I Might Kidnap A Dog

There is a neighborhood in Washington DC called Eastern Market, renowned for its weekend grocers and street vendors peddling furniture and paintings. It is quaint and pedestrian, and serves as a sort of catwalk for young couples wanting to show off their toddlers or dogs.

Dogs are popular in Washington. Cramming a million career-focused Type A personalities into a twelve-mile swamp creates a weird demographic zone where the average age of child spawning is postponed in order to establish glamorous careers in federal bureaucracy. You can’t slap a pause button on biology though, and the magic of juris doctorates does little to lessen the urges of would-be mothers to coddle and groom tiny things which produce body heat.

I don’t have a dog or a girlfriend, so I always feel a bit like a trespasser when I swing by Eastern Market. Recently I’ve felt an increasing urge to rectify this, and am considering the option of kidnapping.

Kidnapping a dog, mind you. Hijacking a girlfriend would take all sorts of complex planning, and, voluntary or not, girlfriends are expensive. Beagle abduction is the saner option quantitatively.

Back In college I used to walk dogs all the time, and I never even had to commit a felony to do so. I simply volunteered at our local animal shelter. Second Chance Animal Sanctuary is a laudable rescue center which takes in stray dogs and cats, vaccinates and de-testicles them, then earnestly seeks out families unlikely to eat them. Unlike dog pounds, no animal ever gets euthanized if it fails to secure new owners. (Although nobody seems to have told the cats. They were insanely affectionate. I simply don’t trust felines to be that friendly without ulterior motives.)

I started out in a very niche volunteer role. I made it a point to specifically request only the ugliest dogs available. My logic was that other volunteers would gravitate towards puppies or naturally endearing terriers who tilt their heads when you talk. Meanwhile, the horrendously ugly canines would receive only minimal attention on account of cataracts and stumpy limbs.

Actually none of the dogs were too unsightly, but there were certainly less popular ones. The dogs the size of Buicks, for instance. One particular canine (I forget his name– Giganticus, I think) was an energetic mutt descended from a long line of Mastiffs and Shetland ponies. Giganticus was so huge and unweildy that virtually no one could walk him without tranquilizer pills and a rugby team. Whenever Giganticus actually did get released for a trot, he was so overwhelmed with enthusiasm that all eight hundred pounds of his muscle would slam me to the ground and then try to lick away my concussion.

The staff wouldn’t so much leash Giganticus as simply hitch me to him, and I would spend an hour or so frantically sprinting after the dog, often hurtling two or three feet in the air as the mutant wolf leaped over fences and hay bails, or lunged at low-flying planes. Eventually, when Giganticus tuckered out, he would dutifully return to the shelter and drop my limp body on their doorstep. Then the staff would carry me fireman-style to my car.

That arrangement changed my senior year when they did get a legitimately ugly dog: Sahara. Sahara was a one-eyed basset hound, robbed of depth perception by the furious cyclone which blew apart her owners’ trailer home like a beer can with a fire cracker inside.

By then the staff and myself had a good rapport, so they would let me “borrow” Sahara if I wanted. They never worried about me stealing the hound, but we did get into several verbal escalations about whether or not I was allowed to call her “Cyclops,” which I found more apropos. (Eventually we compromised on “Winky.”)

Once a week I would swing by and Cylops would dash right out to my car, then smack into the side of it due to her lack of depth perception. Afterwards she would fumble her way into the passenger side floorboards and I would chauffeur her to campus. (By my senior year my youthful altruism was starting to wither, and I could see the benefits of regularly escorting a half-blind dog past sororities.)

Cyclops had scant interest in campus trots, though. She was very much a house dog, and wanted above all else to return to my duplex and nap next to our television. I tried on multiple occasions to interest her in healthy activities (fetch, jogging, algebra) but she only really wanted to flop down in an air conditioned space near a TV.

My flatmate Evan and I tried teaching her tricks, but these attempts all failed miserably due to Cyclops’ various tornado-induced injuries. Playing Frisbee with a one-eyed dog is, from the dog’s perspective, mostly just lobbing a plastic plate at it. And we couldn’t teach Cyclops to “speak,” either, because her vocal chords were permanently damaged by tornado shrapnel.

One day Cyclops was not patiently waiting at the shelter for her weekly bout of lazy television vegetating. To my astonishment, she had been adopted.

(By then Giganticus wasn’t around, either, although I don’t think they ever actually found him a family or a circus or anything. As I recall he escaped at one point and now roams freely through the American West, periodically scaring the bejesus out of buffalo herds.)

I haven’t returned to Second Chance since. There’s a Humane Society in DC, but they take volunteer foster families, not dog walkers. And (it being Washington) there are several months’ worth of paperwork stacks and blood tests I would need to go through for approval.

Hence the kidnapping option. I figure I’ll start breaking into my various neighbors’ apartments, sneak their dog out for a walk, then return a few hours later to merrily announce “Hey– I found your dog!”

Everyone will love me!

I’ll be perceived as that helpful guy who tracks down lost dogs.