My Nutcase Animals

The two animals I live with are truly bonkers. The cat lived at the vet for a couple of years before I adopted her. The dog was picked up from the side of the interstate, along with a bag of puppy chow, at about 12 weeks old. (Note: This dog was dehydrated, severely malnourished, and already FORTY POUNDS.) So I'm not saying they don't have good reason to be wacko, I'm just telling you that they are.

The cat is my best forecast of when we're going to have a full moon. She's a hefty thing, and as such she usually displays all the enthusiasm of a sloth on Valium. Until it's time to eat, then I try to just aim the food at the general direction of her head from inside an armored car. Food is really important to her. In fact, if she lived in 18th century France and got the guillotine, I'm fully confident that she'd keep her head rolling until she found something worth eating before she finally gave up. If she and the dog were left alone in the house for too long and couldn't find food, and it came to a fight, she'd win, and then she'd eat the dog. No contest.

That's because the dog has some major psychological issues and I don't think you'll find a single person who disagrees. My mother will tell you how smart he is, but there's a difference between being smart and being trainable. And it has taken a LOT of training to get him to sit, shake, and lay down at a 50% success rate. This is not to say I don't appreciate him. He's very pretty. When people see him for the first time, they usually say these two things: 1. Wow, he's BIG! 2. He's so pretty!
He's a golden retriever-German shepherd mix, and you'd think he'd be a little more secure. But no, he has all the confidence of a paranoid-schizophrenic with claustrophobia who's been buried alive. Seriously, he got barely nudged with a chair leg one time and tried to climb over the kitchen counter and out the window. Then he wouldn't come back inside for three days, and he's still terrified of chairs. This dog weights about 80 pounds, and is as tall as I am when we're both sitting.

He also will not go for a walk further than about three houses. He'll go until he gets tired of sniffing, and he'll sit. Let me tell you, you can't make an 80 pound dog do something he doesn't want to do even if you're luring him along with raw hot dogs. He is the laziest dog I have ever seen. Again, he's not that bright, either. You can look into an animal's eyes and tell if it's thinking. I'm not saying the cat is smart, but when you look into her sinus-infection-snot-colored eyes, you can tell she's plotting something and it probably involved bloodshed. You look into the dog's Hershey-brown eyes and can practically hear the flies buzzing around in the empty space in his head.

Suffice it to say that it's a blessing I have anything resembling sanity, or free time after calming down the dog from the door slamming or chasing the cat off my computer which is NOT, by the way, a $1200 investment in butt-warming.

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