Man’s best friend. 4/29/2004
I have always loved dogs, and have had dogs from very early in my life. It wasn’t because of choice. Someone had dumped a bucketful of puppies outside our house, and we heard them yelping in hunger early one morning. Upon investigation, we found 7 mongrel puppies in the bucket. We took them into the house and gave them all a saucerful of milk each, and my mother said I could keep one. I choose the meanest looking of the lot, and called him Fido.
Fido grew up to be a mean, evil tempered, short fused, son of a bitch. He was absolutely afraid of nothing, and had a habit of chasing cars. He regularly got into fights with dogs twice his size, and always sent them packing. He was the only dog I know who never lost a fight. Fido was my very first dog, and he taught me a lot about being responsible. He needed to be cleaned, fed, trained and so on. Which was a bit of a big task for a 6 year old, but I did it all.
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He had no respect for anyone in the house, expect my dad, even though my mum cooked his meals and I fed him. When he came back after a night out on the town, scarred and bleeding, my dad would be the one to pin him down and apply iodine to his wounds. All the while trying to avoid his biting, snarling mouth.
After a couple of years living in a huge house with about an acre of land in a small town, my dad was transferred to the big city. And Fido came with us in the car. During the journey, he sat in between my sibling and myself. Sometime during the course of the drive, we all fell asleep in the backseat, and my younger sibling must have nudged him or touched his tail or something, because he promptly snarled and bit my sibling, drawing blood. My sibling then had to sit in front with my mum on her lap, whilst Fido and I had the back seat all to ourselves.
Coming to the big city was a shock to Fido. The sudden move to a small house, with a postage stamp sized garden upset him greatly. He couldn’t get used to the fact that there were no chickens for him to chase, no cats to terrorise, too many cars to avoid. He became even more short-tempered.
Once, a plumber came to the house, needing to do some work. The gate was unlocked, and Fido was sitting in the porch, watching the plumber get off his motorcycle and get his toolbag and parts for the toilet that needed fixing. The plumber came to the gate, opened and saw Fido. He walked in, saying “nice doggie, nice doggie”. Fido took a deep breath and launched himself at the plumber, snarling like the Hound of the Baskervilles. The plumber saw the flying ball of brown fur coming at him and promptly dropped everything, beating a hasty retreat to the gate. He made it in the nick of time, with Fido closely behind, banging and barking away at the gate in frustration at not being able to maul the plumber. Fido then trotted back to the toolbag and stuff the plumber had dropped, and started sniffing slowly. He selected a toilet seat, and took it with him to his corner of the porch, where he lay down on top of it. I think he was using it as bait, wanting to see if the plumber would come back for it so he could have a second go. My mother had to come out and chain Fido, before the plumber would come back in.
The toilet seat? Fido refused to let anyone come near it, claiming it as a trophy of war. To the end, he would lie down on that toilet seat, waiting for the plumber to come back for it. Fido died one day about 2 years after that, pining for the wide open fields behind the big house.
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