Oh, Sweet Mercy, What Have You Rolled In?

It began innocuously enough. But then again, so did The Towering Inferno.

I headed downstairs, preparing for a day working from home, and was met by the three of them. First, a pair of cats who looked like they’d spent the whole night plotting how to get into the knife drawer and finally finish me off. Then a blur of berserk energy: Baxter.

No time for coffee. Just boots on, grab the ball-launching stick thingy, and straight onto the field. He has seven walks most days, and this was already looking like most days. Dogs love routine, and we have ours. I throw the ball, he races after it, he smells every blade of grass within 50 feet of where it landed, and then he brings the ball back and we do it again for another mile or two.

Except this morning. This morning he grabbed the ball, shoved his head into the grass, and stopped moving. And that’s never a good sign.

I still have no idea what he’d found to eat. I was just glad it wasn’t as visibly horrific as the time he consumed an entire mouldy pigeon, which had been thoroughly dead for a week. Beak, feathers, parasites — it was all the same to Baxter.

At least this morning wasn’t that bad.

Not yet, anyway.

By walk number two, less than an hour later, things had already begun to go awry. The routine began the same way: boots, stick, field. But now he’d catch the ball, dive into the undergrowth, adopt a crouching position, and emerge a minute later dragging his rear end. Over and over. Even his legendary guts were struggling to cope with his latest ad hoc addition to his diet.

Not much about this surprised me, not after five years with the doofus. Baxter is an equal-opportunities glutton, a kind of feral, non-judgmental organic Roomba. I’ve seen him eat a live frog, whole. I wish I hadn’t. But I have. He’s munched through enough grass to turf a cricket pitch. Fat-balls filled with birdseed. A fishhook — of which more later. Half a raw red onion. A box of dark chocolate, which is supposed to be instant death to dogs, but just seemed to give him confusingly erotic feelings about the smaller of the cats.

So Baxter eating some indeterminate object he discovered in the long grass wasn’t particularly noteworthy. What made this day special was what he did next. Towards the end of walk number three — his third before lunch — he paused midway through pooing in the bushes because he had found a huge pile of freshly laid fox excrement and immediately rolled in it.

I watched him do it, from a distance of fifty yards. He can hear that far. Experts maintain that in quiet conditions, most domestic dogs can hear a motorbike engine from two miles away. So he definitely heard me pleading with him to stop rolling in a fox’s final draft. He just had his own ideas.

So: straight home, and into the bath. He’s never been a fan, but once he’s in the tub, he seems resigned to what’s happening. I say, “Turn around, Baxter,” and he turns around. I tell him to lift his foot up, and he lifts his foot. We communicate, in our own way. He knows what I mean, mostly. And I kinda get him too.

Which is why I can say for certain that he tried to warn me.

Baxter was standing in six inches of bathwater, and I was kneeling on the floor, trying to hose hardening fox poop off his back, when he suddenly shot me a look that said: neither of us are going to like what happens next.

He was not wrong.

He crouched in the shallow water, and shot out around one pint of diarrhoea.

I yelled, “Oh my holy god!”

I did a thing, he said. In my head, Baxter is from Dudley.

The bath was now filled with a hot soup of liquid bum jelly, livened up with crusty fox crap croutons, and Baxter was wading in it. The smell defied description. I had to chew the back of my hand to prevent myself from gipping.

I grabbed him and lifted him out, slowly working my way through every swear word I’ve ever heard. I plonked him on the bathroom floor, counted to ten, and began to empty and clean the bath.

That was my instinct. Probably yours too.

But instinct is a terrible decision-maker.

My instinct was to take him out of the bath. His instinct was to dry himself off. And we all know how dogs do that.

I was cleaning the bath with my back to him, so I heard it before I realised what was happening. By the time I’d turned around, he’d shaken his special new toxic compound onto every surface of the bathroom. The walls, the towels, the ceiling. Me.

And the floor I was kneeling on was now a small but ambitious yellowish-brown swamp.

I counted to twenty this time. Then I lifted Baxter back into the bath, my eyes watering with the reek, and desperate to get this over with.

He’s not a bad dog. There’s no malice in him. He obeyed every instruction; he lifted his foot; he faced the way I wanted to, and when he was finally clean I lifted him out and turned to put him down.

And that’s when it hit me: I could only dry him on towels that were now coated with his own liquid poo.

I couldn’t open the door to get more towels, because he would immediately run the disgusting mire across every carpet in the house. And putting him down meant standing him in the Horror Pond. And he liked the Horror Pond. That was kind of his bag. So that wasn’t an option.

I stood in this biohazard for what felt like two full minutes, eyes closed, pinching the bridge of my nose, trying not to accept the inevitable. But I couldn’t. This was where my life had led me.

I gave in. I had no choice. I stripped off, turned my clothes inside out, and dried him with those. It was the only solution.

This happened on a Tuesday. I was supposed to be working. My boss probably wondered where I was.

I’ll tell you where: slowly pulling my hair out, stark naked, in a room that I would soon have to nail shut and burn down for the sake of humanity.

And I had a sudden, urgent realisation: I was the only mammal in this room who thought this was a disaster. And one thought kept running through my head:

Why?

Why are they like this? Why do dogs roll in rotting fish or cow pats, then look astonished when we object? Why do they always seem at their most delighted when they’re about to make our homes unliveable, our lives untenable, our days exhausting and confusing and chaotic? Why does Baxter regard everything I find disgusting as either food, perfume, or a valuable artefact?

In short: can anyone explain why the hell dogs are… dogs?