I like to talk about a wide variety of topics. I don’t want my whole blog to be about my dog.

I just wanted you to know that I don’t want that.

Now on to my dog.

Some dogs are food motivated. Some dogs are toy motivated. My dog is people motivated. She loves people. Not in the way that all dogs love people. My dog loves people in what is probably an unhealthy amount. Like, if she were a human, she wouldn’t just be a fan of people. She’d be a stalker who breaks into people’s houses in the middle of the night to try and collect the scent of their morning breath in a jar so she could smell it whenever she wanted.

Well, that was a disturbing sentence.

My dog is a mixed breed. But not in the way that all dogs are mixed breeds (even pure-breds are mixed breeds as it turns out)(but don’t tell the AKC or they’ll implode). My dog is a mixed breed in the same way that the dinosaur in the new Jurassic Park movie is a mixed breed.

Some twisted genetic engineer with a billion-dollar lab asked, “What would happen if we took a breed known for its affection, crossed it with a breed known for its devotion, mixed in some DNA from a newlywed couple on facebook, then dropped it in a vat of liquid adoration, irradiated it with exposure to radioactive love isotopes, and gave it a snuggling-addiction? AND we’ll put it into the body of a stuffed-animal that we brought to life?” That’s how this abomination of adorability came to be made:

cutie (600x800)

Science has crossed the line.

You would think this ability to love everyone she meets beyond all reason would help my dog in her career pursuits (hey, it’s the 21st century; Dogs are allowed to have careers outside the home!)(Besides, somebody has to bring in enough money to keep her in the puppy-toy-rich lifestyle she is accustomed to and I’m a blogger/self-published author, so she has a better chance). Unfortunately, this human-obsession my puppy suffers from actually disqualifies her for many jobs.

Police K9 dogs have to be addicted to a certain reward to motivate them through rigorous training and long, difficult searches. Usually this is a toy, like a tennis ball. In my dog’s case, the police would have to reward her by making everyone snuggle her. Every time my dog sniffed out drugs or a bomb, EVERYONE would have to stop what they were doing to give her belly-rubs: other police officers, civilians, bomb-squad officers, drug-dealers. It would be somewhat time-prohibitive.

My dog could be a search-and-rescue dog. She would excel at the searching half. The only problem would be the rescuing part. Once she found a person, she would like to just nestle down with them under the snow and get petted. She would take it as a personal offense if the person she found insisted on being flown off in a rescue helicopter to go to a hospital instead of snuggling with her. Many of her “rescues” would bleed-out or freeze to death before she would feel she had received enough snuggling to let the person be rescued. She would also take that as a personal offense. Death is no excuse to stop petting her.

I considered making her a therapy dog for a while. I went out and bought a book about training your dog to be a therapy dog. The opening sentence of the very first chapter was, “A good therapy dog is both calm and quiet.” I got that far and then threw out the book.

My dog is calm and quiet in a relative sense, assuming the thing you are comparing her to is a soccer riot. She is a vocal dog. She loves people SO MUCH, she can’t keep quiet about it! She needs to shout it from the rooftops, by which I mean bark it in your face.

And, like all addicts, she is a little jittery.

Also, there is a very fine line in her mind between “snuggling” and “wrestling”.

And God help the person who decides to stop giving her belly-rubs before they have met their belly-rub quota.

So therapy dog is out.

But I’m sure there are some jobs that my dog would be good at. Soccer riot instigator, for one.

My dog is also good at building up your self-esteem. It’s hard to feel bad about yourself when those big, black eyes stare deeply into yours to say, “I love you so much, I wish I could lick your brain! I will settle for the inside of your nose, however.”

So, wherever you are, whatever your problems, know that somewhere out there is a dog who has never met you who thinks you are so great, she might just start a soccer riot to prove it.