Dead Toys
The following is a memorial to all of the beloved toys that have passed on to toy heaven. Please join Zoe in lovingly remembering them all.
A word of introduction for anyone arriving here by accident. Zoe is a Smooth Fox Terrier and she was the first dog in this house, which is to say she was here before any of the Greyhounds and has never entirely accepted that this was not a permanent arrangement. When Porcia arrived in 1999, Zoe could not understand why a large fast dog would decline to play twenty-four hours a day, and spent several months trying to negotiate. The Greyhounds sleep about eighteen hours a day. Zoe does not sleep. Zoe works.
Mrs. Hippo
Alas, poor Mrs. Hippo is gone now. Zoe loved her from the day she arrived, which is the problem. She was a purple plush hippopotamus of considerable dignity, and there exists a photograph of Mrs. Hippo as a young lass, plump and complete, taken in her first week before anything had happened to her. She was, by the end, mostly a concept.
The ears went first. The squeaker was surgically extracted and presented to a human at four o'clock one morning. The stuffing came out over a period of weeks, distributed evenly across two rooms, in what we can only describe as a controlled demolition.
The Rope
Sold as indestructible. This turned out to be a claim about the rope rather than about Zoe. It survived roughly nine days as a rope and a further two months as a diminishing collection of individual fibers, each of which had to be personally located and destroyed. We were still finding them at Christmas.
The Squeaky Bone
The squeaky bone had one job and it did it, at volume, for eleven days. Its removal from active service was not accidental; the squeaker is the soul of the toy and a terrier knows it. It was extracted with the precision of a jeweller and then left in the middle of the hallway for someone to step on in the dark.
The Rabbit With No Ears
The rabbit came into this house with two perfectly good ears. It left with none. Zoe's position, when asked, was that it had come that way. We have photographs. Eat your heart out, every heavyweight who ever bit an ear in a title fight — you took one and it made the papers for twenty years. She took both and had a nap.
The Tennis Ball
A tennis ball does not die dramatically. It is simply worn down: first the fuzz, then the seam, then the rubber, until what remains is a small grey hemisphere of string that no longer bounces and cannot be thrown. Zoe kept it anyway. It went everywhere with her long after it had ceased to be a ball in any meaningful sense, which we thought was rather touching until she tried to bury it in the couch.
Why they do this
In fairness to Zoe, none of this is naughtiness. Smooth Fox Terriers were bred to go to ground after quarry and to work with considerable independence once they got there, and a couple of hundred years of that produces a dog with genuine prey drive and a strong opinion about what should be done with a small squeaking object. Shaking it, opening it and removing the noise from the inside is the job. The breed reference for the Smooth Fox Terrier puts it more politely than we just did, but it amounts to the same thing.
The practical consequence is that soft toys are a consumable, not a purchase, and that a terrier without a job will invent one out of whatever is nearest. This has never once been a problem with the Greyhounds, whose toys tend to die of old age in a basket. There is more of Zoe's own thinking on the subject over on her vocabulary page, and there are a great many friends who share her hobbies in the Gallery of Friends.