Mike Maddock My dog has a good life. He gets free room and board, plenty of attention, and because I keep losing an argument, he also gets a nice cozy spot in the middle of my bed.

He is a bassett hound, which doesn’t exactly strike fear in the hearts of would–be intruders, so we don’t count on him for protection. I don’t hunt, so he doesn’t have to worry about trudging through the woods after a fox at four o’clock in the morning, and he won’t ever have to retrieve a duck from an icy pond. I don’t even expect him to get the paper in the morning.

This is one dog that has plenty of cause to feel good about his lot in life. At least, he did until last Thursday. He had no reason to suspect anything was amiss when he was loaded into the car that fateful morning. He was smiling and wagging his tail as if to say, “Hey, cool! Are we taking Junior to school? Better yet, are we going to the park? I love the park.”

He was still unsuspecting when he was taken out of the car and escorted to the back room of the veterinarian’s office. He didn’t even notice his mother slip out the front door - he was too busy yucking it up with the office staff and some of his canine compatriots.

He should have gotten a clue when a nervous poodle in a cage was barking frantically as if to say, “Run, Man! Run!”

Ignorance is bliss, and my dog wasn’t paying one bit of attention to the poodle’s warning rant.

“Dude, calm down. These are my people. They wouldn’t do anything to harm me. Look, that one in the mask with that long plastic thing and the needle on the end is coming to play with me.”

A few hours later, my dog woke up a little sore and in a cage with the strange suspicion he was missing something. The poodle was in the cage next door.

“Dude, I told you to run. Your people turned you into an ‘it’.”

I picked him up from the vet’s office later that day. He walked gingerly out of the back room and looked at me as if to say, “Man, why did you let them do that to me? Of all people, you should understand.”

When we got home, his best buddy, the Chihuahua next door, came running up ready to play a good quality game of chase, but he stopped short and lowered his head.

“You had the operation, didn’t you?”

“Yep.”

“Didn’t know it was coming, did you?”

“Nope.”

“My parents did the same darn thing to me a couple of months ago. Don’t worry. You learn to live without them. Sure, your bark may be a little higher pitched, but there’s no shame in it. What were you going to do with them anyway?”

“I don’t know, but I didn’t even get the chance to say good–bye.”

“I know, man…I know.”

It’s been over a week now. I hope he can forgive me soon. He still looks at me like I’ve betrayed our gender, but I know my wife and I did the right thing. Let’s just hope my wife doesn’t have plans to secretly drop me off at the doctor’s office any time soon.