Category: Sparky (Page 6 of 18)

Sparky likes to say that old dogs don’t need new tricks, because they’ve got plenty of tricks up their sleeves.

Tonight, Sparky proved it.  It’s game over, man.  I don’t care how clever your dog seems, Sparky has them all beat.  [I’m only counting dogs IRL, not those tricky dogs on Youtube.]

It was like watching Penn and Teller.  You’re looking right at them, and you didn’t even know a trick was happening, much less how it was done.

Sparky pooped on top of a snow ball. 

Dogs leave messages through smells.  Poop is typing in all caps.  Sparky pooped up on top of a snow ball because he’s a boss.

Don’t be dismissive, and consider this to be a futile gesture because the snow ball will melt.  Dogs don’t understand phase change.  That would be missing the point.

I don’t know how he did it and  I was looking right at him.  Sparky and I have a mutual agreement not to watch each other poop, but it looked like he was just standing there.  He was backed up to the snow ball, and what I thought was his tail, wasn’t.  It was evening, but not so dark that a flashlight was needed to walk around.

When he walked away, I realized what happened.  Thinking quickly, I included my boot in the photo for scale.  A short time later, I took the photo at the top for reference.  The top of the snow ball looks to be at the same height or above Sparky’s butt. 

Sparky doesn’t poop haphazardly.  This was intentional and done subtly.  I’m impressed.

Here is an uncensored photo from a different angle.

Sparky is in favor of naps, so likes to hop up and flop over.   I have to hold him up and rub his belly.  If I stop for too long, he gets antsy.

 You’d think a guy would be self-conscious if his breath smelled like his poop, but Sparky thinks it’s funny.  I had a colleague at NoRo who thought it was funny to cut a silent, but deadly fart, then call a student up to his desk for a chat.  It’s fine, he was a coach and the student was one of his players.

I was taking a nap when Sparky thought it would be a good prank to hop up on the couch and blow into my face.  I almost gagged.

I don’t know why Sparky’s breath occasionally smells like poop.  He enjoys goose poop, but we don’t have geese here.  In cold weather, like now, Sparky likes to carry a frozen turd in his teeth like a cigar.  I’ve never gotten a photo, but he looks like this.

Sparky hadn’t gone outside in a couple of hours, drank water and played with Mr. Moose.  How can his breath smell like that?

My theory is that Sparky is a tube.  He can pee or poop whenever he wants.  We’ve gone on a walk, he’s taken a big dump, then if the situation requires it, taken another dump 5 minutes later.  Maybe he can fart out of his mouth.  That’s my theory.

With the snow coming down all day, we’ve been hunkering down.  Sparky didn’t even notice when I went down to the garage for an hour to put the snow tires on.  He was happy to lay by the fire, screw around with Mr. Moose, and help me watch Youtube.

When the wind let up, Sparky would surely be eager to bound through the snow, run off some energy and check on all the outside stuff he has to check on.  When we went out for our walk, Sparky put up a good front, but when I started for the bridge, he ran for the house. 

Sparky wants us to revisit the policy about never pooping in the house.  Even with a Carhartt jacket, going outside to poop in the snow doesn’t seem reasonable. 

To be fair, Sparky is cooperating with the policy, but he isn’t convinced.

Señor Piglet has to shed some weight.  When we talked about it, he kept patting my belly and smirking.  I can’t help thinking he was making some kind of point.

Today, Sparky weighs 29.8 lbs.  He was 25.1 lbs on January 18th, 2023, when he moved in.

Blue Buffalo Wilderness High Protein Natural Senior Dry Dog Food recommends 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 cups per day for a 16 to 25 lb dog.  Sparky gets 1 1/3 cups per day, with typically three treats.  He always seems hungry.  We have to try something different.

The first three ingredients in Sparky’s dog food are “deboned chicken”, “chicken meal” and “dried chicken”.  That’s good, but the next four are “oatmeal”, “barley”, “brown rice” and “potatoes”.  Dogs are opportunistic, but that isn’t natural food for dogs.  Sparky needs fewer carbs.

The Blue Buffalo dog food has a bunch of vitamins and minerals, so he needs to keep getting that, but not as much.  We are going to try 2/3 of cup of dog food, and a hard-boiled egg, with half in the morning, and half in the evening.

My eldest sister gave me two stainless steel bowls.  I made a bowl-holder for them.  Sparky’s little breakfast looks quite paltry in the large bowl, so I added two croquet balls.  The balls should slow down his eating and let him scrounge for his food.

The pair of bowls look like this:

Should I add a third croquet ball to further improve Sparky’s dining experience?

Sparky is getting too big for his britches.  Not in the “putting on airs” sense.  I encourage him to be a confident boss.  No, he is just getting too big.  Sparky doesn’t have any britches, but now that I’ve got a sewing machine, if I made him some britches, he mustn’t be splitting the seams.

Sparky gets Blue Buffalo dog food because he likes the wolf on the bag.  I went to the Blue Buffalo website to review the ingredients and nutritional profile.  They have alligator meat listed.  It’s not an ingredient in the flavor Sparky gets, but if I can figure out which recipe has alligator, we might switch to that.

Sparky just told me not to bother.  He isn’t nuts about eating alligator, but wouldn’t mind a pet turtle if I like reptiles so much.  Since I’m looking, he says that a switch to recipe with rabbit or raccoon would be good.

This photo was taken almost two years ago, the day after I brought Sparky home.  Man, he has really let himself go.  No wonder his nickname is Señor Piglet.  He needs to get on the carnivore diet.

At the orphanage, he didn’t have his own name.  They called him ‘Sammy’, but he hated that.  Like I’ve mentioned previously, he’s kind of racist, and it bugged him to be named after the indigenous people of Northern Europe.   He says the Sami people have small, round heads, large hands, and wide feet with splayed toes.  I have no idea what he was talking about.

When I first brought him home, we were trying to establish some common interests.  I told him that I taught physics.  He didn’t know anything about that, but liked chasing pigeons.  Being a congenial dog, he asked if I had any physics stories about pigeons.  I told him about Nikola Tesla and his fondness for pigeons.  He enjoyed that story and wondered if I had any stories about physics and dogs.  I read him Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, Tom Edison’s Shaggy Dog. 

Reading the story will give you some context.  He wanted to know if Tom Edison was a real guy.  I said that he was, and that he happened to be Tesla’s nemesis.  He was happy about that.  In the story, Edison is a jerk to the dog, but the dog is really smart, and makes Edison look foolish.  The dog in the story is named Sparky, and since the dog isn’t real, he wanted that name. 

Eventually, Sparky became self-conscious about not having a last name.  He didn’t want to take my last name because he felt it implied something about our relationship that he didn’t want to explore.  We put a pin in it.

Sparky and I like watching movies featuring dogs.  Months later, we watched Laurie Anderson’s movie, Heart of a Dog.  Sparky didn’t understand what was going on in the movie, but liked how Anderson talked about her dog, Lollabelle.  Also, since Lollabelle was allowed to play a keyboard, Laurie Anderson must be a nice person who understands that good dogs are smart and should be allowed to do whatever they want.

If I’m honest, I didn’t understand the movie either, but agreed that Laurie Anderson was a national treasure.  Sparky wanted Laurie Anderson to be his godmother.  He took her last name as an homage.

Señor Piglet became Sparky Anderson.  He prefers playing with Mr. Moose, but will chase balls until they roll under the furniture.  He doesn’t mind that there was a ballplayer named Sparky Anderson.