When your kid deploys to another continent—the kind with lots of camels—you fear for her safety. When she leaves you with a dog that’s the size of a camel, you fear for your own safety. Also the mailman’s.
While my military daughter is stationed overseas, her “kids” are visiting. There’s the 55-pound Lab she rescued—her toy dog—and Clyde, who is a dog only in the loosest sense of the term. Technically, he’s livestock.
Clyde is an English mastiff who weighs between 150 and 160 pounds, depending on how many cars he eats before you weigh him. I have no formal training or special license to handle a beast of this size. I’m not even sure our neighborhood is zoned for it. I’m just doing my part for America.
“Ask not what your country can do for you,” my daughter said. “Ask what you can do for the mastiff.” So we took him.
Clyde is only 3, but he’s already been through five families who probably neglected to research mastiff drool, a fast-curing industrial adhesive the dog uses to lubricate his surroundings. Once it dries, the easiest thing to do is buy a new house.
Before Clyde arrived, the three dogs we already own shared one water bowl, which the mastiff empties with a single snort. So we set Clyde up with a commercial stockpot in the bathroom, where he can drain his jowls while inflicting the least collateral damage.
As Clyde drops his mighty head into the pot, there’s a deafening rumble usually created by boats with twin-diesel engines. Once his tank is full, Clyde emerges in all his frothy glory, prepared to empty the fleshy flaps that flank his face. Each one holds several quarts of liquid and assorted projectiles with an effective splatter range of 10 feet. (Tip: Foaming at the mouth is not a reliable sign of madness in this breed. They’re always foaming.)
Since what goes in must come out, we try to empty Clyde frequently. We quickly learned that the pint-size doggie bags adequate for most of the canine world are not one-size-fits-all, so we upgraded to lawn and leaf. My husband thinks the skilled professionals who follow circus elephants around with shovels probably train on mastiffs. And whatever they get paid, it’s not enough.
Wherever he goes, Clyde attracts a crowd. Strangers always stop to gape and point. The mere sight of such a majestic animal seems to trigger a spontaneous reflex as reliable as a rubber mallet tapping your knee: “That is a BIG DOG,” everyone assures us, in case we thought we were walking a Pomeranian.
Oddly enough, they’ll still charge up and stick an arm in the big dog’s face without asking if he’s friendly. Or hungry. It wouldn’t surprise me to see someone pry Clyde’s jaws apart to stick their head in for a photo opp.
Before you adopt a mastiff, I highly recommend taking the dog for a test drive. You might want to hold off until you find one with power steering, cruise control and brakes.
But if you can’t wait, my daughter can hook you up with a camel.
JAN A. IGOE would appreciate any tips from big-breed owners and cattle ranchers on the care and feeding of big, lovable slobber machines like Clyde. Write her at Humor Me.