My golden retriever, Emmet, is four and a half years old, and while that puts him at about thirty-one and a half in human years, he is decidedly a sixteen year old boy in disguise.  Yes, I am one of those people who is unapologetically convinced that my dog is both human and can process every word I’m saying, whether he chooses to respond accordingly or not (and sometimes he does respond accordingly, I swear).  Not unlike the teenage boys I teach.  He shares their fluctuating energy levels as well; remaining lethargically splayed out on the floor beside me – no modesty whatsoever – tongue lolling out the side of his mouth like a dirty sock one moment, only to spring up the second someone else arrives, hyper-orbiting them with whatever the nearest toy was in his mouth, joyously extolling their presence with sounds most accurately compared to the mating call of George Lucas’ wookies.  But the trait that most closely links Emmet with the tribe of teenage boys is his voracious and unabashed appetite.

The vast majority of my “Emmet stories” involve him ingesting something.  Luckily, with the exception of the first year of his life, these things have mostly resided within the realm of the edible.  But that first year was rough, though his digestive system miraculously never seemed to think so.  When he was eight weeks old, I brought Emmet – full name, Emmet the Bearslayer – home, and when he was ten weeks old, I considered renaming him Emmet the Birdslayer.  He was only about twelve pounds when he proved himself as a “bird dog”, and by “bird dog” I mean a dog with a taste for eating birds, not retrieving them.  A cardinal had gotten trapped inside the stairwell of my building one morning, and in an attempt to start my day with a Cinderella moment, I put down my puppy and set out to aid the helpless creature back into the wild.  Cupping it in my palms, I gently tossed it towards the propped open door, only to watch it skitter behind a garbage can in the corner of the landing.  Within five seconds Emmet had the beautiful red bird clenched in his tiny, razor-sharp puppy teeth.  I remember screaming aloud “This is the worst rescue effort ever,” as I tried with all my might to pry his jaws apart and the dark eyes of the bird looked at me pleadingly.  Finally, I got Emmet’s mouth to open, but just as I was about to shake the shocked bird from his clutches, he gave one solid gulp, and the still alive bird was swallowed whole.  Still alive.  Whole.  I spent the day hysterically waiting for my new puppy to die.  I called the vet.  I searched the internet.  I finally looked at him and realized he looked pretty happy with himself.  He was fine.  No, he was more than fine.  He was licking his lips.

Technically, I suppose the cardinal qualifies as edible, but it served as a nice segue, or appetizer I suppose, to the things he was definitely not supposed to eat that year.  Like, oh, I don’t know, say his leash?  A week before Emmet’s first Christmas, I returned home at 4 A.M. from a night of holiday festivities, to find that the friend who had walked him for me earlier in the evening had left him in the kitchen with his leash still attached.  I clumsily reached down to grab it and take him out, but each time I grabbed for it, I came up empty.  Puzzled, I focused on focusing – remember, it was both a night of holiday festivities and 4 A.M. – and found that the only part of his leash attached to him was the four inches closest to his collar; in other words, the part he couldn’t reach with his mouth.   The next morning I searched high and low, under the fridge, under the couch, in the closet, but the rest of his leash was simply gone.  Until, that is, one week later when, at 7 A.M. on Christmas morning, he threw up all three missing feet of his leash in its entirety, like a long string of spaghetti rolled into a ball.  On my bed.  Happy holidays, indeed.

Believe it or not, this was not the strangest thing to come out of Emmet’s mouth (and, therefore, go into it).  One night I woke up in the middle of the night with an overwhelming sense that something was wrong.  Looking over, I saw Emmet sitting up on the bed next to me, not breathing.  Suddenly, my latent maternal instincts took over and I found myself sticking my arm, elbow-deep, down his throat.  The moment I knew I loved this dog more than anything else, the moment I knew I had the potential to someday make a suitable mother to a human child, was when I remained outwardly calm as I spotted the head of a snake coming out of his throat with my hand.  Oh dear lord, I was pulling a snake, a big snake, out of my dog’s mouth on my bed and I wasn’t letting go.  It wasn’t until my whole arm was out in the open that I realized that, in fact, the object obstructing Emmet’s airway, the object I had just yanked from his body, was the front half of a rubber toy alligator.  I don’t own a rubber alligator.  I don’t know anyone who owns a rubber alligator.  I don’t know what happened to the back half of the rubber alligator.

