In addition to home dog training, I am considering marketing my services as a Lost Dog Magnet.
It happened again the other morning.
I was going to my workout at the crack of dawn at the Empire State Plaza. As I walked down Madison, I saw a group of men trying to capture a pug that was nervously skittering away from their attempts. When I asked if it was their dog, they said no. I knelt down, and the dog trotted over immediately. His face said “Finally! What took you so long? Screw boot camp – get me out of here!”
If you remember the last couple of blog posts – Take Me Home…Maybe and Whose Dog Is It Anyway? – you know that lost and stray dogs seem to appear in my path alarmingly often.
There are two endings to the lost pug story – a happy one and an expensive one. The happy one is that I found the pug’s owner and reunited them. The expensive one is that after I dropped off the dog at his home, I had a car accident.
So, as I sat at the auto body shop waiting for an estimate on the damage, I wistfully envisioned some alternate scenarios for this little saga:
1. If the identification tags on the dog had been updated and correct, I would have reached the owners by phone immediately, and gotten the dog to them faster, thereby avoiding the accident.
2. Instead of driving the dog to its home, I should have had the owners pick him up from me, hence avoiding the accident.
3. If the pug had been trained to not leave his yard, he wouldn’t have been lost in the first place, I would have sweated through boot camp and then driven home, presumably without an accident.
4. When my alarm went off at 5 AM, I should have rolled over and gone back to sleep.
So, until I launch my Lost Dog Magnet business, please buy your dog a new ID tag, get him some training, and steer clear of the Plaza in the wee hours.
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