It's Friday, and the dog ate my content.

[saffronhare]

I'm writing this up because princessboredom won't post *her* part of the story until I do.



So. Last night, I'm using some of my mad kleening skillz to wash floors and such, since the "grace period" I'd requested from house-showing ended today. In preparation for washing the kitchen floor, I moved the dog's bed out to the dining room. While I'm in the kitchen, up to my elbows in soapy water, I hear the unmistakeable sound of the dog puking. YAY.

I follow the sound, wondering if she's puking somewhere that will be easy or hard to clean up, and discover that she's puked *on* her dog bed. Okay, I think, I'll just wipe that up and throw the cover in the laundry; I needed to wash that anyway. Except. RED. Dear heavens, is she puking blood? That would be "bad."

Upon closer examination, I see that NO, she is not puking blood. She is puking the bloody organs of some critter she killed. Look! There's a liver! Are those lungs? Hrm. I contrive to get this warm mess (about the size of a cornish game hen, if that sort of detail is important to you) into the garbage (which I'm about to take out the curb anyway, thank goodness). Then, I start unzipping the cover to launder it and see that the blood and other ick has leaked through the cover and soaked into the stuffing.

As the Dutch might say, "That's no ghouda." I've tried to launder or otherwise clean the stuffing of dog beds before and it's always been a disaster. Perhaps there's a non-disastrous way to do it, but I decide on the spot that I don't care and just take the whole darn thing out to the curb. Replacement of such a thing isn't terribly costly and I try to replace it about every 6-8 months anyway.

Meanwhile, the Dingo looks much happier. No wonder she's not losing weight like the vet wanted, despite cutting back her food a bit. She's supplementing her diet -- and getting better at it!

At this point, I couldn't tell from the internal organs what kind of mammal that was, but I figured it was smaller than a possom and larger than a chipmunk. I made a mental note to craft a horrible and amusing story about it for the children in the morning. When I related the (somewhat edited) gory details, the screeching and "EW!" sounds were most gratifying.

But that wasn't quite the end of the story. (Cue princessboredom.)


ETA: Okay, she's posted her part of the story. Go read it, will you? I'll wait.



A few hours into the morning, I get a call from PB, her voice all quavery with a hint of hysterical laughter. My mommy senses are tingling as I ask her what's going on. "I figured out what Marley ate, Mom," she tells me. It was a bunny. [moment of silence]

Thankfully, PB kept her wits enough to notice the remains in the yard...investigate and identify them...and subsequently keep the dog from going out there -- even though the dog was going APESHIT. Good on her. (PB, I mean.) I promise to come home on my lunch break (ha!) to dispose of it.

I tromped out into the back yard (while the dog continued to make horrifying bloodthirsty noises in the kitchen) with my e-tool and several plastic bags. What to do with it? I don't want to put it in the trash or toss it to the side yard, because I really don't want scavengers around the place -- the dog would want to kill them, too, and I bet those critters could fight back. I can't bundle it up and stash it in the deep freeze, because I'm pretty certain our intrepid PB would move out if she found out about THAT.

So that left burying it. In the frozen ground. ::sigh:: While carrying the body out to its burial place, I noticed the "kill zone" was a good 10' radius circle, strewn with bits of fur. Its hindquarters were pretty well stripped of fur (though the skin there wasn't broken); this was not a quick catch-and-kill. It was a full-grown rabbit. She'd ripped the throat out and eaten out most of the upper ribcage; the head was still attached by a teeny strip of fur, so it dangled precariously when I first picked the body up. Ack.

All the while, I'm composing this story in my head, marveling that I'm not particularly grossed out or upset. Wolf and rabbit are two of my totems; I'm pretty comfortable with their relationship as predator and prey. The circle of life...it ain't always pretty, you know?

With luck, the rest of my Friday and weekend will continue to be amusing.* But it'd sure be nice to have a bit less viscera strewn about. KTHXBYE.


*Maybe it makes me a freak that I thought this was seriously funny stuff. Eh. Whatever.

Comments

[diermuid.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of sad... it was Valentine's day, and with spring coming up I'll bet the bunny was just out making a bunny booty-call. I'll bet Marley eating the ass-end of the bunny certainly put a crimp in that little hook-up. ::sigh::

I like viscera too, although I might not be the yardstick of humanity that one may want to measure themselves against.

[saffronhare.livejournal.com]

With luck, it was a male who had already gotten his bunneh freak ON before he died. If not, well...Darwin has a few things to say about that.

[diermuid.livejournal.com]

Perhaps he tried to run, but his bunny-junk was still tingling and it really impacted his hopping ability? To say nothing of not wanting to bouce the bits on cold frozen ground.