It's A Dogs World

This weekend, I heard a guy on the radio talking about buying a thousand-dollar "designer dog." I had to pull over and softly cry into a fast-food napkin. Is our country now so successful that we make up stuff to spend our money on? Since when did dogs cost a thousand bucks? They used to be "free to a good home," or cost about $15 out of the back of a station wagon at a truck stop or your local TG&Y.

Roadside station wagon dogs were always a crap shoot of mixed success.

You'd work out the deal with the fat woman in stretch pants and a stained Jimmy Buffet A1-A t-shirt perched on the sagging lip of an open tailgate, chain-smoking Dorals.

"These dogs have all their shots?" you'd ask.

"Oh, yeah, all of 'em. They got tapeworm shots, heartworm shots, flu shots, cancer shots," she'd say in a cloud of smoke and a phlegm induced cough. But, for 15 bucks, you didn't want to ask too many questions.

You'd take your pick out of the cardboard box, and the fat lady would instruct some vaguely related boy, with a grotesque overbite who never talked, to lead you back to "where the good puppies are."

"These ones up front that get handled a lot tend to die," she'd explain.

Ten minutes later, you'd go home with a new little friend that would cost you $2,000 in vet bills in the first year if you didn't have a cold heart or a country grandfather whose idea of veterinary care was shotgun.

Now we are paying a thousand dollars for designer breeds?

In my day, a "designer breed" was when your mutt had designs on the girl dog two streets over and did something about it. The "girl dog" family would be angry when the puppies arrived with some sort of tell-tale stripe that would lead straight back to your grinning, heat-induced dog.

Then your dad and their dad would exchange some tough words and glances in the living room while you sat in the kitchen, making deals with God to get a free puppy from the rendezvous.

But now we have designer dogs that cost a thousand bucks and have superpowers, according to my brief Internet research.

"This Great Dane and teacup poodle mix, or Great TeaDoodle, never sheds and can levitate. His bathroom output is greatly diminished by selective breeding and fairy dust."

Whatever. The world was a better place when you got your dog from behind the tire shop, or from my Doral-smoking mom before we got my overbite fixed