The Worst Therapy Dog Ever

One time when I was a kid there was this clown at this kid's birthday party. The clown was very overweight, he couldn't make balloon animals, he didn't have anything fun to say, and he started to sweat off his makeup about 15 minutes into the party so by the end he wound up looking more like the Joker from Batman, except instead of trying to poison the entire party via a large parade balloon, he just sat in a chair and smoked a cigar. He was pretty much the worst clown ever. Normally you don't get to meet the worst anything ever, so it was somewhat interesting that on our vacation up North, to Bay Lake, we met another "worst".

We were sitting in the lodge eating, when I heard a muffled barking sound. I went outside and there was a little weiner dog chained to the deck, with an enormous, canvas muzzle on that covered his whole beak, with just a little hole for his nose. It looked like a sideways ice cream cone with a dog in it. The dog looked angry. A person walked by and said, "That's Sigmund. The muzzle is to make him not be able to bark." I found this odd considering he was clearly barking during her whole sentence. Then she said, "He's training to be a therapy dog." I was really surprised by this, but I figured maybe Sigmund was just a little aggravated because he was chained to the deck, so I reached my hand over so he could sniff it through the bottom of the ice cream cone. Sigmund snarled and backed away. I thought to myself, "This therapy dog sucks ass," and I walked off. Sigmund continued to bark constantly even though he wasn't supposed to be able to.

Throughout the weekend I saw Sigmund frequently, since we were on an island he wasn't going anywhere. He was always looking angry and barking or snarling at people, and he began taking little runs at the kids, presumably determined to bite their toes off. I heard he actually nipped somebody. Over the course of the vacation, it became obvious that Sigmund was the worst therapy dog ever. If I was some poor little kid suffering a debilitating disease, and they sent Sigmund in to play with me, I would just figure that the forces of evil were conspiring against me, and quickly die so they wouldn't get the satisfaction of seeing Sigmund bite my ventilator hose in two.

I am now of the belief the Sigmund was a "reverse therapy" dog, so if you were too happy all the time or something, you could send Sigmund in to bite your toes off and get you back on an even keel. Some people need a Sigmund I think.