Our dog Dakota was at it again.  This time she was after something in the burn pile.  It offered the perfect hidey hole for small animals.  For several months we’d throw sticks and branches on the pile letting it build up until the Big Burn.  It wasn’t uncommon for small animals to make their home underneath the branches.

As intensely as Dakota was pawing at the burn pile I figured it had to be a chipmunk, turtle or snake.  I’d never seen our dog get that excited unless there was an animal involved.

The sun had gone down and it was almost dark.  I was up on the deck watching from afar.  She grabbed something from the pile and started dragging it out into the yard.

It was no chipmunk, snake or turtle.  This was much bigger game.  From where I stood it looked like our dog was dragging a dead goose.  It was the perfect size and shape and she was very excited.  I hollered for Bear that I might need help and went running down the stairs.  It wasn’t on my agenda to let her play with or eat a rotting animal carcass.

It’s hard spoiling the joy of an obviously happy dog.  Her eyes were shining over the discovery of a newfound chew thing and I had to be the bad guy to take it away and spoil her joy.

As I got closer I realized it wasn’t a dead goose after all that our dog was dragging around and I revised my guess to some sort of big root from a bush or small tree.  There was no telling what manner of yard waste was in the burn pile and big, knotted roots were not uncommon.

At that point I almost walked away to let her play with it for awhile, realizing there was no danger.  It’s a good thing I bent down for a final look because on closer inspection I realized it wasn’t a knotted root, it was a very big, very spiny chunk of dead cactus.  It was the dead husk of our six foot Madagascar Palm cactus.

We had quite a cactus collection with some towering over our heads.  In the summer the cactus garden lived out on the deck.  In the winter they lived in the house or garage.  At any given time we had dozens of baby cacti growing in little pots surrounding the mama cactus.  Sometimes the mama cactus would die as our Madagascar Palm cactus had.

Dakota had chosen a strange playtoy, carrying this hunk of dead cactus around, pouncing on it and dragging it like it was the coolest new dog toy in the world.  Like overprotective parents we took it away and disposed of it out of her reach, concerned that she’d hurt herself on the spines.  If there was a way to find joy in discomfort, our dog Dakota would find that way.

Our dog who preferred to jam herself up against a hard table leg rather than laying on a soft blanket never chose the easy path.  She sought out the hardest, most uncomfortable positions for sleep.  She regularly went after insects and animals that could harm her and now she’d added a new dangerous pasttime – chewing on a spiny cactus.

Our dog Dakota was not a dainty dog.  She was a dog’s dog in every sense of the word, true to her wild ancestry and the two hardy breeds that she was made of:  Australian Cattle Dog and Siberian Husky, commonly known as the Ausky breed.

Dakota was a semi-adult shelter dog who was the Queen of Bad Behavior and the Master of Dirty Tricks. Bad Dog to Best Friend takes you from Dakota’s awful beginnings to her amazing transformation.

Bad Dog to Best Friend: The Book The Transformation of Dakota Available in Paperback & Kindle

Tags: cacti, cactus, dainty dog, dead animal, dead duck, dead goose, dog, dog dragging a dead animal, dog lays against table leg, dog playing with a dead animal, dog prefers hard floor, dog toy, dog toys, dog's dog, not a dainty dog

Category: Dog Tails of Adventure

Our dog Dakota came into the house stinking like a dead thing. She’d only been outdoors a few minutes for potty and in that short time she’d gotten into something so foul smelling that you could smell her from several feet away. The whole room reeked of the smell of death and all I could think of was that our dog had found a dead animal and rolled in it.

They say dogs roll on dead things to mask their own scent for when they’re hunting, that rolling on dead animals is a throwback to their wild dog ancestry. When dogs hunt animals for food it helps if the prey doesn’t smell them coming. Dakota definitely liked to roll on dead things. Even a dead bug would send her into a frenzy of orgasmic rolling.

Dog rolling on a dead bug video – click here to watch video

You can see how thoroughly a dog can get covered in whatever stinky thing they find. Dakota is a house dog. She sleeps in the bedroom with us and spends most of her time indoors. Whatever she gets into outdoors she joyfully brings in to share it with us. Lovelies such as poison ivy and even the turtle she brought in one day are a few of the joys of sharing your home with an indoor dog.

