Sore subject

Oh dear. I mean, hmm. How to put this delicately...

So I was at Yolanda's house today and accidentally let two of the dogs out when I opened the gate. They ran off down the street to play with the other dogs in the neighborhood - not the first time, and surely not the last. Nobody was too concerned about it.

Twenty minutes or so later, some of the kids on the street came to the gate calling for Yolanda, saying Junior was stuck.

Yeah, that kind of stuck.

He had jumped up and wormed through the gate of a neighbor's house in order to court the alluring young thing in their yard. The bars of the gate are six or seven inches apart and he's a very small dog, so that wasn't a problem. The gate doesn't go all the way down to the ground, but rests on a concrete wall that came up to about my knee. No deterrent to a dog of any size, and particularly not to this particular canine Houdini.

Having attained his copulatory objective, Junior apparently determined that it was time to move on. Unfortunately, the lovely lady, with whom he retained a close personal relationship, declined to follow.

Our more sensitive gentleman readers may wish to avert their eyes for a moment here...

So when I stepped out of Yolanda's gate and looked up the street, I saw a small black dog dangling, head down, between the bars of the gate, his front paws not quite reaching the sidewalk, his rear legs all akimbo, and his manly bits firmly affixed to an even smaller white dog who had no intention of tumbling backwards through the gate and down to sidewalk level. I lifted him up just as the forces uniting them gave way.

OK, you can look now!

Now really. Nature is all kinds of subtle and miraculous. Is this really the best she could do by the canine species? And if for some reason it just has to be this way, couldn't there be some special hormone released that would, just for those few minutes, encourage even the most doltish of dogs to just stay put?

And yet? The little fool was fine. No muss, no fuss, no PTSD. Go figure.