The Fourth Chihuahua

I currently belong to two Boston Terriers and I neither want nor need any more owners, especially little yappy ones with pissy attitudes. So why is the cosmos sending me messages in the form of tiny, quivering taco dogs?

The first one I saw while walking my two Bostons. There we were with the split leash, Sampson (the big one) dragging Piper along. I like to think of it as mentoring but I’m not sure Piper would agree. Anyway, we were a few blocks from home when I saw a little brown Chihuahua sniffing around in someone’s driveway.

Now I don’t like seeing dogs running free and I always stop to see if they are lost and need some sort of assistance. In fact, I once saved a little Schnauzer that way. She’d gotten out of her yard and was romping around a busy street. She bounced her way over to me and I managed to snag her. Then I flagged down a nearby jogger and asked him to read the number on her collar so I could use my cell phone to call her owner (see, I walk with my cell phone but not my glasses . . . it’s a long story, don’t ask). So the nice jogger not only read the phone number on the dog tag but also dialed it for me since I couldn’t see the number pad on my phone. When I talked to the owner he was ever so grateful that I’d found his little Diva but he was all the way up at College Station and would not be home until the evening. He said he’d appreciate if I could hang on to her until he got home. So I said sure and, since I only had one leash and it was attached to my own dog (I only had Sampson back then), I carried Diva the remaining mile home, grateful for the fact that she was only a Schnauzer and not a forty pound Labrador. When Sampson and I got home, we learned that Diva was a) not housebroken b) hungry and c) wound up like the energizer bunny. It was a fun day though. Diva wore Sampson out completely and I was glad to have helped her and the people she owned.

But the little Chihuahua wasn’t wearing a collar so I already knew he wouldn’t be as easy to help as Diva had been. And, unlike Diva, he showed no interest whatsoever in either me or my Bostons. In fact, he scampered about twenty feet down the sidewalk where he stood, staring and trembling and obviously impervious to the little kissy noises I made trying to coax him nearer. Whenever I took a few steps closer, he scurried a little further. Finally I decided that perhaps he lived at the house I’d first seen him at and I’d be exacerbating the situation by scaring him further from it. So I took my two charges home, hoping for the best for the little taco dog.

The next one I spotted from my truck. A different dog, a different day but this one was collarless too. It was headed south on Lakedale, focused on some important doggie mission. It didn’t pay any attention to me as I slowed way down, looking around to see if it had any people with it. It was alone though but very intent on getting somewhere. I didn’t attempt to engage this one in dialog from the truck and figured that, by the time I found a place to turn around, it would be gone.

The third one must have followed me home from another of my dog walks. I’d just gotten back into the house and was washing my hands in the kitchen sink when I happened to glance out the window. Lo AND behold, there was yet another Chihuahua! This one was white and a bit larger than the other two had been, but also collarless. I dried my hands and went out the back door, once again, the good Samaritan trying to assist a lost dog. But by the time I got out there she was gone. I wandered around the cul-de-sac, but she had apparently made it around the corner before I’d gotten out the door.

The final one (dare I use that word?) was spotted from my truck as I drove to the coffee shop last Friday for a meeting with my writing group. There were a number of kids playing in yards and I thought surely it must have belonged to one of them so I didn’t slow down, stop or even give it more than a curious glance. The thing I did notice was that, like the other three, it wasn’t sport any bling.

So how weird is it that collarless Chihuahuas keep popping up out of the blue? Am I just imagining them, like those infamous pink elephants? Or maybe there was a surplus of them after that Beverly Hills Chihuahua movie and now they’re being snuck into random cities and dumped, dropped from low flying helicopters like Dumbo Drop or something (not to imply that movie makers would ever do such a thing - heaven forbid.) And why do I keep comparing yappy little taco dogs to elephants? I don’t know. I just hope nothing comes of this recurring Chihuahua phenomenon. Lord knows, I don’t need another owner, especially a little yappy one with a pissy attitude.