CSotD: So, Lassie, Benji and Rin Tin Tin walk into a bar …
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I love a good barroom joke, and I love a good barroom-pickup joke even more.
And I love dogs, so today's The Other Coast was right down the ol' pipeline for me.
There's some inaccuracy in this, if you can imagine a cartoonist veering from 100 percent accuracy simply to get a laff. Microchips give you a serial number which provides contact information for the dog owner and sometimes a little more information, but it's not a DogFax report.
But it easily could be, and it might be useful, given our mobility, for New Vet to be able to get a link to what Old Vets 1, 2 and 3 have on record.
Expense? C'est a rire! Dog owners have sprouted two new groups in the past decade or so, neither of them unwilling to spend money on their beloved pooches:
1. Especially those who were willing in the first place to spend big bucks for designer mutts, the various doodles, puggles, newfypoos and other purposeful crossbreeds.
Disclosure: I have a Labradoodle in my extended family and my dog Vaska has several close doodle friends. They're nice dogs, and the original for-real Labradoodles have been through enough generations of careful breeding that they tend to "breed true" (that is, their puppies are consistently of a type).
But even the original-for-real Labradoodles are not a breed, and the hordes of wow-there's-a-fad-to-be-served Labradoodles and Goldendoodles are simply mutts.
Nice mutts, but, still, the Doodlemakers themselves did not result from crossbreeding Cesar Milan with Barry White and you really shouldn't pay someone a whole lot for training dogs to f*ck, because
2. There's plenty of proof down at your local shelter of how casually dogs — even without expert training –feel about interbreed sexual relations, whence comes the second huge group of dogowners.
Used to be that animal shelters were a source of "free" dogs, though it was never really true: Between shelter fees, spay/neuter fees and vaccinations, adoption isn't a huge saving over straight purchase, but it's a really cool thing to do and a large number of Vaska's buddies are adoptees.
Most adoptions are mutts, and, in fact, I'd be leery of adopting a purebred, unless I could be absolutely sure it hadn't come from a pet store.
Pet store dogs are puppy mill freakazoids with rotten genetic backgrounds, no prenatal care and poor socialization and nutrition in their formative weeks, and often cost far more over time than a well-bred pup from a serious breeder would have in the first place. God bless people who adopt dogs with horrific medical and behavior issues, but that's a whole different crossbreeding: Mother Theresa and Father Flanagan. (Yeah, I know: I'm going to Hell for that image, without benefit of clergy.)
Anyway, a lot of conversation at the dogpark consists of people speculating about the parentage of their adopted dogs, and some of it is obvious — bassett legs are different than corgi legs, and catahoula spots are unique.
However, adopters who want to waste $125 can get a genetic analysis of their dog which will tell them what it is a cross of. Maybe. If it happens to be a cross of some common breeds and there aren't more than three or four of them involved. And you're willing to believe anything.
Which brings us back to microchips and dogs getting picked up in bars (Take that, Doodlemakers!).
Vaska is chipped, and the service not only records his name, color, breed, contact information and primary vet, but would allow me to upload photos of him that could then be used to launch a search if he disappeared, if I paid an annual fee for the extra privileges, which I don't. But, while reading the chip only leads back to the company, it could, in turn, yield a whole lot of information with the right app.
And here I would make a joke about how all guys in bars should be chipped, except that there was a school district in Texas a few years ago that was talking about chipping kids, since they had figured out that simply planting a chip in their student IDs led to having their buddies take the card to the library while the actual kid was out in the parking lot having a smoke.
Which could easily prompt a whole new rant about how the idiotic, utterly useless practice of fingerprinting children and getting DNA swabs from them at malls and county fairs, while it has never, ever resulted in finding so much as one missing child, has done a great job of teaching millions of people that living in a police state is normal and in their best interests and that Big Brother loves them.
I'll save that for another time and, instead, run a few of my favorite classic barroom pickup cartoons, one by Mike Peters, one by Hilary Price and one of the many, many great barroom pickup cartoons by the late Jerry Bittle.
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