This is Sam, short for Samson. Sam is not particularly strong. He has the IQ of an underachieving gerbil.
I suppose I should be careful in criticizing this worthless accretion of canine protoplasm. My mother-in-law really loves Sam. I have no idea why. I suppose it could be sheer, unmerited grace. Sam is not a Calvinist, although he thinks my mother-in-law is God.
Sam was limping today, so we hauled him off to the vet when we could find no obvious injury to the foot he wasn’t walking on, the left rear.
It turns out, $450 and 7 hours later, that he has a broken toe, etiology unknown but recent, like in the last few hours. I’m guessing he tried to see if he could fly off the top of the dog house, Clark Kent style, and instead of landing on his head, which wouldn’t have hurt him in any discernible way, he landed on a middle toe.
Or, alternatively, the two canine ladies he lives with, named Cassie and Maggie, played just a little bit too rough this morning.
Who knows?
I’m not sure I knew that dogs had toes. I thought they had paws.
In any case, Sam is being introduced to the glories of modern chemistry. In the photo above, he definitely has that Woodstock look, don’t you think?
Here he is definitely inhaling:
Sam is now an inside dog for the next month or so. He’s supposed to really take it easy, not challenge the toes, etc. To aid in the achievement of this doubtlessly noble goal, the vet gave us enough pain-relieving downers to ameliorate the suffering of dozens of faculty meetings.
Sam, of course, does not attend faculty meetings, though I have occasionally speculated that his intellectual peers may be in attendance.
Nor, as you can see from the photos, is he feeling any pain.
You should see him walk in that whole leg splint. He looks like Rudolph Nureyev after a stroke, trying to do a Fouette.
Not that we would be able to detect any diminished mental capacity if he did have a stroke. Goldfish have longer memories.
Come to think of it, this whole thing may have started with a Grand Jete off the doghouse.
