WRD

That’s right. My sweet little girl is officially a WRD.

That stands for “Weapon of Rat Destruction”. Let me back up.

[Memory montage sequence]

It’s 8AM. I’m out of bed, getting ready to start my day. I hear Elphie barking. Elphie isn’t a “barker”. When Niki barks, I don’t run to see what he’s barking at. When Elphie barks, I run. She’s more discriminating with her “alert” mode. I wandered over to the sliding glass door and see her barking. At the ground.

Oh. No.

I rush out the door, and Elphie turns to face me. With a rat in her mouth. A stiff, dead, rat. I screamed. I couldn’t help it. I quickly pulled myself together.

“Drop it!” I commanded in my Alpha voice. Nothing.

“Elphie, drop it!” Still nothing.

“Drop it, NOW!” Clearly, we have some training to work on.

Somehow, I managed to get my fingers behind her back teeth and pried her jaws open without touching the rat. When it hit the ground, I saw the it was no longer in possession of it’s head. I get Elphie in the house, barricade the dog door, and grab the phone to call the vet. Dead rats can mean a number of unpleasant maladies for dogs, and I wasn’t about to risk anything. Especially with the (possibly) ingested head.

The vet instructed me to keep an eye on them for any weird behavior, and while I dealt with the vet, Mom went and dealt with The Rat. She found the head on the opposite side of the patio, so there was less to worry about, but corpse detail is never pleasant.

This may have tipped me off that getting a cat might not be the best idea; the dogs keep their treasures outside, where a cat would artfully display the remains on a pillow, or in a shoe.

The funny thing is that we’ve been calling her “Tiny Cujo” since she was a puppy, since she has a pretty menacing “mean face”. I had someone at the dog park object to me calling Niki “vicious beast” (with a singsong, baby-talking voice), claiming that it would turn him into a vicious beast. Her empirical evidence was that her nephew’s nickname was “Tiger” and now he’s a troublemaker.

Clearly, the behavior was caused by the nickname.

This is the new face of terror:

Watch out for the butt-breath.