6 Insane Ways Dogs Can Inadvertently Screw Over Their Owners
They say dogs are man's best friend, but if your best friend ate poo and sometimes humped your leg, you'd consider getting a new friend, or maybe we just run in different circles. I have nothing against dogs; you could even say I'm a dog person. I like all dogs except the lame ones (looking at you, cocker spaniels). However, I'm not so blind as to not see what's going on out in the world. For a loyal companion, dogs sure do cause a lot of shit. Next time you're convinced your four-legged friend is the greatest thing since sliced bread, you remember these stories. Then take a good, long look at Fido, because maybe, just maybe, he's been trying to kill you for years and years. Maybe he already did kill you. Maybe you were a ghost for this whole article! Felix Shyamalan twist!
Toxic Dog Gas
So you have a dog, probably some low-to-the-ground thing like a Chihuahua or a wiener dog, and it seems pretty hilarious to you, so you let it stay in your home. Then one day it starts vomiting toxic clouds of supervillain-style knockout gas. Oh shit, you may utter, how did this-
You didn't finish your sentence because your dog's vomit knocked you unconscious and now there's just me here narrating the situation. Maybe I'll go through your drawers while you're out. Maybe you don't know if I mean drawers like a chest of drawers or drawers like underpants. Maybe you'll never know.
All your drawers are damp! Felix out!
Back to the issue at hand. Turns out there's a kind of poison meant to fight off gophers and moles, something you'd expect to see in Caddyshack, that must smell at least a little beefy, since dogs seem to want to eat it. Problem is, it being poison, it's not good for dogs either. Ninety-nine times out of 100, this is a simple trip to the vet. Only this time, with this poison, the dog itself becomes toxic, like a living, crotch-slurping bioweapon. Between 2006 and 2011, four veterinary clinics fell victim to a toxic dog that came in, puked, and knocked everybody in the clinic on their ass.
The cause is zinc phosphide, a chemical used to kill little jerk rodents. When it gets in contact with stomach acid and water, it produces a brand new toxin: phosphine. Exposure to the gas as hurled up by the dogs can cause dizziness, nausea, respiratory distress, chest pain, and handmaiden's scrotum.
Everyone, including the dogs, ended up fine in all these cases, but it's worth noting that your dog, if it wants to, can biological weapon your ass to the ground just by eating crap it finds on the lawn.
Dogalanche
I hear that skiing is a very fun hobby if you're the type of person who enjoys both the cold and the out of doors, neither of which appeals to me in any way whatsoever. But if it did, maybe I would get my skis shined up and grab a stick of Juicy Fruit before heading out to Cameron Pass like Joe Philpott and Alex White. However, unlike those two, I would not bring my dog.
Early in 2013, the two friends had just finished a radical downhill slalom, or whatever it is ski people say when they go skiing. The problem was that the dog they brought was still at the top of the hill, and like any dog, he was unhappy to not be included in the fun. So he ran down the hill. Unfortunately, the hill came with him.
Oh shit, cartoony hijinks!
The tricky thing about snow is that it's kind of a dick. It causes hypothermia, people throw balls of it at you and laugh when your retina detaches, and if it's covering a mountain, something as insignificant as a dog running down it can cause the entire pile of it to come rocketing at high speeds toward the ground.
The result of this avalanche was the death of Philpott and White being trapped for hours before rescuers found him. The dog was never seen again and is presumed to have died, but it's also possible it ran off to await the next hapless skiers who weren't expecting a friendly, loping, avalanche-inducing buddy to join them on their trip.
Poppin' Caps in Asses
Lots of people like to go hunting with dogs, a tradition that dates back to Nintendo's Duck Hunt. Man, that dog was a wicked doucher. He laughed at you. Who trains a dog to laugh at human failure? That's perverse. But the idea of a companion who will help you kill other animals without taking credit is both old and well-revered. Unfortunately, we have yet to learn that dogs are not always the best at this sort of thing, and not just because if you try to take out a bear with a Chihuahua at your side you will die a coward's death.
If you Google it, you'll find a harrowing number of cases of people actually being shot by dogs, which is amazing because a dog can't even get a license to own a firearm and it stands in direct defiance of the standard code of operation for a firearm, which is that guns don't kill people, people kill people. A dog with a gun should, at best, do nothing, or look adorable. Still, lots of people get shot by dogs, including one fellow in New Zealand who was not just shot by his dog, but shot in the ass. The ass! No place on the human body is more hilarious to get shot in, understanding that a shot in the testicles, a zone normally reserved for hilarity, would in this case be terrible and cringe-worthy. Never put a bullet at high velocity into your balls. For you ladies, I recommend you never put a bullet in your lady blossom. You know what I mean.
