DRUG SNIFFING DOGS AND SAHARA SAND

A friend of mine who resides down in the Hill Country tells me he is
worried about several cities he has read about having drug sniffing dogs.
He thinks there should be some sort of rehab center established to treat
these poor animals.

"An egg-sucking dog or a chicken-killing dog is bad enough," he says.

I know what he means. My Dad always had a bunch of hounds, used in his
hobby of chasing wolves, when I was growing up around Blanket. Now and
then, one of them would get into egg-sucking or chicken-killing and he
would try to find another unsuspecting hound-dog man and trade the dog off.

Nothing made Mama any madder than to find that one of Dad's hounds had been
into one of her hen's nests. I guess we were lucky back then that there
were no drugs around for the hounds to get to sniffing. Times were pretty
hard back then and nobody I know of could have afforded drugs for dogs.

It would have been a pretty bad situation if one of Dad's hounds had broken
into Ernest Allen's drug store hunting drugs to sniff. Besides, I don't
think Ernest had any of the sniffing variety and not much of any other kind.

Our pain was relieved with Bayer aspirin and we got high on just having
three meals a day. It didn't take much to make our day in what some folks
are calling "the good old days."

Maybe they were.

I informed my friend that drug sniffing dogs these days seem to be
widespread. Even the government has some at our ports of entry. Of course,
everybody knows that the government has never been able to cure anything yet.

"Even our City Police Department has one," I told him. "They do haul him
around in a police car a lot, trying to get him off drugs, I guess. Some
dogs, I assume, even get to smoking marijuana as they get pretty good at
finding it no matter how well the drug users hide it.

I sometimes wish that my friend would quit muddling up my mind with
subjects like that. I have enough to think about without getting into drug
sniffing dogs. The world doesn't seem to be going the way I would like it
to and I worry about that. At my age, that's not good.

I'm supposed to be enjoying my retirement with no particular worries except
hoping that my pickup will start when I turn the key and he's down there in
the Hill Country trying to figure out how to rehabilitate drug sniffing dogs.

What he needs to do is to start worrying about the heat, the dry weather
and the predicted sand from the Sahara desert falling gently on his head.
Now there's something to worry about. We have always had enough from West
Texas and now the folks in Africa are going to send us some of theirs.

Like I said, the world is a pretty screwed-up place these days, even
without the dogs running around among us sniffing drugs. Maybe sucking eggs
wasn't all that bad after all.