Damn, my dogs sure are a pack of Nazis
November 6, 2009 by William K. Wolfrum
When people learn that I have four dogs, they immediately comment that I must be a crazy dog person. And I really can’t argue with that assessment. I’m a crazy dog person, what can I say. I love my little pack, and would probably give them total control of my home if they had the presence of mind to ask.
Still, not all is wine and Milkbones with my pack. You see, my dogs are Rawhide Bone Nazis. I start doling out the bones, and they go completely National Socialist German Workers’ Party on me.
It starts simply enough. I’m at a store and see rawhide bones and despite my knowledge that all hell will break loose if I buy them, I buy them anyway. If you’re a dog lover like me, you understand. If nirvana is a place you want to be, few things will help you get there like feeding a dog. Even a Nazi dog.
First there’s Duchess, my Australian Shepard. If ever a dog was sweeter, I’d like to meet it, because Duchess is a truly loving soul. But if I give her a rawhide bone, she goes after it the way Hitler went after homosexuals and the disabled. I could give her a rawhide bone the size of Goebbels, and she’d still devour it in a matter of seconds. It’s kind of frightening to watch, actually. She goes totally Nazi on the thing and then spends the next few days expelling Hitler Youth-sized rawhide chunks.
Jack (a Boston Terrier) and Afonso (our infamous mutt) have a whole other approach when getting rawhide bones. They get more paranoid than Eva Braun must have been when she was in the bunker with Hitler. Jack – who loves humans more than Hitler loved rounding up and killing Jews – immediately turns on us. He becomes convinced that the main reason we gave him the bone in the first place was so that we could take it away from him. So he buries it. Then, moments later, he digs it up and eats it. Jack prefers his bones a la Dirt, I suppose. Like the dirt the Nazis used for mass burials of those they murdered.
Afonso is far worse. With the paranoia of an aging Hitler, Afonso goes into SS mode and hides in his doghouse with it. For literally hours, he’ll have the bone two feet away and just watch it, guarding it much like Nazis guarded the concentration camps where they murdered six million Jews. The beauty of it is this – he’ll let you take it away from him and the moment it leaves his sight, he goes back to being his playful self. He goes from Nazi to dog in a split second, and if you give the bone back, it’s right back to Nazi.
Then there’s Max, my other Boston Terrier. The oldest and by far the smartest of my dogs, Max is the only one that remains calm when he gets a bone. He’s the calmest little Nazi of the bunch. He’s learned from years of experience to immediately eat whatever we give him. He knows more is coming, much like the Nazis knew there’d be more trainloads of Jews and other undesirables heading to the concentration camps.
Basically, buying rawhide bones sets off a Holocaust around these parts. Millions of bones have been eradicated and millions of more are on their way. Because I’m a crazy dog person, and I can never deny them, regardless of how Final Solution-y things get around here. What can I say? I love my little Holocaust Hitler Nazi dogs.
–WKW
What do you expect? Rawhides are good. If you gave them pigs’ ears, they could go all Chairman Mao on your whole neighborhood.
Try Greenies. They’re like crack for dogs.
My dear departed canine friend was part German Shorthair, so he came by his Teutonic fascism naturally, and, though he enjoyed rawhide ‘flip chips,’ his moments of demonic Nazi possession would emerge whenever he was near a ball that would fit into his mouth. The gleam in his eye said “The ball is all” and he Hitlerized hundreds of tennis and rubber balls into oblivion in his time, crunching them with his Master Race teeth into dust. The only time he would let you have the sacred ball was if you wrested it from him forcibly, thereby coating your hands with the slobbery goo of vengeance, or if he thought you might throw it for him to chase.
Fortunately, he could usually be distracted by a tasty treat long enough for me to hide the ball and, thanks to the brevity of dog memory, he would forget about it – for a while anyway. He was a mild-mannered and affectionate friend otherwise, but a ball turned him into a fierce red-eyed Stormtrooper defending Der Fuhrer’s Fatherland.
Like you, I could never stop buying him new balls, though.