This is an indestructible dog toy.
I should not say that. The manufacturer is quick to add that no dog is indestructible: these are just better-made and more dog-resistant at most.
For those of you who do not have dogs, the toy is a starfish. When it came out of the box it was neatly seamed like a soft-pointed pentagon. None of the points were missing. Nothing was frayed. There was no stuffing drizzling out through holes in the face because there were no holes. Pay no mind to the wad of stuffing in the upper right hand corner–that came from a different indestructible dog toy.
Judging from the manufacturer’s description, therefore, I have on indestructible dog and one flimsy, wimpy, any-old-kind-of toy dog. The starfish was a Christmas gift for the latter. Unfortunately, as all big sisters and brother know, the bane of any good toy is a little sister.
Annie got a lobster for christmas. She was excited beyond all measure. She bounced and barked and ran lop-sided, three-legged circles around her new toy (because for Christmas she gave us a ruptured cruciate ligament, the toy all dog parents dream about) and then she placed it firmly between her front feet and tore out first the creatures eye (I am not sure it was all that anatomically correct) and then all of the stuffing behind the eye.
There was an amazing amount of stuffing in the lobster.
So much so that it came out in long, cotton-like strands that caught in Annie’s throat and made her gag and swallow harder to dislodge it, and I watched that process for about 17 seconds and wondered aloud to Nancy why any dog toy manufacturer would cram THAT MUCH stuffing into a dog toy. Piled up on the floor around it, it looked like it might stuff my entire dog. I am gnashing my teeth about having to shell out a small fortune to repair her bad knee, which went bad during a back yard fence fight with the ever-awful, never-seen Diesel who lives on the other side of the fence.
We have devoted a great deal of training to the cessation of any and all fence-fighting. We do not like fence fighting. Frankly, we do not understand fence-fighting, since the only participant capable of inflicting any real damage is the fence itself. Which it did. (Actually she leaped up against it and came down wrong on her knee.) So now we are looking forward to surgery, 6-8 weeks of recovery and
this will surprise you
and absolute ban on fence fighting.
Like we were ever for fence fighting in the first place.
We are looking at probably 8 (continuous) weeks of trying to keep calm and relatively inactive our hysterical hyperactive dog.
Whom we have never been able to keep calm because she loves to fence/window/door fight.
As you might imagine, I was not at all amused by the prospects of dragging this same gimpy dog to the vet to have the indestructible stuffing of her Christmas toy removed from her indestructible insides.
Why would ANY manufacturer who specializes in making toys for dog that immediately tear their toys apart over-stuff them with large, continuous wads of throat-sticking cotton?
They must spend their spare advertising moments calling vets to collect their kickbacks for indestructible-dog-toy-surgical-intestinal-removals.
Time elapsed between moment of receipt of gift to total destruction of lobster: 3 minutes, 7 seconds.
Time elapsed between moment of receipt of gift to near-total destruction of star fish: 2 hours,15 minutes and 37 seconds.
Reason for discrepancy: he hid it from her in the couch. It took her two hours and 12 minutes to find it.
I like to point out the idiocy of indestructible dog toy manufacturers because it distracts me from my own.
Yesterday my printer died. My printer is a Canon Pixma Pointless Series of Numbers and Letters (there is a nearly indefinite supply of variations.) I had just ordered new ink, popped two brand new cartridges into the machine when it announced:
HORRIBLE, NO GOOD, PROBABLY FATAL ERROR. TURN OFF MACHINE IMMEDIATELY, TRY EVERYTHING YOU DID THIS TIME AGAIN THEN GO BUY A NEW ONE BECAUSE NO ONE FIXES THESE THINGS, EVER, ANYWHERE.
I did all of that. Several times. The final error code was: GIVE UP, STUPID.
So Nancy, the dogs and I all drove to Kalamazoo to find a Canon Pixma printer that will take the brand new cartridges I just received in the mail.
There is one model left.
The floor model was in one store, but they had none in stock. (Okay. I won’t go there…)
So I went to store two. They allegedly had two in stock but (surprise!) no floor model. And foolishly, I failed to memorize the exact sequence of numbers and letters that identified the one machine in the known universe that would still use the $150 I have tied up in ink cartridges not yet used (because it runs out fo blue every other day, but nobody sells gray so you need a back-up, and you never know with magenta…)
So the clerk and I went through the store inventory until we found the missing two machines (they are not listed by the style of ink cartridges they use, anywhere ever) and I bought one.
Brought it home.
Started the old machine to reclaim the ink cartridges. Error code which would not disappear was now gone.
I found the problem. When I turned the machine around to remove the piece of stuck paper that wasn’t there, I accidentally disconnected the printer from the computer. It is a wireless machine, but I gave up trying to believe that and wired it. While I was shopping, the machine apparently reunited with its wireless capacity (isn’t that just sweet?) and now it works just fine.
But it’s dumb to put a whole lot of stuffing inside a dog toy you sold BECAUSE you know the dog is going to shred your toy. A dog that will shred your toy will also eat the stuffing.
That stuffing costs a whole lot more money to get back out than a replacement printer for a printer that still works.
cpeckblog 