The Poop Chronicles

My other dog is a 16-year-old terrier mix named Pochi who mostly keeps to herself except during thunderstorms or when she's hungry, times during which she'll become an absolute terror. Pochi can smell a thunderstorm approaching hours before it occurs. She'll do everything she can to alert you of the impending doom that only her hypersenses and Doppler radar technology can detect. This is the typical progression of events:



1) She starts by walking around aimlessly, making click-clack noises on the hardwood floor with her outgrown nails that she refuses to let anyone clip (she flails around in a type of tantrum that most people aren't aware dogs are capable of)
2) Then she'll make desperate attempts to warn anyone around her, "It's coming! The storm's coming!" Her tactic is to get as close to your face as possible and pant her 16-year-old hot doggy breath into every orifice of your face. With the combination of the food particles encrusted in her terrier moustache and years of oral hygiene neglect, this often smells like rotten fish or sometimes raw sewage.
3) If you are sleeping, she will lift her rickety self up onto the bed and spin in circles or claw you with her eagle-like talons or simply sit on your face in further attempts to to express the gravity of the situation. If you try to offer some sort of solace by holding her or stroking her as she trembles violently with her eyes ping-ponging in their sockets, the odiferous panting usually prohibits you from continuing to do so.
4) Pochi's final resort is to seek protection in the bathtub. Lately, her deteriorating muscles have prevented her from having full use of her back legs, so she usually gets half of her body in, with her hind legs clambering against the outer edge as she struggles to get the rest of herself into her makeshift fallout shelter. She ends up stuck, looking like a towel draped over the ledge, until someone comes to rescue her.



Along with the muscle failure has come loss of control of her bowel movements. During the last few months, in moments of exertion, like when she's trying to get unstuck from the bathtub, Pochi will unintentionally release a poop. At first the poops were showing up in the bathtub or around it. Then as she began to struggle with keeping her back legs propped while eating from her doggy bowl, she would lay a few bombs in the kitchen, too. This has given her the appearance of having the supernatural ability to digest the very food she's eating instantaneously as it goes in one end and comes out the other within moments.



As time goes on, Pochi has begun to pepper the rest of the house with her poops. They come unexpectedly now--it could be from the excitement of having a guest over or while lazily traveling from the couch to her doggy bed--and I've plowed through dozens of canisters of disinfecting wipes as I follow her fecal trail.



The other day, I found Hannah sleeping in one of the doggy beds with her nose precariously close to a pile of poop. Pochi must have laid a bomb while getting up from the bed, and as Hannah took her spot, she was left with a fresh batch of doo doo. My friend Amber often calls animals angels or little Buddhas. I think you'd certainly have to be to be able to sleep under those conditions without any complaints.

The Poop Bandit herself