My New Magnum

The ongoing depredations of the Infernal Eternal Internal Revenue Service pretty much make Buy A Gun Day a fiscal impossibility for me (gotta keep those entitlement slags happy so they'll vote for Democrats again). But that didn't mean I couldn't get a new Magnum on April 15, 2011.

Meet Design's Airlite Magnum:

He's three years old now and weighs all of seven pounds.  His littermates are named Colt and Remington, so this was pretty much fated to be. His name is appropriate, since he’s the dog version of a .357 scandium J-frame: small and lightweight but packing quite a wallop.

After a lifetime of German Shepherds, Greyhounds, and a hundred-plus-pound Scottish Deerhound who stood three feet tall at the shoulder, a dog this small is like an alien life form.

I’m thoroughly accustomed to Greyhounds who learned to open the refrigerator and help themselves. I could deal with a Deerhound who was so tall on his hind legs that I was not physically capable of holding food out of his reach. I figured a dog this small couldn't get into much trouble, right?

This little monster goes places and does things my cats never dreamed of. Like getting in my kitchen sink by running straight up the front of the cabinet like a military working dog scaling an eight-foot barricade. That's why he's kenneled for his own protection whenever I can't devote my full, undivided attention to keeping him from killing himself.

My other three dogs are seventy-to-ninety-pound retired racing Greyhounds, to whom a seven-pound fuzzball* looks mighty like prey. They will never share floor space with him. Without exception there are never less than two physical barriers between them.  That doesn't make them bad, it just makes them Greyhounds. It's not their fault they have exactly the characteristics for which they've been bred for 4,000 years.

Magnum has such a powerful presence that I can't think of him as a tiny dog.  He's a very big dog in a conveniently-sized package.  He has none of the deformities and neuroses that make so many toy-breed dogs utterly loathsome.  My vets just love him, although every time they see him they still say they can't believe I have a little dog.