Alternative Use for Duct Tape

From time to time, even the most resilient dogs have an incident that she can't fix by licking.

One sweaty afternoon, Cranky, Crackaroo and myself jumped in the car. Destination: dogpark. I remember the day because it was the last time we've been to a dogpark.

There's a reason for this.

I'll name it Cranky.

The car in question was a beater with haunted electrical wiring from the days I owned a car rental company. We had quite a few beaters. We also had a customer-base whose combined social standing resembled that gooey ick in a half-filled fish tank left in the garage for 9 months behind some old tires after Nemo went belly up. They had a similar smell too.

It was a perfect doggy shortbus.

Especially for dirty paws and overheated dogs.

Dogparks are a source of tension for me. It's like I'm walking into court to face the judge, but my lawyer is the dude with a black hoodie and sickle. All in attendance frown. Here comes THAT GUY. As if I've chosen -- actually TAUGHT -- my dog to take buttsniffing as a personal affront, on par with tooth removal or tail amputation. I feel guilty and shunned. And I just got here! Please judge... go easy on me.

I'm pretty sure -- if Jupiter aligned perfectly with Tatooine and the moon of Endor -- I could face only community service and doggy trash cleanup. But I'm resigned to the fact that there will be blood shed. And it shall come swiftly.

Not three minutes after we make our woofing, crashing presence known... to the sheer horror of owners now scrambling to pull pooches from a doggy-scrum free-for-all... a random buttsniffing took an unfortunate turn.

Now LISTEN UP uptight dog-owning assholes: If you can't stomach an occasional dogpark scrap, don't come to the fucking dogpark! They were designed to be wild fucking animals! They have a pre-wired duty to figure out who's the head dog! If you can't take it, stay the fuck home and feed your perfectly-mannered princesses Beluga caviar and hormone-free beef while they lay on their backs on tassled velvet pillows and you bring them to orgasm.

Now that I've expressed my anal glands and the dust has settled, it was easy to see there was little carnage beyond some scratches, a slightly ripped ear, and my chances of visiting any more dog parks. But still, the verdict was in... and the dude with the sickle was smiling.

I literally dragged Cranky through the double-gated fence and back to the car. No one held the gate for me. Crackaroo hopped and bounced the entire way like an excited child who just witnessed a horrific ice-cream truck accident... terrified to the point of shaking yet bursting with delight. Of course SHE hadn't gotten injured during the melee. She was hiding under the picnic table.

Pooches were loaded in the passenger side. Crackaroo, as always, moved to the driver's seat. I pushed her back into the passenger side with Cranky as I squeezed in. They looked like two sausages in one casing.

The windows were down. Some asshole shouted something on the way out. The Le Mas rythmn panting became a tongue-wagging motorboat ride down Lake Dogslobber, now puddling in the center console. Noses were mashed to the A/C vents. Dogslobber glazed the dash like a Krispie Kreme. As I drove, a breeze stirred up a doghair dustcloud, half of which stuck to the wet dashboard.

I was especially glad I drove this beater today.

It wasn't until we were at home that I noticed the bleeding. I saw a trail on the kitchen linoleum. I searched Cranky, but I couldn't find the source. Not on her paws. Not on her legs. I found it in the strangest place.

At the very tip of her tail.

Much of the hair had been stripped from the end, and it looked like the very tip had been cut off. Like when you open Super Glue by snipping the end.

The blood wasn't flowing. Just seeping. I opted against stitches. But how in the heck do I wrap it?

While I found an old T-shirt and ripped it into pieces, Cranky had taken to licking the end of her tail in an effort to stop it from bleeding. For the most part, it worked.

But she'd also managed to smear blood all over the kitchen floor.

I did an amateurish job of cleaning the tip and applied pressure with the cloth. Though I'm Doctor McSqueamy, my beautiful intern, Cranky, and I owned it.

So I went for a drink, cleaned up, and continued about life as a quasi-normal quasi-adult.

Until I saw it.

Now... I'm taking artistic license when I say I'm not very observant. Sometimes I think sleepwalkers pay more attention. So it took two weeks or more to notice that something was off.

At the time I lived in a townhouse. The front door opened to a long hallway to the living room. Just inside the door, immediately to the left, was a step and a landing way, and then steps to the second level. Since Cranky and Crackaroo wait as near as possible to the last known sighting of daddy, they basically plant themselves on that landing at the base of the stairs for the majority of the day. I could often hear tail-wagging thumps against the exterior wall from outside the house.

So one day I'm about to climb the steps, and I notice the wall around that landing. The entire bottom half of the wall looked dirty. I peered closer.

No dirt. Thousands of little spatters, not much higher than my waist.

I turned on the light.

Like a scene from Texas Chain Saw Massacre, my foyer walls looked like a crime scene. The location of a viscious machete fight between two angry hobbits. Or possibly a Jackson Pollack original, painted with the bloody tip of a wagging tail.

I learned that Cranky wasn't very fond of the scab on the tip of her tail. Or maybe it itched. Probably it just tasted good. But she chewed it off. And then wagged.

And repeated.

Shit.

I started walking around the house slowly. I squatted down to inspect the WHITE cabinets and WHITE drawers of the kitchen.

Shit.

A CSI's dream.

Everywhere I looked... doggy DNA. Bloody, tail-wag spatters adorned every wall, every door, every cabinet, and every bathroom tile that I owned.

I found it on the side of the bed. The couch. Even my shower curtain.

Even two pairs of jeans.

Every time Cranky's wound would scab, she'd chew it off. The wall accents started to look more like the final scene from Carrie. No matter what I did over the next two weeks, I couldn't keep her from chewing off the scab.

Band-aids on her tail.

What a joke.

I wrapped it with gauze and then medical tape.

Cranky would either slide it off the end of her tail (when I didn't tape it too tight), or chew right through it (when I did).

Bitter Apple spray. It's tastes so gross to dogs, they quit licking or chewing.

Turns out, Cranky loves Bitter Apple.

Gauze with masking tape? Didn't stand a chance.

I purchased a cone. It provided all manner of entertainment watching Cranky navigate hallways. But with a small amount of creativity, tail tips can be chewed.

I was out of ideas. Deflated and beaten. Resigned to a lifetime of bloody wags.

Then I noticed atop a roommates toolbox... A big roll of duct tape.

You WOULDN'T DARE!

I did.

For about three weeks, you could drive through my neighborhood and see on the end of a leash...

The most ghetto...

The most junkyard...

The most confused dog you've ever seen in your life.

She displayed with every wag her full-tail, applied-directly-to-her-skin, thirty-layer, duct-tape tail-cast.

Covering a soon-to-be healed tail tip.

I win.



(also visit my photography blog at http://www.everydayaphoto.com
or my business Gigabark at http://www.gigabark.com )