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Kirby

[Al Franken]

I
HAVE TO
be careful when I get home to kiss my wife before I kiss my eight-year-old black Lab. Franni takes offense if I kiss Kirby first. It’s just that sometimes he comes to greet me and she doesn’t.

Also, Kirby has never been mad at me. As anyone who has a black Lab knows, they are sweet dogs who love their masters. It’s not that Franni doesn’t take care of him, especially when I travel, it’s just that I lavish him with so much affection that he knows I’m the alpha male. Actually, I’m not sure that lavishing affection is an alpha trait—but now that Franni and I are empty-nesters, I’m the only male in the house—alpha or not.

Franni won’t kiss Kirby or let him lick her. This isn’t because she doesn’t love Kirby. It’s because he eats dog poop.

Not all the time. Only when he can. Other Labs do this, and it can be a nasty trait. When I walk Kirby, I have to be super vigilant, always on the lookout for stray dog poop. If I go to a dog run, I have to walk the entire place looking for poop and picking it up before I can let Kirby off his leash. As a result, I’ve developed an almost irrational hatred of people who don’t pick up their dog’s poop. Every once in a while I find another Lab owner who has the same problem and we bond like crazy.

Kirby’s very sly. If I steer him clear of some poop on a sidewalk, he will remember where it is. For days. Day One, he’ll lunge for it, and I’ll pull him back before he gets it. On the way back home, he’ll lunge again and I’ll catch him again. Day Two, I’ll be ready and pull him away just as he begins his lunge. By Day Three, Kirby will walk past it all nonchalant and lull me into a false state of calm. On Day Four, he’ll spring, grabbing the dried dung before I’m even aware of what the hell is going on.

After I know Kirby has eaten dog poop, I won’t kiss him for at least a day. By then he’s had three bowls of kibble and a lot of water and I figure all the poop molecules are gone. If not, I figure I’m building up immunities. The trouble is that we use dog walkers to walk Kirby and I can’t be completely sure when he’s eaten poop. I can’t really expect a dog walker to be as vigilant as I am, because basically I’m a nut about it.

There have been two occasions where dog walkers have failed egregiously on this score and the result isn’t pretty. Twice now, once in New York and once in Minneapolis, Kirby has eaten so much poop on a visit to a dog run (dog park in Minneapolis) that, several hours after returning home, Kirby has gotten sick and vomited lots and lots of partly digested dog poop (if you can digest poop).

In New York, he threw up on the couch. It was absolutely horrendous. I cleaned it up as fast as I could, but we ended up having to throw the couch away. As you might imagine, Franni was not happy, and this might have been the low point in their relationship.

In Minneapolis, Kirby threw up in the middle of the night. The retching woke me up and I ran downstairs to see him throwing up on the hardwood floor, thank God. He continued throwing up, on and off, for a couple hours, and I successfully steered him away from the rugs and furniture and managed to save my marriage.

That day I talked about the episode on my radio show. I thought it was relevant because I hadn’t got much sleep and was tired, but some members of the audience were disgusted. Some, mainly dog owners, were amused and even delighted.

I’ve received lots of advice about Kirby’s “problem.” A lot of people get it in their heads that he eats his own poop and suggest putting something or other in his food. But that’s not what he does. He eats
other
dogs’ poop.

Some have suggested using a collar that can give him a shock whenever he eats poop. I’ll admit that I tried that once, but I just couldn’t bear to shock my dog. Recently, someone said that they knew a holistic veterinarian who believes that this is caused by some kind of nutritional deficiency. I can’t imagine that’s what’s going on here, and I am not taking my dog to a holistic veterinarian.

My solution, of course, is harsher penalties for people who don’t pick up after their dog. I’m talking first time a fine; second time, prison. It’s really a quality-of-life issue if you think about it. The enforcement could more than pay for itself. People without dogs would certainly get behind it, and responsible people with dogs (and that’s most of us) would too.

In the interim, while this new legislation works its way through Congress, I would ask my fellow dog owners, pick up after your friggin’ dog!

