Is that rigor mortis, or are you just happy to see me?

My first real pet was a guinea pig. Three guinea pigs, actually, all of whom were equally useless creatures. The first time I ever set foot in the vet hospital was when one of them - a white, red-eyed little bastard - got a weird anus rash and we took her to the vet so she could pee down the front of my legs in the exam room. Anyway, there were three of them - Pokey, Taffy, and Flash.

Taffy was the Bunnicula doppleganger, Pokey had the appearance and personality of an elephant turd, and Flash was small and black and as it turned out, short-lived.

I was somewhere around 9 years old. Flash got sick very suddenly. I found her lying on her side in the guinea pig pen, twitching. My parents had me hold her for a few moments until she kicked it, although I don't recall the exact moment. They put her in a shoe box and put the shoe box in the garage to wait for the ground to be less frozen so we could bury her. 

The whole time the shoe box sat in the garage waiting, (a total of three or four days) I found myself strangely, magnetically drawn to it. My morbid curiosity was practically leaking out my ears, but I was socially aware enough to know that it would probably be unacceptable for me to fondle my guinea pig's corpse in the presence of others. I nursed that creepy sense of suspense and secrecy for all that it had while I waited for an opportunity to privately spend time with a dead thing for the first time ever.

When my parents were gone, I went out to the garage, took out the shoe box, and opened it. She was dead, all right. A dead guinea pig. I touched her fur - it felt the same, but the skin beneath it was cold and firm. I examined her still-open eyes, her mouth, her paws frozen in position as if she was running. I touched only her fur - I wasn't quite brave enough to do anything more. I put her back and went inside.

Over the next few days, I would sneak away to look in the shoe box. I thought of the creepy little visits as spending time with my pet, the concept of body v. soul foreign to a 9-year-old. 

I was visiting Flash one night when, in a sentimental moment, I tenderly reached into the box and picked her up. When I lifted her rear end, however, the rest of her kind of just lifted right along with it. It took a second for the horror to register, but I had a moment of terrible, terrible realization as I held her aloft - I was sitting in my garage, holding a furry black plank.  

Flash was not Flash anymore. It was both a tremendous growing-up experience, and in retrospect, a really hilarious situation. 

Sufficiently scarred for life, I dropped Flash back into the shoe box, put it back on the shelf, and ran inside to wash off all of the corpse bacteria that I could practically see crawling up my arms.

Now that my sense of soul v. body has developed, I can understand the reasoning from an 8-year-old - but it boggles my mind when adult pet owners spend unnecessary amounts of time with their pet's dead body. Due to what I now know is called rigor mortis, the aforementioned tendency also poses a significant problem to myself and the other veterinary assistants. Prime example - a challenge faced by myself and Little Dan.

There had been a euthanasia in one of the exam rooms that morning, and apparently the owners had spent several hours with the body afterwards. It's common to have to bag-and-tag a body a couple times a day, since the vets perform euthanasia and we have one of the only veterinary emergency rooms in the area. It was no surprise when Little Dan and I were asked to stretcher a dead dog back to the freezer. It was an old German Shepherd and he was already on the stretcher, so we quickly took him back and got out a bag. 

The trouble started when we began to ease the dog into the bag - he was immovable, and had stiffened into a position where his legs were splayed out in several different directions. Bagging the dog would've been an easy task if a) he'd been smaller or b) he'd been in a floppier and more bendable state, which he would have been for the first hour or so after his death. That window of opportunity had closed, however, and we were left with an impossibly rigid body and a bag that just wasn't quite big enough. 

I think we both knew that it wasn't going to work, but Little Dan and I were both fairly new assistants, so we kept our mouths shut, silently thanked the lord that there were doors separating us and our spectacle from the rest of the staff, and started by sticking the dog's upper half into the bag.

On the way in, the dog's frozen front paw caught on the bag and ripped a hole in it before either of us could respond. With a few muttered swear words, a sheepish apology to the dog, and some improvisation, we realized that the leg could not be bent without breaking it, so quickly got the dog back out and tried again.

On the second shot it seemed like the torso had gone in seamlessly. However, when I paused to pull the bag up over the dog's hips, I was greeted with a crusty snout sticking out through the hole previously created by the front paw. The situation continued more and more to resemble a slapstick comedy bit as we tried various ways to get the body bagged, our doggy friend's glassy eyes gazing back at us as if mocking our inadequacy. 

What we ended up with was two large red garbage bags and about a pound and a half of tape keeping the dog contained within them, the tip of a paw peeking out of the hole still. It was a huge fucking mess. 

In the end, appearance didn't matter - it was just going to be cremated anyway. But I'll be damned if that dog didn't put up a surprisingly fair post-mortem fight. 

The moral of the story - live adventurously, and give 'em hell once you're dead. Coincidently, I plan on that day being the first and last time I get punched in the boob by a dead dog.