What I do know is that our daily environment is ideal for the black hole of Emmet’s belly.  Because I work and live at a boarding school, Emmet has spent his life thus far in community with about four hundred high school students.  This has only fueled his food obsession, as “snacks” appear readily.  A simple walk past the dining hall is a scavenging adventure.  Emmet has single-handedly cleaned the campus of no less than a dozen apple cores, on occasion a hamburger patty or a fallen cookie.  But his most successful “finds” took the form of surprise attacks.  Once while I was walking him across campus on the first day of school, my arms too encumbered by a massive stack of books and syllabi to have full control of his retractable leash, my deceivingly sweet looking golden welcomed a new student the way I imagine Scut Farkus from A Christmas Story may have welcomed her.  The unwitting girl was strolling down the sidewalk, carrying a nicely wrapped Dave’s Cosmic Sub in her hand, saving it for later, when she made the mistake of pausing – just for a second – to admire Emmet’s handsome mug.  Before I could even yank on his leash, Emmet had that sub out of her hand, removed it from the wrapper, and gobbled it down with a grin, as if to say “Welcome to my world, freshman!”  All he was missing was a coon skin hat and a slingshot.

As great as I know that was for him, that wasn’t the best day of Emmet’s life; no that day would come in time, and when it did, I’m sure he thought he had been softly lifted into a sweet, sweet dream from which he never wanted to be woken.  I, however, felt I had stumbled into some terrible, foreign, B-level horror movie.  It went something like this:  It is, once again, the first day of school, and Emmet and one of his campus doggie friends are enjoying some off-leash exercise out by the cross-country course, when suddenly, Emmet spots them like a grand mirage.  There by the pond are the new Korean students sitting in a giant circle in the grass…and they are eating pizza.  Lots of pizzas.  They have pieces of pizzas on paper plates in their laps, totally defenseless.  They have at least five open boxes of pizzas in the center of the circle.  OPEN boxes of pizza.  ON THE GROUND!

I heard the screams first.  And then I saw it.  The great pizza massacre.  Most of them were shrieking in their native language, though the one upperclass boy among them, much to my embarrassment, was yelling “Hey!  That’s my teacher’s dog!”  Some tried to guard their slices, others threw their slices away from them – sacrificial offerings to the shaggy, drooling monster frantically circling their circle.  As soon as he saw me chasing him (his frenzy and the terrified yells had deadened his ears to my commands), he leapt into the center of the circle. 

JACKPOT!  Not only did he manage to snag half a pizza, tomato sauce carnage smeared all over his snout, he impressively used another whole pizza pie for leverage, sinking all four paws into its cheesy center and pushing off hard.  If he could laugh, I’m certain Emmet would have sent a Vincent Price-style cackle reeling across the pond that day.  His doggie friend?  Sitting calmly at his owner’s side the whole time, enjoying the show.  Sometimes I get a little sad for Emmet because I’m not sure it’s ever going to get better than that for my eternally hungry pet.

Now, I’m not lying when I say that Emmet will sit, patient but alert, beside me while I eat any given meal, not begging but waiting well-mannered for me to finish.  He doesn’t nose my elbow or jump at my plate.  He sits, knowing that when the Alpha (that’s me) is done, she might let him lick her plate.  She might not.  A lot of people don’t believe me though, at least people who have tried to eat around him.  The problem, as my mother likes to say whenever I visit her, is that in Emmet’s mind, at least as far as food is concerned, I am the Alpha, he is the Beta, and everyone else (particularly my mother) is more or less Omega.   If it’s not in my hand, it’s fair game.  That being said, my mother’s home is the only place I’ve ever seen him lift his front paws off of the ground (and onto a table or counter) to steal food.  He’s no fool, he knows at the holidays, when there are babies and children distracting people, it’s prime time to slip under the radar of the food police.  He has grabbed a whole block of cheese off her dining room table, successfully swallowing the majority of it whole when I broke the ends of the cheese off trying to pull it from his mouth.  And, most recently, with perfect timing – just as my mother stepped into the kitchen doorway to ask if she could give him a treat because he was “looking for food” – he jumped up and snatched the peanut butter sandwich she was making off the counter.  Ah peanut butter…his weakness.  It is the food he most craves and the food he is most allergic to; still, tell him that a half hour spent with his snout shoved in a very nearly empty peanut butter container, tongue lavishly bathing every bit of its walls with surgeon-like precision and patience, will cost him at least a week of gnawing and scratching at his itchy skin and maybe even an ear infection, and he’ll say “it’s worth it.”  And you kind of have to admire that.  He’s shamelessly hedonistic, particularly when it comes to food, and, yeah, sometimes that means he has to sacrifice things temporarily.  Like dignity…or, in the case of the rubber alligator, breathing.  But people stop me in the park to say “Your dog is actually smiling!”  You’ll never meet a happier dog.