The dogs call for unity

HELLO. Hang on.

HELLO AGAIN. Thank you for waiting. The dish towel was unattended. I had to handle that.

Anyway, PAPER!!, what I wanted to tell you was that I have broken your favorite tea cup. It was on the window sill and I knocked it to the floor in a quest for attention. That’s something I learned from my Cat Cousins!

I can see in your eyes that you are mad about the tea cup. I am too. I am mad about what came before. When you were ignoring me for 30 seconds at a time and only giving me frozen carrots instead of meat-based treats. I think it’s best if we both move past the anger. Besides, isn’t it more important that I am looking in your eyes in the first place, a skill that you paid two different women each named Hanna-Meija to teach me at a rate of $110 an hour?

Also, let me remind you, that the tea cup is just a symbol. A memento from when you had a more glamourous life—one where you traveled the world and wore pants every day. Now is not the time to be mad about what has been lost. Now is the time for unity.

Let’s look beyond the tea cup. Let’s come together as one household, The Bravos. Let’s forget about what has been broken and instead focus on all the other things that I will surely break once we are united—flower pots, electronic equipment, a deluxe metal drying rack. I will do this with or without your permission, and there’s no way for you to stop me except by actually stopping me through the use of advanced logic and opposable thumbs.

As part of my plea for unity, I think it’s important for both sides to examine their role in the teacup incident. There is me, Bravo, and how I deliberately and brazenly broke the cup. And then there is you, Am I on Mute?, who put the tea cup in my line of vision two hours prior.

You should know better than to trust me, a being that will eat my own limbs if left unattended for more than half a day. Surely, you considered how the tea cup would tempt me! Just sitting there, motionless. Empty. Smelling faintly of things I don’t even like. And in fact it did! It wooed me like the gently swaying leaves of the Philodendron and the billowing blackout curtains of yesteryear, may they both rest in peace.

What we need to do now is come together in these unprecedented times. Forget the past. Focus on the future. Meet in the middle, by which I mean agree to the following demands:

1. One cup of shredded cheddar cheese (English)

2. An unlimited supply of the dehydrated ears of lesser animals

3. Half of the couch, in addition to half of your section of the couch

4. Twice weekly trips to Dog Island with round trip private transportation provided by Grandpawp

5. An immediate moratorium on baths, showers and nail clipping services

6. All meals to be served by pouring dry food directly onto a hardwood floor or other surface that gives sufficient chase

7. The ability to change the rules and add to this list as desired in perpetuity

I demand this forthwith. I trust that on your side, you simply require continued access to your skinny silver lapbox and the coffee pot, which I will grant in full, while also reserving the right to inspect with my mouth at will. Also forthwith.

If you deny any of the aforementioned terms, I can only assume it is because you have a radical anti-dog agenda. That my culture and way of life are under attack. That the restraints you place upon me—the designer rainbow collar and high-fashion harness—are proof of my suppression. Every day the list of what I cannot do grows longer: No mounting the counters. No exploring public trash cans. No eating an entire bag of dried lentils which was located by mounting the counter. The suppression is endless. It is exhausting. And it serves no discernable purpose other than to keep me and the other living things around me safe and healthy. So I have to ask: is it worth it?

Another thing you need to consider about the teacup is that you don’t know for sure that I broke it. In fact, if you take a closer look at the puppy cam footage, you’ll see that I didn’t knock the cup over—because the puppy cam isn’t set up in that room. And that leaves open the possibility that Celine Dion, the giant Schnauzer from my least favorite dog park, is actually to blame. You can’t prove it was her, but you also can’t prove it wasn’t. I choose to believe it was Celine because breaking a tea cup seems like something she would do. That’s what I call a “feel fact.” And we need to consider my feel facts a lot more than we have been.

You seem to think that this is a simple transaction. That I have committed a wrong that must now be acknowledged and punished. But I’d like to ask: What if we didn’t? What if we just set the broken tea cup aside, with all the other things my fellow puppies have destroyed and just think good and hard about what comes next? What’s the worst that could happen? That I don’t learn any sense of discipline and just keep batting things off the window sill when I want your attention? That we don’t establish boundaries and I can just jump on the bed or the coffee table as desired? That I become so emboldened that I pounce on your houseguests whenever they open the refrigerator? I think we both know the answers to those questions and one of us should ignore them.

Which is why we need unity. Me, you and Hey Babe, together. Doing whatever I want in your home with no consequences.  

Ah! I see that you are coming to your senses, as evidenced by your procurement of the jumbo Kong with liver filling and the donning of your most delicious looking socks. I will indeed follow you to the sleep room, in hot pursuit of the Kong. You think you have a chance at the Kong, but it is I, Bravo, the fastest and lowest to the ground who will get that treat and not share it, eating with such unilateral focus that it will take me a full twenty minutes to realize that I have checked myself into the crate and that you and Hey Babe have gone out for a sushi lunch. Just like the last time. 

And now I need to sit with my sins. Alone. Crated. Until I learn not to break the cups. Until I can prove that I will not destroy the house.