be a good spot to relieve yourself in a manner that would not bring woe and lamentation unto me, and other passersby." But Sunny looks up at me with the blank affectlessness of an enormous rutabaga. "I am not in contact with my butt," that vacant look seems to say. "It speaks to me not." So off the grass we go, and back onto the sidewalk, that people in the city use to walk on, and Sunny's butt suddenly drops vast reservoirs of liquid poop.
It's 15 degrees out or so; 10 o'clock at night, and I am staring in the semi-dark, lit by streetlamps, at piles of shit.
The piles of shit stare back at me. Sunny's head does the rutabaga thing.
So I bring Sunny back inside, fill a mop bucket full of hot water and paper towels and go back outside to wash down the sidewalk. It works okay. Though as I am on my knees scrubbing poop from the sidewalk, and wondering whether I am in fact kneeling in dog shit, I have an epiphany of sorts—a moment of cold (did I mention it is 15 degrees?) clarity.
I do not want this dog. I do not want this dog's butt. Also, and relatedly, I never want to see dog poop again.
We have been told that if we feed the dog rice his poop will become less liquid and more controllable. Also possibly yogurt and expensive dog food will help. It is a negotiation, now, between the dog's butt, and his food, and my marriage. Can they all live in peace together?
No. No they cannot.
Did I mention the dog is also peeing on our carpets?
