Krispy Kreme K-9s

Laverne sniffed my hand suspiciously. “You’ve been petting someone tall, dark, and handsome,” she said in an accusing voice.

“There’s been no petting in my life in quite some time,” I said, adding, “Maybe we need to get the nose checked?”

“Not human tall, dark, and handsome. Canine. And while you were out fooling around, the cat ate all my food. I’m starving.”

She had me.

Last week, as part of an assignment for the magazine, I spent an afternoon riding with Officer Steve and his dog, Abbas, one of the K-9 teams in our local police department.

Abbas is an 8-year-old Belgian Malinois (pronounced Mal-uh-wah) who was born in the Netherlands and has a pedigree longer than Lindsay Lohan's rap sheet. He’s been certified by the Dutch Royal Police. According to his partner, Officer Steve, Abbas has participated in five arrests, including that of a convicted murderer and a child molester. And get this: every person he’s arrested has made a visit to the emergency room on his way to the pokey. In fact, the convicted murder walks with a limp now. He’s missing the Achilles tendon in his right ankle, thanks to Abbas.

Laverne and Shirley were impressed. Kind of. They began yapping about pursuing a career in law enforcement. Part-time, of course. With doughnuts at least twice a week.

“I don’t think the police department is looking to add dachshunds to the force,” I said. “You can do some damage to a possum, but I don’t think the bad guys would be scared of you.”

“The tax assessor was scared,” Shirley pointed out. “And we instinctively went for the Achilles, just like Abbas did.”

“She was barely five feet tall, and you didn’t even break the skin,” I pointed out. “Plus, police dogs have to be brave enough to go into buildings and clear them so that the human officers are safe. You guys are afraid of leaf blowers and vacuum cleaners.”

The hair on the back of Lavern’s back bristled. “I’ve cleared a room before. Remember the gay decorator?”

“Laverne, crapping on my living room floor cleared the room, yes. But making the decorator gag didn't help me.” I continued, “Here’s something else about Abbas: He’s trained in food refusal so that he can’t be bribed or poisoned. In contrast, I’ve thought about having the two of you tested for Prater-Willi Syndrome, that disease that causes you to keep eating because you never feel full.

They howled at the insult.

I continued, “Remember biting the Domino’s guy when you were trying to get the pizza?”

Shirley growled. “That guy put the pizza in a sheet to be hauled up to the second floor so that your kids could sneak pizzas in after midnight! We weren’t trying to get the pizza. We were alerting you!”

Laverne poked Shirley with her nose and whispered, “I’m pretty sure law enforcement dogs don’t lie.”

Shirley hung her head in shame. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes.

“Hey, guys,” I said. “Not everyone is cut out for police work. But some make great security guards. Our house has never been broken into, and you keep this yard completely free of squirrels, possums, and UPS guys. You’re pretty awesome at what you do.”

They weren’t convinced. They moped around until I thought to tell them that Abbas is rewarded for his hard work with a piece of PVC pipe.

Turns out, they like the security gig. They get eggs.

A Pain (or two) in the Neck

Recently, a neighbor took the time to walk across the street and ring my doorbell to inform me that he is unable to sit on his front porch in the afternoon and enjoy a glass of wine because my dachshunds bark too much.

Seriously? It’s been cold enough to freeze the balls off the monkey statue next to my pool (pictured above), and you’re sitting on your front porch with a glass of wine? The only other time we’ve talked, you were putting your garbage in my yard so that the truck would get it on their “return trip” down our street. I’ve got news for you, neighbor: I’ve never seen a garbage man go both ways. I wonder if you're really rowing with both oars.

But being the good neighbor that I am, I have already contacted the Invisible Fence people about purchasing bark collars for my dogs. The reason I haven’t done it sooner is that they already wear the Invisible Fence collars to keep them in the yard, and I didn’t want them to be confused about why they were getting zapped in the neck.

It’s too bad Puppy Tweets aren't available yet.

What are Puppy Tweets? Mattel is getting ready to roll out a product that allows dogs to use Twitter. The special collar is pre-loaded with 500 phrases, and every time the dog moves or barks, the owner receives a new Tweet.

Some of the pre-programmed, generic messages an owner could receive via text are

*I bark because I miss you. There I said it. Now hurry home.
*It’s not the catching of the tail. It’s the chase.
*Can we get some sparkling water for the toilet bowl?

Kind of boring, right? Had Puppy Tweets previously existed, here are some of the messages I would have gotten from my dachshunds:

*I bit the UPS guy. Animal control has been called.
*When am I off quarantine for biting the tax assessor?
*Get us a new bed on your way home. We were bored today and ate it.
*You forgot to feed us so we ate all the pansies in the pots.
*It's 27 degrees outside and the stupid neighbor is on his porch.

My dachshunds already have their regular collars (necessary for displaying the rabies tags in case they bite) and their Invisible Fence boundary collars. If I add a bark collar and a Tweet collar, they’re going to look like the Burmese Pai Dong Long Neck People, the ones known for stretching their women’s necks with brass rings.

