Crash went the conehead dog. Crash, scrape, bang, crunch, screech, scratch … scratch … scratch — those nails on plastic, sounding like a rat trying to claw through a plastic milk jug. Another crash, clunk, bam, slice … eeeyyyyooowww-OUCH!
The “ouch” was the conehead dog’s lighting fast reaction to a morsel of food dropping beneath the table … lunging between chairs — and my legs — to get it … forgetting there was a plastic cone the size of a deep-space satellite dish rapped snuggly around her neck. Three layers of skin and a bushel of hair were instantly shaved from my leg.
Stupid conehead dog!
You know what a cone is? The kind you put on a dog when they have a wound that needs to heal? You can’t trust a dog with his or her wound. They don’t have the good sense to leave it alone and would just as soon lick their whole appendage off.
In my dog’s case, she had stitches on the top of her noggin and along the elbow of her front leg. A couple things had to be removed and biopsied. Turns out she’s fine. Expensive, but fine.
Our vet, Dr. Nicholas, stitched her up with what looked like fishing line — the kind you would use if you were out trawling for great white sharks. It was blue and thick. He knows my dog Chase all too well. I think he would have used stainless steel dipped in Tabasco sauce if he’d had any around.
The last time my dog needed stitches, she outsmarted the cone or maybe we took it off at night so she could sleep more comfortably. There in the dark — with her teeth! — she removed her sutures with such surgical precision. There wasn’t a mark to be found the next morning — barely even the holes where the stitches used to be. It was extraordinary — I pictured her carefully untying them with her teeth — and even the vet was impressed. (I think he wanted to hire her.)
So this time he was taking no chances, and when my wife picked the pooch up he gave explicit instructions: Keep the cone on … for two weeks … no exceptions. She can’t be trusted.
We obliged, and poor, sad, clumsy Chase went about the house with her satellite dish cutting big grooves in the walls and knocking over china cabinets. How she didn’t break her neck with the number of times she crashed into walls and furniture is beyond me.
On walks it was even worse. She had no concept of how far the cone stuck out on either side, so as she went about her sniffing, say of a car tire, the cone would clip and snag on the fender. Slam! followed by a horrible metallic screech like razor blades on a chalkboard. At one point I thought she ripped an entire fender off.
Always the hound, her nose would then hover just above the ground, the cone scooping up dirt like a snowplow. Back in the house she would race for a drink of water, the drool dripping down into the cone to form a thick puddle of mud.
That was if we could even get back in the house. She never quite mastered the whole opening of the screen door, and couldn’t grasp that her thin little frame would no longer squeeze around the door as I opened it. Instead the door would catch on the cone, pinning her against the wall and creating a stalemate: the dog unable to go forward no matter how hard she tried, and unwilling (or lacking the brain cells) to simply back up so I could open it all the way.
The more I yelled, “backup stupid dog or the mosquitoes will eat us alive,” the more she took this to mean, “hurry, push harder. If you just keep crashing into the door you’ll eventually get through.”
Conehead dog!
The cone is off now. Chase couldn’t be more relieved. And we are, too. No more listening to the loud crashes and bangs in the middle of the night as she wandered to the kitchen in search of a drink. No more legs scratched raw while eating dinner. And no more cleaning the mud puddles out of the filthy satellite dish. I sure won’t miss that.