Doggie Daze

I may have mentioned my little trip to the vet a couple of weeks ago. When we came home, I had to put Gunther in a cone. You know, a collar shaped like a cone to keep himself from licking his leg. A huge one, like a huge lampshade, because he has long legs.

He happened to be on the staircase landing when I cornered him and put the darn thing on. The cone was so amazingly huge that it hit the bottom step whenever he tried going up the stairs. Gunther couldn't figure out that all he had to do was lift his head, and instead believed it was an invisible barrier suddenly preventing him from moving. He also refused to go DOWN the stairs, probably because he couldn't see the step he was aiming for.

We had to show him how to go up and down the steps. For the next few days, Gunther sulked. He stayed flat on the ground, lifting his head only when we forced him outside or filled his food bowl. When he ate, the cone would cover the whole bowl and touch the floor, creating a seal between cone and floor, completely enveloping both dog-head and bowl.

By the time we got back from New York, Gunther was over it. He seems to have forgotten, actually, that he was ever without the cone in the first place. He scratches his head, making a huge plastic scrapy sound, and it foes on for minutes at a times. He pushes through doorways and between legs, scraping things and people and children aside as he passes. He barges through doors before they are open all the way, sometimes keeping me from opening it further at all, and creating another Invisible Barrier.

The cone is now so dirty from being licked and drooled on and puked in and rolled around in the outside dirt, I can hardly stand it. I think I want it off more than Gunther. If that's possible. But it might be because he has forgotten he has it on.

And Gunther has become much more annoying than usual. I don't think he's doing it on porpose. He's just too stupid to realize he is bigger around the head than usual. Like a pregnant woman trying to slip between chairs at a restaurant. Not fitting.



Here is a link about a dog from Hyperbole and a Half. It's worth going to and reading all the way through, even though it may seem a little long. I thought it was long, too, but I was laughing before the end.

Because dogs? They are dumb.