Wild

I suspect the dog may be wild. Not wild at heart, but really wild, a feral animal lurking just beneath the domesticated surface.

A few times a week, we drive up to a dog park that borders a lake on the north side of town. Most of the park is cleared -- muddy half the year, ice-packed the rest. But the slice of park that hugs the lake is wooded, with thick underbrush. Small trails, like tributaries, branch off the main walking path and cut deep into tangled branches.

I let him lead the way. He stays about 20 yards ahead but pauses every now and then to look back, watching me, making sure I'm following. We head down a narrow trail toward a frozen stream that feeds the lake. All along its edge, the ice has turned from opaque white to a blueish clear. If I stepped on it, it would break. But the dog, tracking some scent, runs safely out onto the ice, oblivious to the line between land and water.

Most of the people and the other dogs stay in the big, muddy center. We are alone. Something catches the dog's attention, and he bounds over a rise, toward the lake shore. He runs, nose to ground, pauses, looks up with ears perked, then runs again, not in a straight line, but weaving around like a bumblebee. This is the closest to real wilderness he'll see this month, away from our city apartment and cramped backyard. He could not be happier.

He ignores the other dogs in favor of sniffing and tracking and burrowing through the reeds. Part spaniel, part fox. JK likes to say this dog could never survive on his own, that if we dropped him off in the middle of a field, he'd get eaten by a hawk. But at the dog park, I think him less domesticated, more able to fend for himself in the wild.

He runs ahead and through some trees, and for a few moments, I lose sight of him. I can hear him, though, the sound of breaking twigs and the plod of his footfalls on the ice-encrusted snow. Then, I hear a crash, something breaking, the sound of cracking ice, and I walk a little faster, calling his name. There, in a small clearing, he stands chest-deep in a puddle that, until a few seconds ago, had been frozen over with a thin sheet of ice.

I shake my head. "You deserved that," I say. He just looks at me, wagging his tail, then takes off running.

Sigh.

I am about to become the kind of person who does this to their animal. And I am sorry. If you see us walking down the street, please don't point your finger, or snicker, or say to the person walking next to you, "Oh my god, can you believe that?! Some people are so ridiculous."

Because that's what I say. And if I do this, I won't be able to say it anymore. And I will want you to refrain out of sympathy.

It's not that I care about what other people think. I care about what I think. And these violate my sense of what is right and wrong. Buying them -- and then admitting that I bought them, through the act of using them -- will mean I'm no longer privy to the jokes I once made about People Like That.

Admittedly, this is a far cry from a diamond-encrusted water bowl, or a facial at the doggie day spa. But it's a little more than I feel comfortable with, in the let's-personify-our-pets department. It means I'm contributing even more towards the $40 billion a year that Americans spend on their pets (seriously, people, we could feed a small nation with that).

This almost crossed the line for me --


-- but not quite. It's not like my dog wears his Christmas outfit (which is more of a plaid collar ringed with jingle bells) in public, or anything. Or for more than one day out of the year.

These are different. These are about as public as it gets.

But dude, the dog's feet are frozen. We can't walk the two blocks to the video store without him crying in the middle of the sidewalk. So I figure this is better than that.

Addendum. I don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. If you, dear friend, put boots on your dog in the winter, whether you live in Alaska or Alabama, I still love you. And no, I've never pointed at you and laughed. Honest. Oh, that time? No, I wasn't laughing at you. I was laughing at, um, that mime, you know, the mime who lives across the street and happened to be practicing his Britney Spears impersonation in his front yard. Seriously!

The Gross Post

I have something to say; and frankly, I'm going to be a little graphic.

We got adopted by a cat last month:

Being a two-pet family has its perks: In the winter, it keeps the bed a few degrees warmer. And plus, cats don't beg for walks or table scraps, so it's twice the animal-fun without double the guilt-trips.

And yet, despite the domesticated bliss, we've been having a problem lately. And to be honest with you, it's growing a bit untenable.

The worst thing about having a cat is the cat shit. And the worst thing about the cat shit is that the dog loves to eat it.

So far, our solution has been to block the entrance to the hallway with a baby gate, leaving enough space for the cat to slither through to reach her cat box.

This means that every time one of us needs to get to the bedroom or the front door or the linen cabinet, we're forced to hurdle, straddle or trip over the damn gate. And at least once an hour, I stop whatever I'm doing, stricken with panic that one of us forgot to replace the gate just so.

One afternoon, I realize I haven't seen the dog in a while. I find him in the hallway, with his face coated in litter-crumbs, eating away like it was an all-you-can-eat buffet. Before I can open my mouth to holler, "you dirty-mouthed sack of bones!", his eyes widen and he primly sits down. Then he glances around, as if to see who on earth could have caused such a mess.

The cat poop thing would merely be disgusting, if it also didn't come sprinkled with hearty amounts of litter, which, apparently, can harden into clumps in a dog's intestines and require surgery to remove. So, after dragging him into the kitchen while repeatedly shouting "bad dog!", I call the vet's office.

"My dog ate a bunch of cat litter," I say.

"How much," asks the receptionist.

"I don't know," I say. "He wasn't just eating it like a little appetizer. It was definitely more bottomless bowl, if you know what I mean."

To this, there is silence.

"So, um, maybe a few cups," I guess.

"Lemme get the doctor," she says.

A few seconds later, the doctor comes on the phone. She sounds alarmed and asks me to bring him in immediately, so they can pump his stomach. Can't I do that at home, I ask, to which she sounds a little disappointed. Yes, she says, just give him some hydrogen peroxide. It should do the trick in about 15 minutes.

"This is your own fault," I tell the dog, a few minutes later. "But I'm still sorry for what I'm about to do."

Pinning him to the linoleum floor, I force-feed him 50 milliliters of hydrogen peroxide with Joe's stainless steel turkey baster. He gurgles a lot of it up in a spray of white foam, and then looks at me as if I just stepped on his tail on purpose. Poor guy. I will only say that what happened next was truly, insanely gross, and that now I feel a few steps closer to being ready for human parenthood, if ever that should happen.

In a non-icky-bodily-fluids kind of way, the two-animal family seems to share yet another similarity to parenthood. Every time I play with the cat, I feel guilty. I worry I'm hurting the dog's feelings. I worry he's keeping track of who gets what attention.

After all, he was here first.

Is this how parents feel when they bring home a second kid? Is this how my parents felt? Did they overcompensate somehow, and that's why I'm a little screwed up? Am I screwing up my dog, in a vicious, never-ending cycle?

So far, we have yet to repeat the turkey baster episode. And the dog has only managed a small swipe or two at the cat box. I'm hoping he's learned his lesson. But if he really is keeping score, I suspect I know how he'll act out.