[
Show a dog the time and he sniffs the leather watchband.—Dan Liebert
]

A Second Act

[Alice Elliott Dark]

A
NOW INFAMOUS
controversy arose last year in the usually warm and furry world of dog books when Raw Bones, the mutt who penned the best-selling memoir
A Million Little Reeses,
was exposed by the Internet media watch site The Steaming Pile as having fabricated many of his claims.
A Million Little Reeses
was already a best-seller before it was chosen by Orpah Doxie as a book club selection for her wildly successful show on the Animal Planet channel. As always, her imprimatur sent sales through the doghouse roof! It seemed every dog everywhere was reading the book. At dog runs only the puppies gamboled in the dust; any dog who’d learned to read could be seen stretched out against a fence, snout buried in the tome.

The attention paid to this dramatic story of one dog’s descent into chocolate addiction and his self-styled recovery barked to thousands. There was new hope, especially for all those dogs who’d tried the methods offered by 12 Step programs, only to find themselves stymied when they simply couldn’t conceive of a higher power to whom they might turn over their runaway appetites. Raw Bones’s tale of old-fashioned determination appealed to those who were unable to find a place for themselves in the pack at meetings, or who were precluded from attending altogether, often by means of a rope tied to a tree. In a population not always aware of its options, Raw Bones had provided a fresh trail, and many rolled onto their backs with gratitude.

Then the accusations of hyperbole, if not outright falsehood, hit the airwaves. Was it true that the book was a lie? At first many of Bones’s fans scratched the counterclaims as being jealousy. When a dog gets famous, particularly a mutt from nowhere, other dogs can get a little weird. Some come out from under the bed to hound him; some seek a butt-sniffing familiarity with him; and some criticize him for thinking he’s best in show. Soon, however, it was clear that Bones had indeed claimed to get chocolate poisoning many more times than he actually did. Nor had he ever reached the end of the line at the pound and had an
X
placed on his cage. In fact, he’d only spent one night at a kennel, and a rather plush one at that. The story unraveled, and Bones, accompanied by his editor, made a famous appearance on
The Orpah Doxie Show
to offer an apology to her and to his packs of readers. Book sales plummeted, and Bones disappeared from the public eye with his tail between his legs.

We at
Mea Culpa
magazine followed his story closely, and recently sent a reporter to visit Bones. Our readers are always curious to see how such cataclysmic experiences and public apologies shake out after some time has passed. Bones was willing to talk to us and invited us to conduct the interview at his place. He lives in a gorgeous doghouse—he did make a lot of money—overlooking the ocean, in a location he asked us not to disclose. Suffice it to say he isn’t an American dog anymore—not that he’d be eligible to join any of our kennel clubs anyway. One look at him and you immediately see generations of unpedigreed sires and dams stretching back into his past.

Not that that matters. The real question on our minds was: had Bones really changed? Read what he told us and decide for yourself.

M
EA
C
ULPA:
Thank you, Mr. Bones, for having us. Our readers are very eager to know how things are going for you today.

B
ONES:
Call me Raw.

M.C.: Okay, then, Raw. I guess we may as well begin with the big question. Why did you write so many lies in your book and then claim it was a memoir?

B
ONES:
You know, you get tired of being at the bottom of the heap, kicked around by people who don’t even bother to try to understand you or your needs, signals, and vocalizations. You see all these dogs who aren’t nearly as intelligent as you leading these cushy lives, being carried around in expensive purses, going to restaurants and premieres and offices. Basically never being left alone. Over time seeing the unfairness that goes on all around you can create a low growl in your throat that just doesn’t go away. Even if you’re not a sight hound you can see that no one is going to give you a chance. You realize that if you’re going to have any luck in this world, you’ll have to make it yourself. That’s what I realized. So I wrote the book.

M.C.: That explains your motivation, but not the lying.

B
ONES:
I didn’t lie! I embellished the truth to make my point stronger. Only the details are lies. I really was a chocolate addict.

M.C.: Stop pacing back and forth. We’re not going to be able to communicate with you while you’re so agitated.

B
ONES:
I’m sorry. Without the chocolate, you see, I have nothing to calm me down.

