In his most recent email newsletter, Andrew Heaton explains the problem he’s encountered while visiting a national park with a foster dog:
Not Andrew Heaton’s dog
I am writing this in the woods during a brief respite from the dog trying to strangle himself.
I have been fostering Wallace for about a month, and the shelter informs me a nice man is threatening to adopt him, and so there is added social pressure to keep him from asphyxiating. Obviously I don’t want any dog to suffocate, least of all Wallace. But it would be embarrassing on top of all that if I had to awkwardly call the shelter and explain I can’t return Wallace on account of his apparent suicide in the woods. I’d probably wind up on a watch list of some kind, or have my picture on the wall with the caption of “possible murderer”.
Allow me to explain. Wallace and I decided to go camping over the weekend, where I assumed I would get to lounge around a hammock and read books, while Wallace, enthralled with nature and new smells, would sit attentively on a bluff looking into the middle distance like the platonic canine ideal in a Kinkaid painting. To maximize his enjoyment, I purchased a twenty-five foot cord, which I further hooked to a retractable leash, affording Wallace a respectable illusion of freedom and autonomy.
It turns out that when you take dogs camping, they are only interested in two things: hiking, and strangling themselves. We went on a two hour (!) hike earlier in the morning, then retreated to camp for lunch. That’s when Wallace developed the new and exciting hobby of trying to off himself as quickly as possible.
If there are six saplings in his immediate vicinity, he will gleefully wrap himself around all of them in a diagram reminiscent of how quarks orbit sub-atomic particles, then conclude the adventure by accidentally tying a slip knot or a noose or some other damn thing and commence dyeing.
I am told by hunters that animals will gnaw their limbs off when trapped, but Wallace shows no initiative in biting through his leash, despite having previously chewed his way through a variety of wood-handed tools I borrowed from my neighbor. Instead, his entire strategy for breaking his restraints is to angrily pee on them. Wallace seems to think the piss stream unleashed by his Herculean doggy prostate is sufficient to cut diamonds, and so surely can free him from the absorbent cloth tethering him to nine or ten saplings. So I free him, and make a mental note to buy a new leash upon our return.
I have also caught Wallace trying to drown himself by wrapping his leash around a submerged log, getting himself hopelessly tangled in the (stationary) tires of my car, and as near as I can tell, managing to tie asphyxiating knots around invisible things like radio waves and WIFI signals. Given sufficient time and as little as a shoelace, I think he could probably strangle himself around imaginary concepts like latitude lines, Bigfoot, or Modern Monetary Theory. I don’t know who previously owned Wallace, but I’m beginning to suspect Jeffrey Epstein.
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