The luckiest unlucky dog in America

Labradors, as Steve Kuusisto will be glad to tell you, are genius dogs.  That's why they make the best guide dogs.  Steve's partial to Yellow Labs but Black Labs and Chocolate Labs are no intellectual slouches either.

A Lab, seeing a pick-up truck barreling down the street, will say to himself, "Ah ha, a Ford F-250, a class vehicle, but it's a 2003 model and I note from the pristine condition of the paint job and the rather too even hum of the motor that this is not a truck that has been used to do any real work.  I'll bet the last load this driver hauled was a set of modular furniture from IKEA.  Amateur.  That's far too much machine for him to handle.  I'll give him a bark to let him know he's out of his league and let him go by."

An average dog, spotting the same truck, will say, "Hey, he's going too fast!  I'd better run out in the street and bite his tires to make him slow down."

A Lab, prowling about in the fields near his house and coming up to a line of trees that marks the beginning of a woods, will hear a twig snap and stop, thinking, "Hmm.  My mistress read in the paper this morning that today is the first day of bow hunting season.  I wonder..." And he'll take a sniff of the air and say, "Ah ha!  The pleasant aroma of coffee sweetened with Jim Beam.  Someone is in there waiting for a doe to wander by and judging by just how sweet his coffee smells, I'll wager he is not in the right shape to notice the difference between a deer and a large brownish dog.  Best if I stay out of the woods for a month or so."

An average dog, coming to the same point at the edge of the woods and hearing the same twig snap, will pause, sniff the air, and say, "Yum!  Sandwiches!  I'll go in and see if the friendly person who brought them will let me have a bite!"

A Lab, bounding out to the bank of a local pond one crisp winter morning and finding it frozen over, will stop at the edge to think it over thus:  "Hmmm.  Something's wrong with the water.  It looks too still and...hard.  It wasn't like that last week.  Ah ha!"  Labs like to say ah-ha.  "It's been very cold the last few nights.  I'll bet that's ice!"  He'll put a paw tentatively on the ice.  "Yep.  Ice.  The pond's frozen.  But!  True, the nights have been so cold I've needed to sleep in the kids' beds, but the days have been fairly warm for this time of year.  I don't believe the ice could be thick enough to support my weight yet.  I'll go around."

An average dog, romping up the pond, will pull up short and say, "Whoa!  Who took the water away?  Oh well.  I guess this means I don't have to walk around.  I can run straight across!"

And a Lab, seeing the sun glinting off something in the grass, will approach that something slowly and cautiously until he's close enough to make out exactly what it is and stop to say, "Glass!  Some careless person has smashed a beer bottle against that small rock.  Judging by the thickness of the shards and the unusual green tint, I'd say it's an import.  I prefer a good domestic micro-brew.  But I'd better not just ignore it.  Some barefoot child may come along and get a nasty cut.  I'll dash home, get my mistress, and by dragging a garbage bag out from under the sink, let her know that there's something that she needs to pick up, and she'll follow me back here to clean up this mess."

But an average dog, catching sight of the glass sparkling in the sun, will say, "Ooooooh!  Shiny!"

Now, Chance, a dog from around here who has lived a life fraught with misadventure, is a Yellow Lab.  A genius dog.  So there has to be a good explanation for why he's managed over the last couple of years to:

Get run over by a pick-up truck.

Get shot through the abdomen by a hunter's arrow.

Fall through the ice and almost drown.

And cut his paw on broken glass so bad he needed forty stitches to close up the wound.

If I had a dog with Chance's luck, I wouldn't let him out of the yard.

Then again, if I had a dog with Chance's luck, one day I'd go out back to call him in for supper and find him hanging on the fence, upside down, with his back paws stuck through the chain links, a look of utter bafflement on his face.

How has Chance gotten himself into this much trouble?

The explanation can't be that he's dumb.

It must be that he's just unlucky.

Considering that Chance is still wandering around, a target for more bad luck, he must also be very lucky.

The luckiest unlucky dog in America.

