Guilty Secret

Bedford, circa 1996

I can no longer ignore the facts. Lefty, our big, goofy, good-natured golden retriever, whose brethren are featured in a thousand catalogues and advertisements as the perfect family pets, has a dark side to his nature. He is a coprophiliac.

 Lefty came into my life when he was a tear-away two-year-old. Until then,  I had been strictly a cat-woman so I was surprised to the point of shock by my new friend’s ability to detect a decaying hot dog at a hundred paces and his way of greeting newcomers by thrusting his nose into their crotch. Lefty’s pleasure in our walks was clearly correlated with the amount of, shall we say, digested matter that other dogs had deposited along the way, but I put all this down to youthful exuberance. This too will pass, I told myself, like my daughter’s passion for collecting dirty jokes in the fifth grade. But things took a turn for the worse when we moved into the country, to a house near a very large cornfield. The farmer turned out to prefer natural fertilizer, a point that we had not picked up on when we bought the house. I knew we were in trouble the day I saw my dog sit for several minutes, nostrils flared, giddy with sensual pleasure, in front of an enormous, recently defrosted pile of cow manure.

So then we moved to a condo and looked forward to walking our dog in the acres of woods and meadows around our new home. That the woods were filled with deer and the meadows with horses seemed a bonus. How could we foresee that these rural pleasures would prove too much for our charming but weak-willed canine friend? Confronted with ample, regularly renewed supplies of small dry black pellets and large loose brown ones, Lefty is now an unrepentant, enthusiastic coprophage. So once again we are forced to prefer the roads to the woods, keep our pet on the leash, and drive him to areas with fewer temptations. 

Can anyone suggest a good 12-step program?