Give a dog a cone

Thanks to Isabel Archer (the blogger, not the protagonist), I have yet another reason to feel dog-guilt: after Bisou was spayed, she wore for nearly two weeks straight the regular vet-issued plastic cone. I had not even realized that a superior alternative existed, but seems it does.

In my defense, Bisou seemed for the most part indifferent to the cone, same as after she turns our living room into a gymnasium in ways that inevitably culminate in banging her head against corners of furniture or slipping off the couch and onto her back from a not-insubstantial height, it's as if nothing happened. Same as how she apparently spent the time her paws were being trimmed licking the groomer's hand. Same as how she demands that the vet - the great source of needles and surgery in her life - give her belly rubs. I'm not sure our dog has any conception of pain. I mean, some conception (she's not keen on being brushed, and on the rare occasions we've so much as begun to step where she had, unbeknownst to us, put a paw, she's squeaked in agony), but not human-level.

But I totally get what Isabel means when she mentions trying to figure out her dog's "inner ethnicity." Bisou is a pet of intermarriage in the Jewish sense as well as international marriage, so ethno-culturally she could be either a New York Jew or a Flemish Catholic. She's been cooed at in (Flemish) Dutch, (Canadian) French, Russian, and Hebrew. Going by her taste in food, she's from a cold part of Europe, what with her willingness to do anything for smoked salmon, which could be my background or Jo's. But she may have origins on a different continent altogether. Her "Afro" has been admired twice in such terms by black and interracial families, and when we've taken her to New York, her biggest fans have been Japanese tourists. But the poodle is a German dog with French connotations.

The only conclusion I can come to is that Bisou is a cosmopolitan. Unfortunately, unlike the cosmopolitans of turn-of-the-century French literature, she isn't also a financier, in which case she could have bought herself a more comfortable cone and, more importantly, paid the associated vet bill.