A real genius dog: You can listen to Steve Kuusisto talking about his first guide dog, Corky, a genius among genius Labs, on NPR's All Things Considered here.

And if you haven't yet read Steve's wonderful memoir, Planet of the Blind, which finishes with the story of how Corky came along to save Steve's life, you're missing out on a treat.
 

Comments

[Ken Muldrew]

Our dog, who is about 10 months old now, came from a mother who is mostly black lab and an unknown father (though now we can be fairly certain that he had a lot of shepherd and rottweiler in him). Being fans of hybrid vigor, we figured he would be pretty clever, and so he is, but his luck, while much better than Chance's, hasn't held up quite as well. One day this summer he was left alone in the house due to the rain that was falling outside. I guess the rain didn't upset him as much as I thought, because he decided that he would be better off outside. He must have spent a while looking around before deciding that the drywall was the weakest point in the defences surrounding him. This was a clever deduction, as I'm sure he had little trouble digging his way through. Unfortunately for him, he ended up in the hall closet and that's where he abandoned his escape attempt. Clever dogs can be a lot of work.

[PhoenixRising]

Yeah, I had a yellow Lab that...unlucky. You can call it that. We called her The Dumb Blonde.

Ran under the F350 diesel, chasing a squirrel, on leash. I let go rather than risking brain damage (on me).

Fought her way to the part of the pond that's over her head, with a black Lab outweighing her by 40 pounds, only to realize that...she'd forgotten to learn to swim as a pup.

Her last water rescue--she never provided one, only received them--was from the pool. We moved the non-buoyant retriever to the Southwest and she walked onto the solar pool cover, requiring me to dive beneath it, collar the dog, and shove her over my head onto the pool deck while fighting off hundreds of pounds of plastic.

My current dog, while a retriever, is no genius. However, she's a crack swimmer and once brought me a live baby bird in her mouth, feathers unruffled.

I do have a bumper sticker about her: My Golden Retriever Can Lick Your Honor Student.

[PhoenixRising]

Your comment screening technology, at the end of a post including some items of interest to the visually impaired, is a cruel joke.

[Linkmeister]

I had to take my dog to the vet today, ostensibly for dental work. Turned out the teeth were fine, but there was a large growth on one jawbone and two large growths elsewhere on her body. No bets on whether any of those were cancerous.

I can't pick her up till 4:30pm. That means I'll have a groggy unhappy dog in the car during Friday rush hour.

[Lance]

Phoenix,

I hate the comment screening thing and it is unfair. I've complained about it to Typepad. But if I don't use it I spend an hour every day deleting comment spam.

Thanks for your comments though. I thought Labs were born swimmers. Guess not.

Link,

Sorry to hear about your dog. What's the prognosis? Let us know.

[Linkmeister]

Well, Tigger is crashed on the family room floor, presumably due to antibiotics and anesthesia.

We won't know the biopsy results till next week. She's got a boatload of staples holding her skin together in seven different locations, and she sure isn't hungry. That doesn't worry me, but she hasn't shown any interest in going outside to relieve herself either, and that does. I guess I'll have to drag her out later.

[KathyF]

You have obviously mixed up Labradors with golden retrievers, who are indeed the smartest dogs in the world, which is why they're used a lot more often as guide dogs, when they want to be, that is.

But that's okay. Everyone over here mixes them up too. I wish I had a dog bone for every time someone's said "Look at the cute Labrador!" Even our dog food, made for Labradors, has a photo of a golden on it.

My golden wants me to come outside now. Must be a broken bottle.

[Peanutcat]

Um, does it make me a bad person that I laughed so hard I nearly peed myself?

[RedSonja]

All veterinary technicians know that, if a bad thing can happen to a Lab, it will. Mostly involving eating things that they shouldn't. Often repeatedly.

This can also be observed in animals named "Lucky."

[Wren]

That poor dog was doomed from the moment his people named him "Chance." I'm sure he'd have been much smarter if they'd named him "Einstein."

But ...hmmm. Maybe not. I'm trying to imagine Einstein hanging upside down on a chain link fence, baffled look on his face, and I just can't.

Great post, Lance.