Duty Free Dog Cage

I have a friend who keeps a large, 70 pound dog. It looks like a Rotweiller to me but he insists it is half sheperd half... I don't even remember what he said. Who cares. The story is what happened to him this week.

Some background; when my friend is at work, he keeps his 70 pound dog in a steel cage. The cage is pretty good size for the dog to move around in, so he's not constrained to face only one direction all day long.

At some point this week, the dog crapped in the cage, as animals are known to do. Normally, the dog can wait until the owner gets home to let him outside and do his business, but today he had to go. To make matters worse, I guess the dog decided to play in the pile since he didn't have much else to do-do and when the owner got home, the dog was apparently covered in it.

So now the dog desparately needed a bath. Unfortunately, the bathtub is on the second floor by way of spiral stair case and did I happen to mention it was a 70 pound dog? He couldn't carry the dog up the steps, he had to drag him, dog covered in his own poop, up a spiral staircase and into the bathtub. The dog got clean but the cage is still soiled and now my friend has the carpet to worry about, like a trail of breadcrumbs from cage to tub.

The carpet he's still working on trying to make doody-free but the cage, that should be easy. The bars are steel and the floor is durable plastic. Nothing is going to stain. However, my friend does not have a water spout on the outside of his apartment and certainly no water hose. I mean why would you need a water hose if you have nothing to plug it in to? So the tough question: What do you do?

Well I'll tell you what he did. He's got a nice lake-view apartment. A lake I say? That's right. He got the bright idea to submerge the steel cage into the lake to wash out the contaminate. It was a solid idea, something that might be worth pursuing except for one thing. He assumed (probably correctly) the apartment owners would frown upon him washing dog dookie into their man-made lake which is normally used for the viewing pleasure of hundreds of residents. There's a simple solution to that - he decided to do it in the cover of darkness.

Out of sight, out of mind.

With as much stealth as possible, my friend hauled the enormous steel cage out back to the lake (it's more of a pond actually), pushed it down into the water with as little as a noise-making splash as possible, to submerge the floor of the case where most of the fecal matter lie, trying to not lose control of the cage where it would float out to the middle of the waterway and partially sink. I say partially sink because the pond-lake probably isn't deep enough to submerge the cage completely and come daylight, the residents would look upon their pond-lake, gazing at the ducks, swans, geese, small man-made waterfall and one partially submerged steel cage covered in dog feces.

His fears were allayed however, he didn't lose control of the cage and I guess the mission was a success. The cage is back in the comfort of his apartment, clean and tidy, awaiting the day for the 70 pound dog to mess it all up again.

You can't make this stuff up.