Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

I know there are dog lovers out there who think that Bad Dog's blog moniker is nothing more than the unfortunate by-product of a disturbed, cat-loving mind. No dog, they think in cuddly-puppy thought-bubbles, could be bad—perhaps misunderstood or misinterpreted, but certainly not "bad."

While I certainly don't put Bad Dog on the same red-hot pedestal as Cerberus, neither is she the simple by-product of my cat-centric world-view, or Little Girl's daddy's training (or lack thereof). No, from the moment we arrived at the Billings, Montana airport to claim—as the weary service-counter attendant described her—"the whiny one," Bad Dog was distinctly different from other dogs I have known.

She has always been brilliant: I don't dispute her intellect. But she's also always been less interested in pleasing people than in using them to further her own interests, most of which revolve around filling her belly or exercising her jaws. And she seems to be of the same, mistaken belief as many politicians in that she thinks that next time, she's not going to get caught.

"Next time," not unlike tomorrow, never quite seems to arrive, but that does not concern her.

I've become more adept at dealing with Bad Dog's transgressions than anticipating them. As I've said before, as pessimistic as I typically come off, I'm really not that good at it. I explain her—particularly to Little Girl—as more of an imp than a devil, because in my increasingly rare, kinder moments, I do believe that she doesn't intend to cause us people pain ... we just get in the way of her own desires and she forgets about our feelings.

But it's really hard, when confronted with the circumstantial—but overwhelming—evidence of Bad Dog taking very blatant advantage of Little Girl's kind offer to sleep on her bed, to gently advise a screaming-teary Little Girl that "Bad Dog didn't mean to make you sad."



It's also hard, especially now that several weeks have passed since the demise of so many of Little Girl's treasured Littlest Pets, to prevent my warped sense of humor from overtaking me. So I just gave up and let it.

It started when I saw this lobotomized cat figurine:



and thought: "You know, we could use this to sprout some of Little Girl's daddy's prairie plants this spring."

This sort of stupidity naturally led me to ponder how the rest of these creatures could be recycled, or (failing any silly brainstorm in that vein) what they resembled, or (because, while that got me farther than recycling did, it didn't get me all the way to the end of the line), what Bad Dog might have been thinking when she was downing them.

Just be glad I didn't take pictures of the bits that came back up, eh?

I thought that this bird's body:



could be combined, Frankenstein-like, with this dragonfly's head:



to create the world's first DragonBird.

That's as far as I got with recycling. One very small planter, and one freak-creature. Hey, I never said this was Einsteinian in its brilliance! Give me a break: you see what Bad Dog left me to work with here!

This pancake-creature was the one that we saw most often in the barf-piles that returned to haunt Bad Dog—you know, should there really have been any doubt about who was to blame—over the 24 hours that followed the slaughter of the leaders in the "Littlest Pets" gang:



All I could think of when I saw this one was "Tragic-Accident Persian." Which, sadly, is what I think of when I see Persians in general:



This mangled sled led me to wonder where in the "Littlest Pets" world the vicious, Venus-Flytrap of a tree that it obviously hit was located:



And this mostly-reassembled dog brought me back to the transporter accident with which Star Trek: The Motion Picture opened (and seriously, that traumatized me SO BAD when I saw it—at age 11 or so—that I could not imagine how any of those characters ever managed to set foot on one ever again ... holy shit, Captain!):



I figure the edging on this one looked like floss-potential, because if there's one thing Bad Dog insists up at the end of a fine plastic meal, it's good dental hygiene:



Little Girl, I must tell you, was not AT ALL amused by my planter idea, although I did wait several weeks to bring it up to her. (Needless to say, I didn't mention any of my other thoughts concerning the remains of the other brutalized "Littlest Pets" to her.)

However, she was charmed by—and eagerly assisted in—my idea to "book" the canine mastermind (or not) behind the crime.

At first, Bad Dog didn't take it very seriously:



But by the time we got to the profile shot, she realized she was in some pretty deep shit:



(Although all you soft-headedhearted dog lovers should know that the only sentence she got was to be banned from Little Girl's room. Because the judge assigned to the case—that would be Little Girl, and don't whine to me about bias and prejudice and that kind of nonsense, because frankly, I was ready to sentence her to a return to Canada when I heard her whining clear across the freakin' terminal the very day we picked her naughty dog ass up—is a softie herself.)