M.C.: Wow. That’s rough. But it’s so great you quit. Chocolate addiction is really dangerous for dogs. Did you know you could die from chocolate?

B
ONES:
Oh, sure, I knew. Addicts know these things. You have to. Heroin users know how much they can handle. Dogs know about chocolate. I had the stats firmly in my head. It’s all calibrated to weight. I weighed about 50 pounds when I was eating a lot of chocolate. At that weight, toxicity sets in at 200 pounds for white chocolate, which isn’t really chocolate, of course. For milk chocolate and semisweet, it takes about 2 pounds; for cocoa about two-thirds of a pound; and baking chocolate or dark chocolate, about 5 ounces. Dark chocolate was the most lethal and also, naturally, my favorite.

M.C.: Five ounces is a lot, though. A candy bar is about 2 ounces, right?

B
ONES:
Right. But two candy bars in the course of a day is nothing. I could have eaten ten if I didn’t want to stay alive to eat more. I wasn’t completely self-destructive, you know. I mean, I never ran across a highway or anything like that. No death wish. I would push the envelope and eat the two candy bars. Yeah, that made me pretty sick, but I’d just go into the fireplace and eat a bunch of charcoal to set myself straight.

M.C.: That seems like a plan that so easily could go wrong.

B
ONES:
Sometimes it did. I had two incidents in the book that showed how on the edge I was living. There was the time the fireplace got cleaned while I was outside in the yard; I didn’t know about it, so the next time I needed a hunk of charcoal it wasn’t there. I was a pretty sick puppy that night, let me tell you. And then there was the time I was at the house of a person who had a whole bag of Dove miniatures under her bed. I knew I shouldn’t eat them, that I probably wouldn’t be able to save myself if I did, but an addict is an addict and that kind of reasoning means about as much as most language does when your nose is two inches away from some other mutt’s fresh puddle of pee. I had to go to the emergency vet that time.

M.C.: So that was true.

B
ONES:
The book was mostly true!

M.C.: Stay calm. We’re not here to accuse you of anything.

B
ONES:
I know, I know. I’m still a bit skittish. You can’t imagine what it was like. I mean, I’ve been beaten before, but having the Bones name spoken in harsh, scolding tones over and over and over…it really hurt.

M.C.: We can imagine. It’s too bad you couldn’t have published the book as a novel.

B
ONES:
I wanted to! My editor said it would sell better as a memoir.

M.C.: Maybe. But it was such an exciting book. Your writing is really strong. We think it would have sold anyway.

B
ONES:
I can’t think about that. Alternative life trajectories are really hard for me to wrap my mind around. A few memories, an appreciation of the present moment, maybe a thought or two about dinner—that’s about it. I’m really a very simple guy.

M.C.: Are you working on anything now?

B
ONES:
I’m thinking about it. I haven’t come up with the right idea yet.
A Million Little Reeses
was so me.

M.C.: We can see where it’s a hard act to follow.

B
ONES:
It’s hard to learn a new trick.

M.C.: You look very well. That’s good.

B
ONES:
I am well. I’ve lost ten pounds. One of the terrible side effects of a chocolate addiction is you get fat. I’ve dropped my chocolate weight and I’m working out a lot. I put in an electric fence and I’m running inside it, twenty, thirty times around the perimeter of the property in a day. I’m also doing stairs, and I’m eating grass once a week to cleanse my digestive tract.

M.C.: That sounds like a rather abstemious regimen.

B
ONES:
I’m doing what needs to be done. Chocolate has a grip that’s hard to describe if it hasn’t had its choke collar around your ruff.

M.C.: Just as long as you don’t push it too hard. People can become addicted to the cure too.

B
ONES:
Huh.

M.C.: What?

B
ONES:
Oh, just something you said. Hey, did I say I ran around the property thirty times a day? I meant thirty times an hour. I do it five or six hours a day. And I’ve eaten most of the newly seeded grass in the neighborhood….

[
Every hair on a Pointer shouts
“Here!” “Here!”—
Dan Liebert
]