Dogs. Pound. Show me the ones nobody wants. Contemplate. Consider. Leave. Can’t sleep. Toss. Turn. Go Back. Ask to see the dog and pray like hell it is still there. It is, thank God. Tell them you will take it. Look through the glass and see it scooching’ on its back, hairless, because it has fleas. Watch it cry, paw. Suddenly you want it very bad.

Bring it home. Bathe it. Brush it. Love it. Licks your face. Tells you it’s grateful. You return the sentiment. Now the story can start.

So this beagle I got from the pound I named Theodore was renamed/misspelled Theeadore by my vet. I liked it and so it is. While we never know for sure with pound dogs, he appears to be a “BEANTER”=beagle-pointer. Yea. I know. Holy shit. So I let him. Every day for about an hour, I let him scatter small mammals, namely CA Ground Squirrels, and stop whining about the poor buggers. The dog is incompetent. He hasn’t killed anything. In fact, while Theeadore is in frenzy, barking, howling, being what he is, the ground squirrels run or pop-up ten or so feet away then hang out, watch, take notes, clean their paws, make a few calls, smoke a cigarette…I am glad Theeadore doesn’t comprehend this as this could cause him to feel seriously humiliated, and he is very sensitive.

Per the latest biological science, native ground squirrels are moving into more residential areas, for me, rural residential, and they have parked their prolific hides in the culvert that holds our driveway up. Lots of holes. So Theeadore is permitted to explore this area not to kill anything but to hopefully move the cute little varmints out from under the driveway. He’s been doing this now for a few months. He has never caught a single one and it appears some of them, not all of them, are moving out.

I tie him on a red cheap ass ‘climbing rope’ I got from the hardware store for $2.99 and God help anyone who actually took it for a climbing rope but they’re dead now if they did so no worries on this front. Last week I went to roll up this rope and noted clean little cuts in it (see photo). It’s not humans because the fellow humans I share this driveway with LIKE Theeadore displacing the ground squirrels from our culvert berm that is now full of holes and therefore, destabilized. So who is doing the cutting? By damn if it isn’t the ground squirrels! I saw one of them gnawing away at the rope that until then, I just left out in the yard. (It did not let me take a photo possibly worried about the legal implications.). We all understand that if that rope ever breaks, Theeadore with his giant nose is gone. It’s already happened and he boogied down the canyon. I found him on the road below.

The rope has now been cut in FOUR places.

Do the ground squirrels know what they are doing and why they are doing it?  What the hell?

Theeadore doing what he is genetically programmed to do.

Who let the dogs out? A gang of Ca Ground Squirrels also doing what they are genetically programmed to do?!