Another Jump the Shark moment whereupon I talk about dead pets.

If you knew me, you'd probably consider me an outdoorsy kind of guy. I like backpacking and canoing, hiking and snowboarding. When people see that, and then find out I don't care that much for dogs, I think that fact wrecks their stereotype of me. "How can you not like dogs?" they ask. "You are clearly a walking, talking Orvis ad, so what's up with that?"

Well, it's like this. I don't like dog slobber, I don't like dog smell. I don't want the responsibility. We had a dog growing up. A big, stupidsmart* German shepherd/Collie mix named Doc.



Doc was the "family dog." My father got him for the family, but not all members of the family were completely down with that. I, for one, really had no interest in dogs, and therefore thought it entirely unfair that two of my assigned chores revolved around taking care of him. I'm not sure whether it was my mother or father who thought it would be uproariously funny to put me in charge of the dog's entire digestive process from start to finish, but that's what they did. It was my job to feed him every day, and it was also my job to clean up the resulting giant piles of crap every weekend. Sometimes I could get my brother to trade with me for the dishes and garbage duties, but that was rare, and usually involved a lost bet on his part.

Let me tell you, this clean up duty was a LOT worse than it sounds because in retrospect he was clearly too much dog for our property at the time, and we never should have owned him. He was a rescue pup from the pound, and I think my father just didn't want to see him put down. He needed a place he could run, and even though my father took him out for a run in the woods almost every night when he got home from work, it wasn't enough. We would take him out for walks but that never ended well. One random squirrel and we had two choices: Drop the leash, or be dragged down the street until we were almost skinless. Sometimes, we'd try to get him to pull us on our skateboards, which never really worked since he had two speeds - a dead stop and an all-out run, which he combined in unique and unpredictable ways.

During the day, he stayed in a penned area in the yard that he eventually wore down to a urine-soaked hardpack. And since the generally accepted interpretation of "clean up" was "bury," I quickly learned that you can only dig so many holes in a 16x16 foot area before you are just digging up the crap you buried the week before. It was horrible. It looked horrible, it smelled horrible, and I cursed my parents and that dog every day of my young, slave-driven life.

I loved winter and hated spring. This was because in winter, the crap was frozen and didn't stink as much. Also, each new snowfall covered the crap piles so I didn't have to clean them up. That was all well and good through about the middle of March, but when the snow thawed and combined thirty seven layers of frozen dog shit into one layer of dog crap soup, that clean up effort became one of SuperFund proportions.

The daily feeding was another issue. Was I allowed to simply shake a bag of dry food into a bowl, or plop a can of Alpo into a doggie dish? No, I was not. Instead, my father created "the mix," which I now firmly believe he did just to mess with me. The method for creating the mix was as follows:

(1) take a food storage bag from the cabinet and dump in a can of dog food that smells like roadkill and has a consistency of cold refried beans with pockets of nasty orange gel.

(2) take a cup of dried Gravy Train dog food and dump that into the bag.

(3) Add a small amount of water.

(4) Knead the bag until (a) the entire contents is completely mixed, or (b) the bag gets a hole in it and some of that nasty smelling orange gel squirts out on you, causing you to gag repeatedly.

After I made the mix, I had to turn on the backyard spotlight, walk out to the dog pen in the dark, and squeeze that pasty mixture out of the bag and into his bowl, all the while trying not to step in any fresh piles that may have been produced from the previous night's bag.

My mother, of course, thought it was hilarious to wait until I got about half way to the pen before turning off the spotlight. She would wait about 30 seconds and then turn it on again. This was apparently fun for her, and she would do it almost every night, no matter how much I begged her to stop. One night, as soon as she plunged me into darkness, I just dropped the food and ran like hell and hid behind the shed. When she flipped the light on, there was no sign of me -- only the bag of dog slop sitting in the middle of the lawn. I stayed there until she came out to look for me, and then I jumped out from behind the shed and scared the crap out of her. After that, she laid off the light flipping for a little while.

Anyway, one more thing to add to the pile of things that annoyed me about this dog. He liked to run, as I mentioned, but he also liked to run in one direction -- away. Since the only one he would listen to was my father, this meant when he escaped from the back yard during the day when my father was at work, my mom would pack us all into the car and we'd end up chasing him around the neighborhood. I still hear the cries of "HEEEEERE DOC! HEEEEEEEERE DOC!" in my nightmares. He got picked up by animal control once, and once was enough to learn how to avoid that in the future, and he never got caught again. He was a smart dog. After a while, the guy in the truck would just call us to tell us he was out again. Doc would eventually come home, covered in mud or something worse, and we'd be forced to give him a bath, which tended to soak us as much as it did him.

My dislike of Doc only deepened as the years went by. When I was in college and still living home, he would wake me up either by howling in the middle of the night, or barking at six o'clock in the morning. I was hoarse from opening my window and screaming at him to shut up. It would work for approximately 30 seconds, and then he'd start up again. It was great for a hangover, let me tell you.

As luck would have it, I was the only one home besides my father on the day Doc died. Early that morning, my father came to get me out of bed and said, "We have to bring Doc to the vet. Something's wrong with him." I threw some jeans on and groggily followed him down to the garage, where the dog slept at night. He was lying on his side, whimpering and flailing around like he had no control over his legs. He was foaming at the mouth, and snarled every time you tried to touch him. "I think he had a stroke," my dad said, and I remember thinking that maybe I liked that stupid dog a little after all, because why else would I have a lump in my throat and feel like I wanted to cry? It was hard to see him in pain like that. We carefully picked him up and loaded him into the back seat. As my father drove, I sat there with my hand on Doc's head talking to him, telling him it was OK, and that he was a good dog. There was nothing the vet could do except put him down.

He was annoying and smelly and hard-headed and a giant pain in the ass 99% of the time, but he was a part of the family and we were used to having him around, just like my brother Houdini.

I'll never forget Doc, but I definitely wouldn't want another dog like him. I think I like the idea of a dog, but not the reality of a dog. In other words, I want Lassie but I know I'll end up with Santa's Little Helper.



*a made up term to describe a dog that can can somehow learn to do 10 different tricks, yet never learn how to not bark incessantly at every random squirrel or bird that passed by.