Sam the Chocolate Dog

            I have a dog. We’ll call him Sam. We’ll call him that, although personally, I never do, despite that being his legal name. Sure, I will refer to him as Sam in the third person. “Did you feed Sam?” or “I’m taking Sam for a walk.” But when referring to him directly he is almost exclusively referred to as Boo.

            Sam is, most of the time, a very good dog. He doesn’t bite, or chew on furniture, or bark at the neighbors. In fact, he really doesn’t bark at all. He is almost completely voiceless. That is until he falls asleep. Then the whooping starts. And It. Is. Loud. I don’t know what he dreams about, but it is either really bad… or really good.

In actuality he is probably dreaming about food. That is about the only thing that Sam thinks about. He would sell his soul for a spoonful of peanut butter if René Descartes hadn’t disproven animal souls in the seventeenth century. This is, of course, normal for dogs. Eating is a prosurvival behavior, so it is one that features prominently among most animals. However, it seems that Sam wants to disprove that fact. He seems quite intent on proving eating to be deleterious to life.

As you may now, chocolate can be toxic to dogs, as the theobromine content can build up in their system and exert a similar effect to a caffeine overdose. The toxicity is dose dependent as well as proportional to the cocoa content of the chocolate, i.e. the darker the more dangerous. As it so happens, Sam loves the taste of chocolate. So much so, that he managed to locate a sealed gift box of it tucked away in a closet in a room blocked off by a pet gate. He then proceeded to eat approximately one and a half pounds of 85% dark chocolate. I don’t know the exact conversion, but I would guess it is something akin to a human drinking three large energy drinks… laced with just a couple spoonfuls of crystal meth.

            Have no fear. One night of induced vomiting and IV fluids later, Sam made a full recovery. Now humans have evolved this quite useful trait, such that anytime they vomit, they will develop an aversion to whatever they ate proximal to vomiting. You can see how this would promote viability, as well as explain your disdain for corndogs ever since riding the spinning swing ride at the state fair. However useful a trait it may be though, it is one that Sam clearly did not inherit. Despite the chocolate induced hospital stay, the very smell of chocolate still gets him begging.

             I’m not saying that the dog is suicidal, but he clearly likes to live dangerously. Were he a human, I imagine he would be one of those hashtag yolo Youtube stars that eats seventeen pounds of bacon in one sitting because – We’re all going to die eventually, it might as well be from a heart attack live on camera. Well move over bacon guy, chocolate dog is here – like, comment, and subscribe.

            -AMS