A Dog at Sea
This entry isn't funny at all; just look at the title. Like, I'm going to put jokes in, but they're going to be super awkward and vaguely insensitive. Sorry. It's my job, though. Jokes, I mean. Being super awkward and insensitive is just sort of a personality affectation of mine.
A family enjoying the beach in Eureka, California, with their dog saw things go from fun to frightening when their dog got swept out to sea. This is a pickle for anyone who is a pet lover, because you don't want your pet to die at sea, but at the same time, you're probably completely unaware of how adept an animal is at surviving all manner of things that you think are traumatic. That sounds like a generalization, but when I see people spending more money on clothes for their dogs than they do on clothes for themselves, it stands to reason that a lot of people forget that their pooch has wolf DNA and, if the world ended tomorrow, he'd be eating their corpses in the dust of the apocalypse, not the other way around.
Anyway, this family panicked as their dog went out to sea, and their 16-year-old son went in after him, followed shortly thereafter by his father. The boy got back on his own, but at that point his father had vanished, so the boy and his mother tried to find him. None of the three humans made it back to shore again. But the dog did. All by himself.
The Road Dog Warrior
When dogs don't have access to firearms, they need to look for other fairly impressive ways to do damage to humans, like rabies. Rabies, of course, showed up in the '70s after a dog had sex with a monkey in Africa, or maybe cats made it and set it loose in Detroit, it's hard to pin down. Point is, dogs can do stuff. Dangerous stuff. And that stuff can also include the operation of precision machines like cars.
In this tale of woe, some carefree chucklefuck was out on a jaunt when suddenly -- BLAMBOW! A car came barreling toward him, possibly at typical barrel speeds. What happened was the car had been left running by its somewhat soft-brained owner. Inside the car, a dog that had no patience for not committing vehicular homicide put the car into gear and started it on its fateful path toward a pedestrian. The pedestrian saw the car heading toward a parked truck and attempted to stop it, instead succeeding in getting pinned between the two vehicles and knocking his ass out. The dog, we can assume, laughed mirthlessly.
I'll grant you that this story is probably a 50/50 split of a dastardly dog and an owner who may abuse solvents, but at the end of the day it was still the dog that went out of its way to try to homicide a person. Purists will claim that a dog can't think like that and this was just an accident, and to that I say I saw Benji and Milo and Otis, and dogs can do all kinds of crazy awesome things. Don't even kid yourself.
DogbamaCare
No one dies in this story or even gets maimed, and yet this one may be the saddest of them all, so I have saved it for last. This is the claw hand you find in the door handle of your car the next morning. This is your Rosebud. I don't mean that as a euphemism for butthole, either.
Baxter, a 14-year-old Yorkie from Colorado, has signed up for Obamacare. I want to leave that as the most important part of this paragraph, and I really want you to savor that. Roll it around a second, see how you enjoy the mouth feel.
At the time little Baxter signed up, only about 360,000 Americans had managed to get through the process, or roughly the population of Miami. Major media outlets had been raking the system over the coals since its inception, and jokes about low enrollment thanks to a poorly designed and executed website were par for the course each and every day. And a Yorkie had made it through.
"I can get a kidney transplant whenever I want."
As numerous problems continue to plague the website and many people find themselves having problems getting properly insured, this dog triumphing over adversity is a majestic Dutch oven for all the peoples of America, a stinky sheet pulled over their heads to rub just a hint of salt in a frustrating wound.
How does a dog sign up for Obamacare, you might wonder? According to his owner, a letter came in the mail proclaiming that the dog was now insured. The likely cause was someone on the insurer's end drinking schnapps on the job, as the owner, when signing up, gave the dog's name as the answer to a security question, which naturally resulted in the dog becoming fully insured. If you can't trust your government to screw you in favor of a beast that licks its own ass, you're clearly not living in America.
Has a dog ever been more insulting to mankind? Short of sleeping with your significant other or possibly urinating on your dead mother after causing her death (perhaps from toxic vomit), a dog qualifying for health care when so few others can even figure out how to get the damn website to load is almost Kaufmanesque in its bleak hilarity. Baxter, you sinister bastard, I salute you.
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