David Thorne is one of those people who is so funny I’m scared of him. I worry that one day I might accidentally meet him, say something stupid, and then he’ll write a blog post about me. While I’m sure that post would be great, it would probably also render me incapacitated for life, because he is just that good at blog posts, you guys.

He recently got a puppy, anyway, and here’s a quote from his post on it I really liked, followed by a link to the whole thing, which you should definitely read, because it made me cry. Admittedly that’s not hard to do when writing about pets (or childhood, or love, or friendship). But it’s a pretty big deal for a David Thorne piece.

My first mistake with the new puppy was listening to the advice of other people in regards to buying a ‘crate’. “Puppies like the crate,” they told me, “it gives them their own safe space, etc.” As it turns out, a crate is a cage. People call it a crate because it is easier to justify keeping a puppy in a crate than a cage. Perhaps, instead of chicken farmers bothering to go to the expense of producing “cage free” eggs, they could just call the cages ‘crates’ and write on the carton that chickens like crates so that everybody can pretend it isn’t something that it is and get cheaper eggs.

I purchased a cage and assembled it on the kitchen floor while the puppy played with the instructions next to me. I then sat looking at both the puppy and the cage for a few minutes before disassembling the cage and putting it out on the sidewalk for the next morning’s trash pickup. Then I thought that one of the rubbish truck guys might take it home and use it, so I broke the door off the cage and threw it into a neighbour’s hedge.

http://27bslash6.com/puppies.html