RWN’s Guide To Raising Your Dog

RWN’s Guide To Raising Your Dog

Everybody who has been reading RWN for any significant amount time knows that I love dogs. I’ve explained why they’re: better pets than cats, brought you the: day in the life of a puppy, featured an: Amazing Japanese Dog Translator, and I even explained how: puppies could help us win the war on terrorism.

But now, after publishing our: award winning,: acclaimed,: useful, reviled: Guide to Childcare, we here at RWN thought it would be a great idea to publish a guide to raising your dog based on how I’ve raised my half-Jack Russell Terrier, Patton.

To begin with, dogs are much like children — or more accurately, really stupid children with fur who enjoy licking themselves and drinking out of the toilet bowel. On one hand, dogs start out stupid and never get smarter — unlike children. On the other hand, your dog will never disappoint you by quitting college after three years to travel across Europe and “find himself”. Plus, dogs are much cheaper and eat things you drop on the floor. Advantage dogs!

Now I don’t see a real need to go into a lot of detail about having fun with your dog. I mean everybody knows that you scratch a dog’s belly, watch “101 Dalmatians” with him once in a blue moon, and chase him around with a vacuum cleaner once in a while (dog’s love that) and your dog will be as happy as Ted Kennedy with a snoot full of bourbon. But let’s face it, if it were that easy, everyone would have 100 dogs like those crazy people who the police end up carting away after finding that their trailer is full of dead dogs and knee-level feces.

But what do you do when your dog comes home covered with more fleas than there are crazy militia members in Montana? Some people might favor sobbing like a Frenchman faced with a German tank, but not RWN! We understand that dogs bring home fleas because they’re social animals and want little friends to play with and scratch at when they get bored. So to take care of the problem, you’ve just got to give them a good talking to. Scream something like this at them…

“As long as you live under my roof, you’ll go by my rules and I will not have fleas in this house! Do you hear me little mister? Where do you think you’re going? Don’t you bark at me! I won’t tolerate that sort of barking in this house! I forbid you to ever bring those fleas here again or I’ll ground you so long that you’ll forget where you buried those bones in the yard!”

As bad as the fleas are, they’re nothing compared to walking barefooted through a “gift” your dog has left you outside your bedroom door. Now conventional wisdom says that when your dog has an “accident” in the house, you merely rub their nose in it, give them a swat on the butt, scream “Bad dog, bad dog, I hate you more than anything else in the whole world” and then lock them in the bathroom until they use the commode. But I’ve found it’s much more effective to save up all the dogs feces and put it into a “learning sack”. Then every time the dog uses the bathroom in the house, you put him into the sack and swing him around a few times. I think you’ll find that when the dog comes out of the sack he’ll smell bad, be a little disoriented and traumatized and…well that’s all that has happened so far. But I’m confident that the dog will eventually be housebroken using this method.

And that’s just about all you need to know to take care of a dog! Well, other than what to feed him (if unshucked oysters & pixie sticks work for babies, they should be fine for dogs too), how to train your dog to defeat other animals in underground dogfighting competitions (you think I’m giving away all my secrets), and what to do if your dog uses mental telepathy to try to convince you to kill people (your dog may have psychological problems, take him to a dog psychiatrist). Until next time, remember to love your dog and treat him as a friend — unless you live in South Korea, in which case you should treat your dog as a friendly yet delicious meal!

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