Cops Approach DUI Suspect & Find a Drunk Chihuahua

The thing about a chihuahua is that he weighs roughly twelve pounds and is convinced he weighs roughly twelve hundred. This is established science (it is not established science, but it should be). So when I tell you that police in Pennsylvania recently approached a car they suspected was being operated by an impaired driver, and discovered that the most impaired individual on the scene was the chihuahua, I want you to understand that I am not making this up.

I am not making this up.

The setup, as best as anyone can reconstruct it, is that there was a vehicle, and the vehicle had encountered a fence, and the fence had won. Inside the car was a small three-year-old dog who, according to the people whose actual job is to assess these situations, had gotten into some vodka. Not a little vodka. Enough vodka that the professionals used the words "dilated pupils," which is not a phrase you want a veterinarian using about your dog (or, frankly, about you).

The dog's name is Maxwell. I feel it is important to name him, because the dogs always have names, and because Maxwell did nothing wrong here except possess the exact decision-making apparatus of every small dog I have ever met, which is to say NONE.

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A Brief Word on the Chihuahua Worldview

People assume small dogs are cautious. People are wrong. A chihuahua approaches the world the way I approach a sample table at a warehouse store, which is to say with total confidence and no plan. If there is a thing, the chihuahua will investigate the thing. If the thing is on the floor, this is simply more convenient. The chihuahua does not perform a risk assessment. The chihuahua does not consult anyone (the chihuahua has never once asked my opinion about anything). The chihuahua sees a puddle of something and thinks, in whatever passes for thought inside a head the size of a lime, "this is mine now."

I have a chihuahua. I know this firsthand. My chihuahua once ate approximately one-third of a birthday card, including the part that played music, and showed no remorse, and I would estimate continued to play a faint muffled rendition of "Happy Birthday" from somewhere inside himself for the better part of an afternoon. I called the vet. The vet had heard worse. The vet had, apparently, heard MUCH worse, and now we know what worse sounds like, and it sounds like a twelve-pound dog discovering vodka.

The point is that Maxwell did not make a bad choice. Maxwell made the only choice available to a creature with his particular operating system. The bad choices, in this story, were made entirely by the large bipedal mammal in the driver's seat, and I am going to leave that gentleman out of this (he is a matter for the courts, and I am a man who once lost an argument with a greeting card).

The Rescue, Which Is the Good Part

Here is where I want to slow down, because this is the part that matters and it is also the part that is, against all odds, lovely. The officers did not leave Maxwell to sleep it off in a fence-adjacent vehicle. They took him to an emergency veterinary service. He went on an IV. People with credentials and gentle voices stood over a twelve-pound dog at what I assume was a deeply inconvenient hour (nothing good has ever happened to me at an emergency vet at 2 a.m.) and decided, collectively, that this tiny ridiculous animal was going to be okay.

And he was. By the next day, the vet reported, Maxwell was back to normal. No lingering signs. Up and playing outside. One of the people caring for him described him as "super happy," which is a phrase that should be on a plaque somewhere. Twelve hours earlier this dog was, by the professional assessment, walking like a person who has made several regrettable decisions at a wedding. Now he was playing outside. I want that kind of recovery time. I want to be Maxwell. I am, regrettably, closer in spirit to the fence.

The vet also mentioned, almost in passing, that animals sampling their owner's drinks is not unusual. Let me sit with that. It is NOT UNUSUAL. There is, apparently, a whole undocumented population of dogs out there making contact with beverages they have no business making contact with, and most of them do not end up in the newspaper (because most of them do not also involve a fence). I am not making this up.

What We Can Learn From Maxwell

I have read a number of self-help books, against my own wishes, and most of them want you to learn to live in the moment. They charge you money for this. They use the word "journey." And here is Maxwell, a three-year-old dog of approximately twelve pounds, who lives so thoroughly in the moment that he will drink a puddle without a single thought for the next moment, the next morning, or the concept of consequences at all.

I am not recommending the Maxwell lifestyle (the Maxwell lifestyle has, as we have seen, an IV component). But there is something in the way he bounced back, in the way he was super happy and playing outside roughly one day after the worst night of his small life, that I find genuinely instructive, and I would like to learn it without the vodka.

The last documented fact in this story is that Maxwell did not go back to the situation that produced the vodka. He went to stay at the home of one of the people who helped him. So the dog who could not assess a single risk wound up, through no planning whatsoever, in the safest possible place, fed and warm and super happy and playing outside. I have planned my entire life and I am writing this from a chair that hurts my back.

Twelve pounds. Convinced he weighs twelve hundred. And as it turns out, the only one in the whole story who landed on his feet.