So the doggies and I have come up with a solution. We’ll forego the bark collars and wait for Puppy Tweets, provided they promise to only bark when it’s REALLY important for them to send me a message. Acceptable TWEETS are as follows:

*Luverne is trying to eat from the cat’s litter box again.
*UPS guy is here. You have a package! If you want, we’ll go ahead and open it for you.
*The cat told me she is going to kill you in your sleep tonight. Get rid of the cat.
*Your kids are throwing a party. They’re giving us beer to buy our silence. You’d better come quick.
*The dumbass across the street is putting his garbage in our yard again.

Come to think of it, those are pretty much the only things they bark about anyway. And let’s be fair -- their brains are the size of an Everlasting Gobstopper, and that’s what they’ve been programmed to do. They, at least, know that garbage trucks don’t go both ways down the same street.

Metaphysical Mutts

Having their pictures hanging in the local post office for biting the mailman just wasn’t enough for the dachshunds. The felonious little beasts are now on the county’s list of vicious animals, and they’re under house arrest, which in this case means they’re only allowed to leave the confines of our home under heavy security. Two leashes each.

Laverne and Shirley are the biggest little troublemakers on the planet. Well, Laverne is little. She’s eight pounds of pure badass, trotting her little self all over the yard as if every cat, dog, or person who passes should be terrified of her. And they should be. She bites. Not hard enough to break the skin, but it doesn’t exactly tickle, either.

Shirley used to be twelve pounds, until she ballooned to twice Laverne’s size. Last fall, gained four pounds in one month. That’s a twenty-five percent weight gain. In Oprah’s world, it’s enough to get your picture on the cover of several tabloids with the blaring headline “OUT OF CONTROL!”

She was fat and lethargic and mad as hell about it. God knows that if I gained that much weight in one month, I’d bite someone, too.

The vet determined that Shirley had a thyroid problem. After a few weeks on soloxine, her “Skinny Shirley” pills, she was almost back to her normal weight. And I have to say that, if it weren’t for having seen the Seinfeld episode in which Kramer helped himself to the canine meds and then started to act like a dog, I might have been tempted to pop a couple of those little pink pills.

The soloxine did not, however, temper Shirley’s temper. She’s like Mike Tyson on speed when a stranger enters our yard, especially a stranger she deems to be of questionable character. And somehow, she’s surprisingly accurate in her character assessments.

According to some of the New Age wizards, animals mirror the behavior of their owners. But whose behavior are my dogs reflecting?

Well, for starters, the dachshunds are extremely protective of our children. I can grab my son and playfully shake him, and within seconds, Luverne is hurling her body at me like a Kamikaze fighter. Protecting the kids – that’s like me.

I’ll take credit for the pancake batter incident, also. They once intercepted the UPS guy and opened a package containing five pounds of sweet potato pancake mix. I pulled into the driveway to find them lying in the yard, bloated and unable to move. I love sweet potato pancakes, especially with cinnamon syrup. And although I haven’t gained twenty-five percent of my body weight in one month, four pounds in thirty days can be easily accomplished with the help my friends Ben, Jerry, and Sara Lee. So the dogs’ eating habits are more like mine, although I don’t eat shit. Well, on second thought, I swallowed a lot of my husband’s crap without thinking twice.

But pushing little kids down and attempting to hump them? And rooting around in gym bags looking for dirty underwear to chew on is something I can’t say I’ve ever done. They got that from my former husband.

So they’re a combination of my ex-husband and me, I guess. Energetic mixed breeds. Metaphysical mutts, if you will.

Well, there is one more story I should tell, an incident that happened after the divorce was final which might tip the balance in favor of my being their reflective inspiration.

My property taxes went up. The county claimed that a “Change of Ownership” prompted the reassessment and that the higher valuation reflected the increase in market value.

Being a writer, I quickly fired off a letter that only marginally veiled my outrage. First of all, there had been no change of ownership. I had received the house in the divorce and had, upon the advice of my tax attorney, placed the ownership of my home in a trust, appropriately titled the Grace Adams Trust. The name was the same, I pointed out. Secondly, I reminded the Office of Tax Assessors that the housing market was in a serious slump. According to recent reports on “Good Morning America,” my home was only worth two thirds of its previous valuation. So either they could reduce that valuation to accurately reflect current market values, or they could just agree that no name change had ever taken place, and we would all just forget the whole unfortunate incident.

Well, the unfortunate incident got worse. They sent an assessor to my home, but nobody told me she was coming. Had I been warned, the dachshunds would not have been patrolling the perimeter of my property hunting squirrels, moles, and well, tax assessors. The poor girl had no idea that the cute little doggies wagging their tails while barking ferociously would actually bite. (Actually, their method of attack is quite sophisticated. Laverne barks the ferocious warning, and Shirley sneaks up from behind and draws blood from the thin-skinned area around the ankle.)

I actually felt sorry for a tax assessor.

County Animal Control came to my house and verified they were current on their rabies vaccinations. They put my dogs on the county’s list of vicious animals and a ten-day home quarantine.

And then the county put my home’s valuation right back where it had been in the beginning.

Barking and growling while wagging their tails. They got that from me. Then again, if your dog barks and growls and chases tail, it could be mirroring the behavior of a cheating husband.