I Wish I Hadn’t Done That

By Chris Robinson

Life has a way of telling us that there are things we shouldn’t have done. Sometimes that reminder is immediate such as when you are standing waist deep in water that’s on the verge of turning to ice after you wrongly assumed that the half-submerged tree spanning the creek you needed to cross to get to the Brittany on point on the other side actually reached to the opposite bank and wasn’t rotten because it didn’t and it was. Other times, it takes awhile for “Gee, I wish I hadn’t done that” to sink in such as when you are trying to extricate a roll of candy or a tube of lip ice from the barrel of an over/under .20 gauge shotgun where, in the heat of the moment, when a straggler quail or two took off after you’ve emptied your gun on the covey rise, in your haste to reload, you have instead loaded the lip ice/candy roll which has slid halfway down the barrel and is strenuously resisting heroic efforts to dislodge it. Both of these epiphanic moments, incidentally, have happened to me.

For some reason, many of the “I shouldn’t have done that” moments involve dogs. A friend of mine was at her breed’s national specialty a few years back with one of the top conformation dogs in the breed. Absolutely everything was stacked in her dog’s favor to win the specialty. The judge was someone who had awarded the dog several group wins and a pair of bests-in-show previously. The dog had been second or third for the entire year in the national rankings for the breed. What’s more, due to the somewhat remote location for that year’s national specialty, three of the dogs that would have provided her dog’s stiffest competition were not entered. Her dog was practically a shoo-in for another BISS and this time at the national.

On the day of the judging, she had walked her dog for close to an hour in the morning. While he had watered roughly every weed in the county, he had declined to take care of his other toilet duty. An hour or so before the scheduled start of competition, she decided to give him another chance. Again, despite a long walk, he wouldn’t take care of that important project. Finally, in desperation, as they walked along a small wooded area on the edge of the show grounds, knowing that doing his business on leash had sometimes been an issue with him, she unclipped his leash. Sure enough, the dog immediately bounded off into the woods and she caught a glimpse of him as he began preparations to complete the mission.

She waited what she thought was the requisite time to conclude the operation and when he didn’t reappear, she became a bit concerned. Just about the time she started into the wooded area to look for him, to her horror, she heard a very loud splash. Her water-loving dog had found the only pond within 10 miles of the show grounds and it was not what you’d call a lovely, clean, garden pool. What she got, when she yelled at him to “Get in here” was a dog covered with mud and an odious green slime that was gag-inducing even from a good ten feet away. Not content with anointing himself with the execrable goo, he proceeded to happily shake it off on his owner’s show clothing before she could scramble out of range.

With less than a half-hour before the competition, needless to say, there was little time to repair the damage. Although she hustled the dog back to her truck and made what she described as a heroic effort to clean him up and get some of the muck off her clothing, it was an impossible task. While she was able to get most of the green slime off the dog, the stink remained. As for her attempts to clean her clothing, they were a dead loss. The ultimate result was the shoo-in for BOB was a no-show at that year’s specialty. And, when her fellow competitors asked why her dog had not been in the ring and heard the reason for his absence, instead of the sympathetic cluck-clucks she thought she deserved, all she heard was howls of laughter as she described her efforts to get the dog and herself cleaned up in time for the judging.

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Posted by Alex on Nov 29 2016. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.