PUPPY FOOTPRINTS
★★★★★
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing puppy footprints.
Puppy footprints don’t always lead to a puppy. Sometimes they lead to a raccoon because they were actually raccoon footprints all along. But the only way to find that out is to follow them in the snow through several neighbors backyards just hoping that your lost puppy will be at the end. He won’t be. A sleeping raccoon will be. And you might hope maybe your puppy just looks like a raccoon because of the ravages of living outdoors, but that’s wishful thinking. That raccoon will never be your puppy and definitely don’t try to grab it and make it your puppy. Definitely don’t do that.
Real puppy footprints have a puppy at the end. That’s how you can tell the difference. (That tip is nowhere to be found in the Audubon Guide to domesticated animal tracks but you can take my word for it.)
I suppose technically they’re still real puppy footprints if there is only a puppy leg at the end. Like sometimes you see a three-legged puppy and wonder where the other leg went, and it turns out someone used it to make puppy footprints.
In this instance I bet puppy footprints really excite three-legged dogs because they might hope to find their leg. Puppy footprints probably excite mountain lions the most, since I think they are puppies’ most likely predator. I don’t know anyone else who eats puppies.
If you followed puppy footprints long enough, they would eventually turn into dog footprints as the puppy grew older. You would have to follow them very slowly though. It would take years if you did it right. But if you followed too slowly, you would just find a dead dog at the end. I guess that would make them corpse footprints, which sounds scary – as if the footprints were left by a ghost dog. There’s a movie called Ghost Dog but it’s about the African-American actor from Battlefield Earth.
Battlefield Earth would have been better if all the aliens had puppy feet instead of platform shoes.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing a grain of salt.
