Teacup dog stops violently shivering for 10 happiest seconds of godforsaken life
CALGARY, AB—Mr. Schmoo might seem as if he has it all. He is pampered and brushed, fawned over and carried everywhere.
However, for this tiniest of dogs, life is a relentless nightmare.
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Mr. Schmoo, a teacup Chihuahua, has spent his entire existence on the spectrum between terrified, scared, and rattled. When his owner Tabitha carries him in her handbag, he feels disturbingly unmoored, and yet even the ground itself does not offer much solace, being too cold for his fragile paws.
So delicate that the very air he breathes scorches his lungs, Mr. Schmoo cannot understand why Tabitha would subject him to this torture, stare as he might into her enormous eyes.
What is life but suffering?- Mr. Schmoo
"I love Mr. Schmoo," Tabitha explains. "When I first held him, I thought, it's almost as if someone ripped a beating heart out of a person's chest, put a puppy costume over it, and kept it alive through some sort of dark magic. He's just so impossibly teensy."
Impossible it may seem, but Mr. Schmoo's teensy-ness is engineered by the likes of dog breeder Wesley Nebbs.
"Yes, we breed 'em tiny," he says. "The smaller the better. Sometimes I think: maybe we've gone too far… maybe these things aren't meant to be. I stepped on one once—by accident—and it just sort of flattened into the floor, like an empty husk."
"Does something like this have a soul?" Nebbs wonders aloud. "I sure as hell hope not! Else I'll have some explaining to do!" He gives a good-natured chortle.
As Mr. Schmoo is toted from one nauseating whirlwind of noise, stink, and human frenzy to the next, occasionally proffered up to other giants so that they may plunk the enormous weight of their hands onto his quaking body, he tries to will himself into unconsciousness.
What is life but suffering? he asks himself daily while Tabitha coos in his face.
Yet even in the most wretched of lives there can be moments of mercy. For Mr. Schmoo, one such moment comes today, when Tabitha tucks her bag under a chair at a Starbucks and wanders away.
Seizing his chance, he clambers out and hides himself in a corner. Alone in the semi-darkness, Mr. Schmoo briefly experiences what might be called peace. The shivering stops. His heartbeat changes from one long hum to distinct blips. He defecates unwatched, unjudged. He is a hero.
But as quickly as it began, it is over, and Tabitha's hand has come for him again. "There you are, wittle puppy-wuppy!" she chirps, popping him lightly back into her bag.
And as the zipper closes over his head, Mr. Schmoo's hopes implode like hundreds of tiny Chihuahuas who never stood a chance against the clumsy, all-flattening foot of humankind.
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