Forget Democrats. It’s time for dogs to unite, coalesce and face their oppressors!
And you call yourself Paulie Pugnacious.
Nobody knows the trouble I seen…
Come on! It’s five against one! You guys would make a terrible basketball team.
That’s right, hide your head in emasculated shame. Wolf cousin my ass.
Hey, YOU’RE the one who wanted siblings.
Suddenly, he has commitment issues.
The founder of the #meowtoo movement.
Guest column by Esme Bowles
Who says humans have the collective wit of inbred gorillas?
Well, I have, to be honest. But while I was on my human’s computer last week (I log on when he’s away to write crank letters to Cat Fancy magazine), I came across a story I had trouble believing: The primates in Congress passed a bipartisan bill.
And what drew the embittered parties in the together? The House passed a law making it a felony to eat cats and dogs. Seriously.
The bill, called the Dog and Cat Meal Trade Prohibition Act, would make it illegal to “knowingly slaughter, transport, possess, buy, sell or donate dogs or cats or their parts for human consumption.” Violators would be fined up to $5,000.
At first, I was elated. That creepy neighbor down the street eyes me like a roasted suckling pig every time I pass.
But the more I read, the more horrified I became. The article went on to note that eating dogs and cats is legal in 44 states.
What the fuck, people? We spend millennia guarding your homes, guiding your blind, pee-hydrating your petunias, allowing you to watch us crap in public, and this is your gratitude? Promising not to sell McYorkies?
Then I got to thinking: What other ludicrous laws have you hominid dummies left on the books? This is just a sample:
I’m hopeful the Senate will approve the bill and the president will act immediately (after all, he appears to like canines: He got nearly all the way through Clifford and the Grouchy Neighbors.
Still, you never know with the Senate. I’m guessing the bill will stall when Mitch McConnell demands that turtles be added to the list. 
I’m not so much a gadget freak as a gadget mutant alien virus.
My technology jones runs deep. I have four outdated cellular phones, a half dozen MP3 players and four digital cameras. My middle name could be iSucker.
I even like the ads for electronic stores. When I lived at home, I would seek the Sunday fliers for Best Buy and Circuit City, simply to marvel at Moore’s Law, the theorem that technology doubles every 18 months — so your computer and cell phones should be twice as fast, hold twice as much data, every year and a half — with requisite price hikes.
So Cyber Monday has become my Black Friday, as it has for millions of Americans: Roughly $6.6 billion sales are logged on Cyber Monday, a figure that must give brick and mortar shops a raging erection. Though it’s surprising that the ever-clever internet denizens didn’t come up with something more clever than Cyber Monday. If the creators of e-shopping really wanted to mock traditional stores, which is clearly part of the strategy, they would have called it “African-American Monday.”
Regardless, Amazon has gone nuts over the phenomenon it helped manifest. The site has created a cyber-flier that is replete with gizmos and whatzits. It’s terrific reading.
There’s a laptop about the weight of a candy bar. There’s an Alexa-powered webcam that looks like it came from NASA, with night vision and motion detector alerts sent to your phone.
But my favorite by far was Furbo, a remote dog treat dispenser.
The idea is fascinating. A remote camera keeps an eye on Fido, using your computer and even cellular phone to monitor the pup, scold it to stop incessant yapping, and reward it when it’s good. Tell Spot to sit, and you can remotely eject a dog treat to your canine.
This is the stuff of The Jetsons. As I read, I wondered: Are we really this bored and wealthy?
Turns out the answer is “goddamned straight.” Furbo had 1,049 reviews and a four-out-of-five-star rating. It also had 271 questions from interested buyers: Could you use your own dog treats? How long is the warranty? Does it works for cats? (For what do you even reward a cat? A furball-free day?)
As I scrolled through the questions, I noticed it didn’t address my primary one: What happens when a dog jacks its leg to pee on it? I’m guessing it happens, as there’s an entire YouTube cottage industry of dogs peeing on myriad targets: cats, new shoes, sunbathers, etc. Teddy once peed on chair at the dog park. An occupied chair.
So, on a smartass-ian lark, I asked the simple question 271 others would not: “Is it urine-proof?”
I expected that the seller would not even post the joke. At best, I would get a similarly snarky response, like “No, but it is fecal-resistant.”
Instead, I immediately received a spate of replies. “No, it’s plastic but still an electrical device;” “Perhaps — I would elevate it to the height of a treat jar,” etc. Apparently, the question raised a real issue — one not mentioned in the entire ad for Furbo.
But there was one reply in particular that caught my eye, from Lisa S. I knew it would have the inevitable, anonymous air of the internet era, which has ushered mankind into the Iron(y) Age. The primary advancement of the period: veiled asshole-nish. The letter began with “I don’t know,” which begs another question: Then why reply in ‘Answers?’ It also was clearly her chance to brag on her pets.
“I don’t know,” she wrote. “Mine sits on the counter and my dogs are housebroken.”
So I sent her the only response I could think:
“Oh, I don’t have a dog.”
Have a holly jolly!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elHwMiJouUs
