Recently, Napoleon hasn’t been quite himself; fussing and crying and licking at his rear end (more than normal, and fussing, crying, and slurping at his nether regions are his favorite things on Earth, so it may have taken me a while to notice the increase in volume). A week ago, I came home after being out for just a few short hours to find that he’d licked/torn out a patch of fur on his rear end near his tail, and I hauled him immediately to the vet, where I learned something so awful that had I known about it beforehand, it may have put me off dog ownership entirely:

Anal gland squeezing.

Apparently when dogs poo, it squeezes out some fluid from stink glands on either side of their anus…at least, that’s what happens in large dogs. Some small dogs have difficulty squeezing out said fluid, and (lucky me), Napoleon is one of them. I never would have guessed this, because he’s a total professional at all other kinds of fluid and solid excretion, but I suppose no one can be good at everything. So now I have to take him to have his booty squeezed with regularity to prevent the sort of build-up that caused this issue, but in the meanwhile, he had five years of backup in there. In the aftermath of his first squeezing, both the vet and the tech couldn’t use enough descriptive words to convey just how awful it had been. “You see, it’s normally like a clear brownish fluid. This was like…thick, creamy, and chunky, like gravy. Like, you know…chunky.”

I think I could have slept better without ever hearing that description, but thank you for being a veritable anal juice wordsmith.

^{Jason wouldn’t let me show gravy fountaining out of a dog’s butt into the bowl, so just be thankful for that.}

I’m considering renaming him, but I’m not sure that Campbell’s Chunky Gravy GooBooty will fit on a nametag.