Dog Doo

The house is quiet and the dogs are put away for the night. Fellow woofs gently and whines, twitching and paddling in his sleep, gently rattling the bars of his kennel, and then is quiet again. I am finished deleting emails, ignoring spam phone calls, and looking at TikToks until my phone runs out of juice.

It snowed again last Friday, and some more on Saturday, and so by Sunday when I was putting on my snowshoes to walk the dogs in the woods, it was somehow a little bit fresh and exciting again. Even the Bacon Provider set aside the barometer/altimeter iPhone app he works on on weekends to come with us.

His snow boots were with mine in the back hall. His snowshoes were on a shelf in the garage. He found a hat he could use in the closet, but where were his gloves? Didn’t he use them to dig out his car on Saturday? He grabbed a pair of insulated work gloves instead.

And we jollied Captain into coming along.

The original layer of deep snow is now several weeks old, and I am glad I checked the backyard for poo before it fell. I have done my best to dig up the dog shit in the yard as it has been produced, but there are three of them, and they eat two meals a day, and hot poo sinks in snow and the snow re-freezes overnight, and then you have to chip it out again. It’s nasty. It’s necessary. It’s part of owning dogs.

If you are thinking of getting yourself a pandemic puppy, go forth with the knowledge that your dog may bring unconditional love to your life, should get you to go outside more often, and comes with drool, barking, and probably more poo than you bargained for. A dog trainer I knew many years ago used to say, “Barking is one of the functions of a dog;” it is something I think about almost every day. Pooping is another of the functions of a dog. Also, you will regularly examine your dog’s poo, and find out how they’re doing, and also that they’ve been eating cat turds, or toilet paper rolls, or sticks.

As we dug out the snow by the gate so we could leave the yard, I told the Bacon Provider that going into the woods with two dogs off leash was harder than going into the woods with three dogs off leash, because three is a pack, and the old one will stay with you, and the other ones will keep checking in; but when there are just two dogs, they go off together and make bad choices (barking at the neighbors, chasing deer). Of course, I was full of shit.

All three of my dogs return on recall (which is why it is ok to take them out of the fenced yard and into our woods). But, they are not perfect and neither am I. So I headed into the woods, and right away I had to redirect Fellow who was headed in the wrong direction, and by the time I got to the bottom of the hill, Eggi and Fellow had run past me and the Bacon Provider pointed out that Captain was not with us. Almost without stopping or turning around (you have to make a small circle in snowshoes! If you try to turn on the spot you will almost certainly fall over), I declared with all the wisdom of the dog expert of the house that the dog would follow if the Bacon Provider would stop looking back to see if he was coming. And again, though this is usually true, it was, in this case, not true.

With continued encouragement, Captain did eventually catch up to us, and we did manage a couple of laps of the snowshoeing trail I’ve been maintaining. We did a bit of exploring of the part of the woods that is normally the wettest and thus the least explorable. Under the snow the ice had melted, so we were walking over frozen mud and open water. This is the part of the woods where the skunk cabbage grows; last year it came up in March.

When we got back up the hill to the gate, we found the reason Captain had gone back to the yard: he needed to poop, and had wanted to get back into the yard to do his business.

Now in the past I would have finished by saying something along the lines that we can all relate to Captain’s predicament, because who doesn’t prefer pooping at home? But these days, who goes anywhere?

So, instead I will end with include pictures I took when I was brushing their teeth.