King Pup's NYC Blog Dog

This is Norman. A collie cross from Roden, England. Norman likes to pick things up in his mouth, carry them around for a while and then pulverize them. Like most loyal dogs, he’s also given to following his owner around wherever she goes.

Are you following? Now imagine that Norman follows his owner to the neighborhood recycling bank one day. He sees a plastic bottle in the street on the way there. Thinking, “hey, that looks like it could fit in my mouth,” Norman picks it up and carries it with him. When they arrive, he drops it. Stop me when you think I’m describing something out of the ordinary. Pretty mundane stuff, right?

Tell that to owner Rhea Parsons, who’s convinced that Norman is the canine answer to Al Gore. Stunned to the core by Norman’s initial display of everyday doggy behavior, she decided to give Norman an airtight test of his premeditated environmental tendencies:

Thinking it may have been a one-off, on Rhea’s next trip she put a milk bottle on the floor to see what he would do.

“I thought it was brilliant when he picked it up in his mouth, crushed it, as everyone is asked to do, and took it to the recycling bank,” she said.

Well grate me finely and sprinkle me over mashed potatoes! A dog picks something up and crushes it in his mouth? Next you’ll be telling me he does the same thing with tennis balls and socks — does he recycle those too?

Don’t get me wrong - we dogs care about the environment. That’s why you won’t see us driving or using toilet paper. But we’re also of the general belief that if humans use plastic bottles, then humans can recycle them. Dogs don’t recycle, because we don’t need to. Our carbon pawprints are some of the smallest on the planet. Now, some dogs are taken to “recycling” their “trash” (usually in the most inappropriate situations) - but we don’t talk about them in polite company.

Filed under: Deluded Humans, Harebrained Humans by Bob