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Standing in the fabric store with your mom, reaching into your pocket, and discovering that you forgot to throw out the plastic bag of dog poop from this morning.
Ohhhh yeah.
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Our dogs don’t chew things they shouldn’t. They chew their chew toys. They don’t chew shoes, or clothes, or newspapers, or anything. EXCEPT.
In the past four days, they have chewed up 3 pair of my $1 flip-flops. Everything else, we can pretty much leave laying out with a huge sign that says “Hey dogs try to chew me!” and they don’t go for it, but the flip flops? They are ninja stealth dogs and manage to find them wherever I hide them.
I think it’s because the flip flops are possibly made with a similar meaterial to one of their early chew toys? Or maybe dogs just sometimes want to chew flipflops.
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When I was probably 12 or 13, my dog Wicket (we got her when I was 10 and she had to be put down when I was 27) was outside pooping one time (anyone noticing a theme?) and I noticed that she was having troubles. She kept dragging her bum on the grass. I was home alone, having refused to go to my brother’s hockey game that day in Nowhere, SK (it took three hours to drive there, flat the whole way, and I had carsickness like you wouldn’t believe back then).
Now, these days I know that bum-dragging is the way that dogs scratch their butts, but Wicket was my first dog that I was in charge of in any way and I was freaking out. I ran over to her and was like “Stop, Wick, stop! Stop doing that!” Yeah. Dogs don’t really want to stop doing things that they’re doing when they’re doing them.
So I picked her up, and I saw something wiggly hanging about two inches out of her butt. I thought it was worms. I didn’t know what to do. The worms! They were flapping and wriggling! And they had poop on them!
I left Wicket in the yard in the hopes that she would drag her bum on the ground enough to get those worms out. Or at least clean them up some. When I was inside, I decided I would perform a little surgery. I made two stops: One at my dad’s tool box for a pair of pliers (I’d been watching Doogie Howser. I needed forceps!), and the other in the kitchen for our yellow dishwashing gloves. I then grimly stepped back outside, where Wicket was still looking confusedly behind her and then dragging on the ground.
I picked her up again, turned her so that her head was under my arm and her butt was in front of my face, used the pliers, and grabbed on to one of the worms. I pulled. The worm… stretched. I yanked agan. Wicket wriggled. The worm stretched some more. The worm was not a worm. It was a partially chewed elastic band. The pliers weren’t working out properly. They kept breaking off little pieces of the elastic. Gritting my teeth, I grabbed it between my begloved fingers and pulled, pulled, pulled, gagging the entire time (Doogie Howser I was not). Eventually it was all out. I freed Wicket, and she ran straight into the house, giving me accusing looks the entire time.
I returned the pliers to Dad’s tool kit, returned the gloves to the kitchen, and promptly blocked the whole incident from memory until I just saw Sprocket sniffing near a box of elastic bands that had fallen off the shelf in the kitchen. You should have seen me slow-motion diving toward him (“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”) and snatching up that box of elastics. These dogs are going to think that they live in a madhouse, if they don’t already.