Rolling with the dead

Like most dogs, my parents' pooch, Casey, is a perfectly fine companion.  She's sweet, she's entertaining, and her devotion to the other members of her pack is unwavering.  That's not to say, however, that she's without her blemishes.

She has a strange and unfortunate fixation on things that, in the parlance of our times, smell like shit.  Like, for instance, shit.  She finds that a hearty roll in a steaming pile of horse or deer poop is intoxicating.  So much so, in fact, that she is completely oblivious to the horrified screams of her owners as they strongly advise her against smearing another animal's excrement all over herself.  Sadly, this is not her most foul habit.  Casey's most foul habit -- in my estimation, anyway -- would be her desire to roll in the dead carcasses of woodland creatures who have lost battles with beast, infection, or good old Father Time.  I haven't asked Casey, but I don't think that the cause of death is of much importance.  What matters is getting as much rotting flesh on her coat as possible.

And, so it was on Sunday morning in the bucolic calm of a public park that I didn't spot the lawnmower-ed groundhog soon enough.  By the time I arrived on the scene, Casey had covered some reasonable portion of her left and right flanks with her fallen comrade, and as no amount of verbal dissuasion was getting the job done, I had to jump into the fray and pull her off the dead fella.  (I'm tempted to make a joke about the expression the groundhog was wearing at the time of his passing, but honestly, I don't think that my face would be a picture of distinguished calm if someone dropped an inverted running helicopter on me either.)

After fouling the peace of an early Sunday morning with a series of expletives and pulling Casey a safe distance away from the decaying carcass, I wailed, "Why?  Why do you do that?"

Still panting from the ecstasy of the moment, she looked at the ground and at a nearby bird for a little bit before working up the courage to make eye contact with me.  And her expression said, "I know.... I know.... but that one had maggots on it!  Maggots!!!"