Essentially, the world can be divided into two basic groups of people: dog people and cat people. And while this concept does little for me except conjure up interesting images of half-man half-animal hybrids, I decided I’d use the former to explain two subdivisions: Terrier people and non-Terrier people. For those who aren’t aware, Terriers are an exceptionally annoying classification of dogs that apparently have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder because of their teeming amounts of useless energy. Of course, this is from the perspective of a non-Terrier person. Terrier people think that these animals, despite their penchant for obnoxious behavior, are actually quite charming. I know because my mom is one of them.

Meet Charlie: a smooth Fox Terrier with issues. I’ll explain the “issues” elsewhere. For now I’ll simply explain the origin of his breed. Back before whenever the hell it was some sick sadomasochist decided to create the rat-like creatures known as Fox Terriers, hunting for foxes was rather difficult. Poor hunters had to actually get off their horses and fish the foxes out of the holes themselves. Along comes the aforementioned maniac and his new stupid breed. These dogs have particularly long snouts so that they can reach deep down into foxholes and grab their prey but because their pea-like brains inhibit them from the ability of moving backwards it was also necessary to make them with strong tails so their owners can yank them back out. You probably know of the more common wiry-haired Fox Terriers. Charlie isn’t one of these. His fur is smooth and would actually be nice to pet if it didn’t smell like Chewbacca likely does after a month without bathing. His breath is even worse. It seriously smells like a small part of his insides is dead and decomposing.

As I stated above, Charlie has issues. Case in point: he’s ravenously hungry. So hungry, in fact, that he eats himself. This only occurs during the summer and early spring. It’s my theory that his horribly thin fur renders him so cold in the winter that his body uses most of his energy keeping warm. As a result, his appetite lessens somewhat. But the rest of the time the little guy just chews on himself until his self-inflicted wounds start to turn gangrene. The only way to prevent this was to fit him with a ridiculous cone around his neck so he couldn’t reach the
	Shown above: Charlie wearing his bonnet. Not pictured: uncomfortable grunting.
rest of his body. This turned out to be rather ineffective on account of his long snout. We can’t simply give him a larger cone (a.k.a., “bonnet”) because his neck is too skinny to fit it. Later Charlie got bored with chewing on himself so he decided to start doing it to our other dog, Cassie, a black Labrador-Australian Shepherd mix (big mistake).

Cassie

Charlie has two basic goals in life: A) Eat everything that’s eatable (and some stuff that isn’t) and B) Make sweet love to the carpet. It’s my guess that if he were able to do both at the same time he’d be in doggy paradise but alas! his mind is not capable of such complex coordination. Were he to attempt such an extraordinary feat he’d likely have a brain aneurysm. His quest for food alone is at best futile. It's like the nerd from Sixteen Candle trying to score. Such are the issues of Charles the Terrier.

	Charlie hates water and aggressively seeks to destroy it. Here you can observe the ongoing struggle of Terrier VS Nature.

The stool-sitter (and I might also add that this “stool” has nothing to do with Fat Bastard from Austin Powers 2 as was initially thought by some)can’t say anything while this is going on and also has to improve by the next meeting. My uncle found this rather comical so he decided to have Charlie sit on the stool: “I don’t like your nose, I don’t like your breath, I don’t like your eyes. Furthermore, I don’t like your fur, I don’t like...” and so on. Then he applied it to his wife, and as some of you may guess, that didn't work out too well, even though it was all in good fun. Charlie, of course, just stood there panting, rife with issues.

But I suppose that’s what makes the little rat-dog so interesting. If he were better behaved like our other dog I’d have nothing to write about. If he weren’t so horny or if he had a more pleasant smell then I guess he wouldn't be much of a dog. And if he didn’t have issues he’d be pretty damn boring. Besides, don’t we all have issues?