An excerpt from Wild Dog #4: In Search Of The Inner Puppy. (April 1993)
Originally titled Outside Of A Dog, A Book is Man’s Best Friend. Inside Of A Dog, It’s Too Dark To Read.
Jaxx Good Dogg came back from his morning walk with a two-inch-long puncture wound on the inside of his left back leg.
In a state of shock.
The dog’s injury was a gnarly cut, obviously requiring stitches. Alarmed, Barker called EMERGENCY VET, who offered to charge something in the neighborhood of sixty bucks plus an additional sixty bucks for laboring on the Sabbath.
“But, he’s a twenty-dollar dog,” Barker countered.
Barker figured Jaxx could wait until Monday morning. The dog didn’t seem to be in much pain.
Monday, everything’s cool. The doctor has long hair and an earring. In a rural community of seven hundred people, Barker figured this guy must be good or he wouldn’t have lasted here.
The vet takes one look at Jaxx and says,”He looks like he’s part wolf.” Ha! Like a wild dog.
No problem. The vet can fix the dog and for an additional fifteen dollars he can really fix the dog but good. So, Barker said, his voice rising, okay, sure, throw in the castration.
Five p.m., Barker’s back. Some fat farmer and his fat farm wife are there to pick up their farm dog. The vet comes out, he’s so excited.
The vet tells the fat farmer’s wife about her dog. The little tumors he was planning to remove, well, they came out easy.
Both times, however, the tumors were attached to these other, really HUGE tumors, which, like water balloons full of fat, just SPRUNG! out of the dog’s ribcage.
And the other tumor, bigger than the first, behind the shoulder, SQUISH! The vet had never seen anything like this ever. Fat everywhere.
Barker was ready to hurl chunks himself. The actual medical terms used by the vet were a great deal more disgusting than the layman’s lingo.
So, the formerly fat farm dog, built like a short case of beer covered with patchy brown fuzz, has to go on a special diet, a canine version of Pritikin, to lose twenty percent of its weight.
The fat farm wife says, “Boxlunch (which was the name of the dog) has no will power, Doctor.”
Vet says to the wife, “Boxlunch will just have to be strong, won’t she? I’ll put her on this special diet dogfood called Mr. Ed’s Animal Byproducts Natural Life.”
“We’ve tried that before, Doctor,” the fat wife retorts. “She refused to eat Mr. Ed’s. Didn’t like the taste.”
“She will eat it when she gets hungry enough,” the vet offers. “Boxlunch is not a dog likely to starve herself.”
“She’ll never eat it.”
“She’ll have to learn a little discipline, won’t she?” The doctor is a slender man. “We’ll just have to be strict with her.”
The fat farmer takes one look at the fat bill and says with a grumpf, “Used to be something went wrong with the dog, you got yourself a new dog.”
“Maybe you could restrict old Boxlunch’s pizza privileges for a few months,” Barker suggested. “Maybe take her for a walk once in a while.”
Then things took a more serious, and even increasingly gruesome, tone. The doctor wanted to talk about Jaxx Good Dogg.
This had not been just a routine – yawn – castration, but, yes, ANOTHER INCREDIBLE OPERATION.
And it was only Monday in a one-man animal hospital in a small town like hundreds of other small towns across this grand land of ours.
Turns out the cut on Jaxx’ leg was not a mere gash but an entry wound.
The doctor was about to repair the rip when he heard some sucking noise from inside Jaxx’ groin.
It’s a sound usually made by dead dogs, the vet said.
An examination found that a sharp object had entered the dog’s leg, went into his groin, missed every major organ, missed every major artery.
Basically didn’t hurt anything important, just kind of filleted the entire groin.
Before going all the way through to the knee bone of the dog’s other back leg.
“Like the inside of a glove,” the amazed vet offered. “You could put your whole hand in there.”
The sharp object came back out the same way it went in, the aforementioned two-inch gash.
Best the vet can figure, Jaxx – perhaps the world’s greatest athlete, makes Air Jordan look like Aircraft Carrier Jordan – was leaping some tall fence in a single bound and got himself hung up on a thin metal pole.
The dog probably struggled side-to-side to escape, then lurched up and backed off.
Which had to hurt like a booger.
Now totally recuperated, Jaxx did develop a lingering post-operative side-effect, a farting problem.
A large canine with a flatulence issue soon becomes Outdoors Dog. Which would be a great new superhero, maybe.
Jaxx Good Dogg is so smart he has trained an entire household of humans to rush to the door and beg him to go outside and get some fresh air before he farts anew. Whenever he cuts the cheese.
The trick to good pet management, say Barker Ajax, Dog Trainer To The Stars, is not teaching your furry buddy to pass gas every time he feels like taking a stroll.
By the way, the dog has the recuperative powers of Richard Milhous Nixon.
From the looks of it, he’ll recover fully.
Except for his balls.
Jaxx Good Dogg, that is.