Animals...

OK, first of all, when I was away last week, someone around here must have traumatized my deer herd. They used to spend a good part of the day here and didn't mind me watching them or even walking outside, especially if I was putting out corn.

But now they mostly come around after dark, and they're incredibly skittish. If they even see me moving inside the house, they run off. And today, when I saw my usually docile fawns in the back yard looking for corn, as soon as I went out to give them some, they bolted and didn't come back.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot--WTF?

And then there's Lagniappe, or as he is now known, the assdog.

This morning, I'm making breakfast and I'm putting bacon in the skillet. Lagniappe is sitting right next to me, watching and hoping that he'll get a scrap. Now I used to just throw him out of the kitchen or any room where I was eating, but I confess, I've been getting soft lately and letting him slide.

So how does he repay me?

As I'm peeling bacon slices off of the slab, suddenly his jaws snap shut on the slice in my hand.

And to make it really comical, the bacon doesn't tear, and he still won't actually pull the food away from me, so when I look down, he's just sitting there with half the slice of bacon in his mouth and the other half in my hand. And he's looking up at me like "Wow, this is awkward..."

Assdog. I don't want to reward him by letting him have the bacon, but to be honest, I don't want it back now either. What to do?

He's still staring at me...and holding onto the bacon.

So I do what I usually do when I can't think of anything else. I yell at him.

"DAMN YOU!"

He drops his end of the bacon and scurries off to watch me from a distance.

And not thinking, I almost toss the bacon strip into the pan with the others, but I catch myself at the last second. It goes up on the counter and he can have it later when he no longer associates it with his blatant act of thievery and his half-assed effort to momentarily assume the role of Alpha Dog.

Still, I can't help but smile. He did hit that bacon fast. Now if he'd just done it to anyone but me...