This guy just got himself a beagle puppy:
Rookie error. If only he had asked me for advice first.
I can see that I’m going to have to set up some sort of pre-emptive advisory service for foolish individuals such as this.
That is, if I have time between repairing the garden and saving geckos from the jaws of our own huge mistake.
According to this comment, I should be thinking of Colin as clickbait. The rationale, as the commenter goes on to explain, is that revenue from the Google ads clicked upon by people coming here to see photos of Colin could be used to pay for replacement furniture. It’s a good plan, but there’s going to have to be a lot of clickage to sort out all the damage.
Earlier this week, the dog discovered the joy of digging up the lawn. Turns out that it’s actually very good at it too. Let’s make no bones about this (pun intended), I KILL MOLES WITH A SPADE for doing exactly the same thing. And then on Monday evening, I spent an hour repairing the wire from the alarm contact on the front door because it had been chewed through (the wire, not the front door) (yet). While there’s no actual proof that this was the dog, sources indicate that they are around 99.999% certain it was Colin-related.
Beyond. Reasonable. Doubt.
Look, I’ll admit it. It looks fairly harmless, doesn’t it? It’s clever though. Devious. It has already learned the power of public relations and it poses, looking mournful, underloved and completely innocent, as soon as it sees a camera or cellphone. It has naked selfies on the iCloud and will rightfully expect widespread pity when its account is hacked.
Don’t be fooled.
Once the camera is gone, the mischievous, destructive escapologist reappears. Things get dug, chewed, eaten, damaged. The dog isn’t where you left it and you’ve no idea how it got where it is. Your daughter has been partially devoured. Colin is about 1o weeks old. Apparently, “it gets better” by the time they’re about 10 months old.
Something is going to have to give.
Colin is here and it’s like having a new baby in the house. Excitement, no sleep, apparently random defaecation events and a check up at the vet. (Yes, we were actually so tired after our daughter was born that we once took her to the vet. She’s now the only six year old in Cape Town who is vaccinated against distemper.)
Colin is officially called Tigger by the rest of the family, because the breeder told us that she was the bounciest of the litter.
She’s already made the place her own and I’ve consequently resigned myself to fifth place in the house (still just ahead of the goldfish).
File under Acts, German students carrying out inexplicable.
Via the Daily Telegraph and rather late due to World Cup traffic blocking the South African internet (cough):
The 26-year-old drove into the grounds of the motorcycle gang members’ clubhouse north of Munich on Sunday, according to reports in local media.
The young man, who was not identified, then dropped his pants, threw the puppy, and then fled.After making his getaway, he stole the bulldozer from a construction site, and attempted to drive it to Munich. However, it was not fast enough, and his snail-like pace caused a 3-mile traffic jam near the southern town of Allershausen.
He then fled to his home nearby where he was apprehended by the police.
“What motivated him to throw a puppy at the Hell’s Angels is currently unclear,” said a spokesman for local police. He said the student had lately been suffering from depression.
The puppy was now in safe hands at a local animal shelter, the spokesman added.
Look, I think we’ve all done something like this when we’ve been a bit down at some point in our lives. I once hurled a squirrel at the bouncers outside the Ritzy nightclub in Newcastle and then escaped on a pogo stick after a Biochem practical went slightly wrong at Uni. And then there was the time I lobbed a goose at those soldiers and made off on a golf cart because I’d run out of jam.
There are many other incidents of this nature buried deep in my past, but those aren’t for here.
And what a line from the police spokesman: “What motivated him to throw a puppy at the Hell’s Angels is currently unclear”. I bet he couldn’t wait to get home to Mrs Spokesman: “You’ll never guess what I had to tell the media today, dear!”…
His optimism is refreshing though – the use of the world “currently” suggests that – at some point – they actually expect to get a rational explanation of why the man woke up that day and decided to fling a small dog at some hairy bikers.
I’m willing to bet that the bulldozer thing was just a spur of the moment decision.
It was a bad one.