The stench was horrible and poor Dakota couldn’t understand why we were avoiding her. She smelled like a dead, rotting animal and I assumed if she’d rolled on a dead animal she’d be covered with nasty germs and bacteria. In a few short minutes outdoors our dog had become a pariah dog. Untouchable.

It was too late for a real dog bath and I was pretty desperate. I gave Dakota a whore bath with a wet washcloth and a dab of rubbing alcohol on it. You just can’t have an indoor dog smelling like a rotting carcass. I don’t know how safe my method was knowing that whatever you put on a dog, they will lick it off, but whatever nasty germs might have been attached to the rotting carcass could be harmful to all of us so surely it was the lesser of two evils.

I rubbed her vigorously all over with the washcloth concentrating on her back, shoulders, flanks and scruff. Apparently I got most of it because there was just the tiniest whiff of a smell when I finished. The next morning I went in search of the dead thing in hopes of deleting it before she rolled in it again but I couldn’t find it. I found what appeared to be a stinky, rotting mushroom that looked like old dog poo but that was about it.

The next day a thorough dog bath washed the bad smell away and Dakota was touchable again. Two days later I had a flash of inspiration as to the source of Dakota’s smell. Rotting dead bodies weren’t the only stinky things she could have rolled on. I’d been researching mushrooms for the adventure game and remembered reading about a mushroom called a Stinkhorn. I knew it was a longshot but worth a look and discovered an amazing mushroom in the process. The scientific name for one variety of Stinkhorns is Phallus Impudicus and for good reason. They emerge from the ground looking a lot like that male sexual organ. So much so that in the 1800s, Charles Darwin’s daughter Henrietta “Etty” Darwin embarked on a mission to rid the world of the immoral Stinkhorn mushroom. Unlike her father in his quest to expose evolution, Etty preferred to burn the seedier aspects of it and set out on her own version of the Stinkhorn witch hunts.

According to her niece Gwen in a memoire called Period Piece, Aunt Etty claimed to be the inventor of a sport to eradicate a toadstool called The Stinkhorn, whose scent was so powerful that you could hunt it by smell alone. Armed with a basket and pointed stick, Etty would hunt down Stinkhorns and using her pointed stick, “poke his putrid carcase into her basket”, later burning the toadstools “in the deepest secrecy on the drawing-room fire, with the door locked; because of the morals of the maids”.

Gwen Raverat, Period Piece (New York: Ann Arbor Paperbacks,1976)

There are several varieties of Stinkhorns including the Octopus Stinkhorn, Devil’s Fingers Stinkhorn, Chambered Stinkhorn, Stalked Lattice Stinkhorn, Columned Stinkhorn, Basket Fungus, Bamboo Fungus, Veiled Stinkhorn, Netted Stinkhorn, Common Stinkhorn and Dog Stinkhorn and one of their claims to fame is that yes, they stink. You can actually smell them from quite a distance and depending on the variety, they smell like either a pile of dog poop, raw sewage or a dead animal. The Netted or Veiled Stinkhorns are encased in a delicate, lacy net as a bride on her wedding day awaiting her groom.

Stinkhorns erupt from the ground as an egg shaped mushroom and can grow several inches in a matter of hours. In the egg stage they are actually edible and some folks consider them quite a delicacy. All varieties share this innocent beginning but from that point they diversify into entities resembling starfish, octopus, sex organs, Wiffle balls or pretzels.

No matter what alien they emulate sooner or later they will do what they do best: they will STINK. These mushrooms will emit a smell so overpowering that you might think you are smelling raw sewage, dog poop or a very large dead animal. You could clear a room with a single Stinkhorn mushroom. That’s how a Stinkhorn propogates. It emits a slimy, foul-smelling substance designed to attract flies. What self deserving fly wouldn’t zero in on a dead carcass or dog poop? The flies come sniffing around, the Stinkhorn spores stick to their feet, the flies carry the spores off to multiply elsewhere. A pretty ingenious mushroom!

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Category: Dog Tails of Adventure, Wild Kingdom