I go through dogs like a newborn through diapers. I'm not the best-looking guy and find most of my companionship with man's best friend. But I'm the furthest thing from a one-canine man: I like to play the field. My first was a bull terrier. Like many products of Great Britain, he was a nasty piece of work: an attitude of feisty superiority capped off with a mouth of rotting teeth. Still, like a lot of the British (Eddie Izzard, John Cleese), the guy had character. I loved taking him to the park and watching him scare the bejesus out of other dogs and their owners. With wide-set eyes and a compact but vaguely offputting muscularity, Zeus reminded me of myself. Except for his ears.
I'd bought the scariest, most frothing beast I could find and still some people refused to be intimidated. "You really should have his ears pinned," one woman told me. "He's a bull terrier," I said, "his ears are supposed to jut out." She stared at him: "Not like that." It's surprisingly affordable to have a dog's ears pinned. Not that Zeus was that keen on the procedure, but he did look a lot better until he was mauled to death by two Presa Canarios and a Dobermann.
Next I tried a Tibetan Spaniel and discovered the joy of being seen with the cutest dog in the park. Parents would lay down their newspapers and kids their water pistols to gawk at Electra. Like all things Tibetan, she was diminutive and adorable. Pretty much perfect, actually, except for her nose. Electra had a little bump. "Nothing I can't iron out," said my veterinary plastic surgeon, Bruce. "What will you do?" "Same thing I'd do to your wife and daughters if you had either and I were qualified to work on humans: I'll break Electra's nose and re-set it." "Cool," I said. The thing was, though, looking at Electra post-op, I started to miss Zeus. It hadn't gone all that well: Bruce had given her a new nose but also a wounded look in her eyes that drove me crazy. At least Zeus was too dense to know he'd had his ears pinned.
I couldn't afford a German car, so I bought a schnauzer. They're a robust dog: courageous and notably intelligent. The trouble with Hercules was his eyes: I couldn't understand why they were almond-shaped. "You're Teutonic," I barked at him, "with an agressively masculine posture, bushy eyebrows, and a beard. But your eyes are like something out of 'The Mikado.'"
"Bruce," I demanded, "give me oval eyes." "You have oval eyes." "Not me: Hercules." "We may be going a bit beyond my purview," he told me. "Don't sell yourself short, Bruce, just make an incision or whatever." He sighed, "I should have done something less competitive like become a doctor."
Bruce and I grew close over the years. Each breed I brought him cemented our friendship. I pushed him to the limits of his medical expertise as he expanded my options of ways in which it is possible to alter a dog. I dropped off my mastiff (face-lift), German shepherd (mole removal), Saint Bernard (tummy tuck), Chihuahua (collagen injections), and West Highland white terrier (buttock implants).
But Bruce seemed peevish the day I showed up with my pair of pugs. He glared at them: "What now?" "We're here for a little liposuction" I announced. "If you could just remove a bit of tissue from Orpheus and place it in Eurydice..." "If I take fat from A and cram it in B, then B will look like A and you will have spent thousands and a considerble amount of my time." "First off, Bruce, no one's asking you to 'cram' anything. Second, the pugs have names." "Then why dress them in matching tracksuits and deprive them of their individualty?" I decided then that I valued Bruce more as a surgeon than as a philosopher.
Bringing him Neptune was a mistake "Look at that face," I instructed. "I see a perfectly normal Sha-Pei," Bruce retorted. "Well, I see folds, wrinkles, furrows, crow's-eyes, a quintuple chin..." He cut me off: "As I said: a Shar-Pei. "You're telling me you can't fill in a few frown lines?" "I wonder why he's frowning," Bruce said cryptically.
His greatest challenge was Hera, my basset hound. "Her teats hang too low," I explained. "They're supposed to. "Not like that," I told him. "You know there's nothing I wouldn't do for you, nothing I haven't done," he said, "but I'm asking you now, as a board-certified vet and as a fellow human being, do not ask me to perform breast-reduction surgery on a basset hound." "Even if Hera will be less self-conscious? Even if she'll look better in the lavender sweater she wears to the park?" I asked. "Is it Hera who'll be less self-conscious or you?" "How should I know, Bruce? It's not as though she can speak." "I'm sorry," he said, "but no. This I cannot do." "Her breasts graze the ground, Bruce: she gets dirty." He shook his head no. Then I had a thought. "Hey listen," I said, "do you think maybe you could lengthen her legs?" He reflected. "Yeah, O.K. Anything within reason."
