Donald the Dog
My name is Donald and I don’t remember being born, but I remember that my name wasn’t Donald.
My brothers and sisters and me lived in a big white room. We had a Mama. She used to lick inside our ears. That was my favourite thing.
There were humans, too. Big ones. Their fur was all in the wrong places and they bared their teeth at the strangest things. They weren’t very good at walking, either, because they always forgot to use their two front paws. That was why they used a house with round legs to do any running. Then, they would go away and Mama would howl that it was going to be days and days and days before they came back. She was very worried about her humans getting lost, she said they had funny faces that didn’t know how to smell their way back home. The humans must’ve had better noses than we thought, because they always came back to give us dinner.
One day, the humans wanted all of us to go with them in the house with round paws. I tried explaining that I already had four paws, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer. Everything around me smelled very different, and then there was big noise and the house shivered and lurched into motion. Me and my brothers and sisters were very impressed.
The house stopped, and soon we all stood inside a square box.
There were lots of other puppies and dogs, and lots and lots and lots of humans. I was excited, I kept jumping to try and see outside the box.
That was when my lady saw me. Oh, I loved my lady immediately. She looked down and patted my head and scratched my ear. Then, she talked to the humans. I didn’t know why she was bothering with them, but soon she came back, and lifted me out of the box and into a blanket.
She put me into another moving house, and brought me home. My lady, my lovely lady, whose hands smelt of sweat and meat and everything that is very delicious, took me out into her other house. There were three other people there, humans that weren’t quite as big as my lady.
All of them had all of the same problems as the other humans, though they tried their best to walk on their paws when they surrounded me. They soon became my humans. If anyone else barked or growled rudely at my humans, I always told them that even dog shampoo smelled better than their lousy bottoms.
My lady was the loveliest lady that ever was. She always gave me things to eat and she liked to play a lot of games. I always obliged her because I liked it when she scratched my ears and told me I was a good boy, in her special voice.
Of course, I missed my brothers and my sisters, but my new family played lots of new and exciting games. I discovered a game they called ‘fetch’, which was when the human lost control of its paws and kept needing me to help them find a stick they were incapable of holding. Another they called ‘going for a walk’, which was a very good game, except they often tied a rope around my neck. This was because they didn’t know how to walk properly, and needed me for directions. I would try to pull my human along as best I could, but it didn’t make them any faster. Oh! And the games: ‘come on Donald’, ‘sit’ and ‘roll over’ which consisted of doing stupid things like running very fast to them or gesticulating on the ground in order to get a very delicious treat.
I am an older dog, now, and my name is still Donald. The smaller humans got bigger and left. Their senses of smell have deterioated over the years, it now takes them a very long time to smell their way home, but they always come back, eventually. I am so happy that they do, though I always worry that my lady will one day disappear, too. So I’ve started asking her to take me with her. I am glad I can take care of her in this way, though she insists on the both of us using the house with the rolling round legs.
My lady has just given me a treat, because there is thunder coming and she knows I don’t like that one bit. I think I will go to sleep, now.