Five Chihuahuas, One Sewing Machine, Zero Survivors

Somewhere in this country there is a person who lives with five Chihuahuas and designs tiny clothing for them, and I want to be clear up front that I am not making this up. Five. Not one Chihuahua, which is already a household running at full capacity. Not two, which is a household that has quietly given up. Five (a number I have now typed enough times that it has stopped looking like a number). That is roughly four more Chihuahuas than any structure rated for human occupancy is engineered to contain.

I think about this person a lot. I think about them at 3 a.m., which is the hour Chihuahuas have collectively agreed is best for expressing themselves.

Here is what I have pieced together about the multi-Chihuahua lifestyle, mostly through fear.

The Math Does Not Work

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A single Chihuahua weighs approximately four pounds and produces the noise output of a car alarm being attacked by a smaller, angrier car alarm. The reasonable assumption is that five Chihuahuas would produce five times the noise. This is incorrect. Noise from Chihuahuas does not add. It multiplies, and then it forms committees.

When one of them barks, the other four do not investigate. They simply agree. They have a system. Dog One barks at a leaf. Dog Two, who did not see the leaf (and frankly does not care about the leaf) barks anyway, in solidarity. Dogs Three through Five join because barking is happening and they refuse to be left out of anything, including a crisis they personally invented. The leaf, meanwhile, continues to be a leaf.

I have read that small dogs bark to alert their families to danger. I have also read that small dogs bark because they are small dogs and this is the entire job description. Both of these explanations exist in actual books, written by people with credentials (who I can only assume have never been in a room with five of them at once).

The Wardrobe Industrial Complex

Now we arrive at the clothing, which is where the situation graduates from chaotic to genuinely impressive.

You may think dressing a four-pound dog is easy. You are thinking of the dog as a cooperative party. The dog is not a cooperative party. The dog is a furious eel who has been issued opinions. Getting a sweater onto one Chihuahua requires, by my estimate, roughly eleven hands (the average adult human is issued only two). The front legs go in. You celebrate. You turn to the back legs. The front legs are now out. This is not a setback. This is the design.

And someone, somewhere, does this FIVE times, on purpose, before noon, and then takes a photograph in which all five Chihuahuas appear calm and dignified and possibly French. I do not know how the photograph is achieved. I assume bribery. I assume an entire underground economy of small treats changing hands like a tiny criminal enterprise.

The outfits, I am told, can be elaborate. We are not talking about a raincoat. We are talking about full ensembles, with theme and intent and structural integrity. A dog roughly the size of a baked potato wearing a gown with more engineering than my first apartment. I respect it ENORMOUSLY. I also need everyone to understand that the dog has no idea. The dog believes it is naked and being persecuted.

A Brief Word on the Sewing Machine

To make clothing this small, you need a sewing machine, and you need to operate that sewing machine in a home that already contains five Chihuahuas, which means you are operating heavy machinery in an active warzone.

A Chihuahua hears a sewing machine the way I hear a smoke detector at 2 a.m. It is not a sound. It is a summons. Five of them will arrive instantly, from physically impossible directions, and station themselves around the work area like extremely small, extremely opinionated supervisors. They will not help. They have never helped. They are there to judge the seam allowance and to lie down directly on the one piece of fabric you need (this is, I am not making this up, the actual texture of the job).

Five Personalities, Four Pounds Each

The thing nobody warns you about is that each Chihuahua is a fully formed individual with a personal philosophy and a long list of grievances. With one Chihuahua, you manage one philosophy. With five, you are essentially running a tiny, trembling parliament.

There is the one who LOVES everyone. There is the one who loves one specific human and considers the other four dogs to be roommates she did not approve. There is the one who is convinced he is a German Shepherd and is genuinely surprised, daily, to learn that he is not. There is the one who simply VIBRATES, constantly, even at rest, like a phone left on a glass table. And there is the fifth one, who I suspect actually runs the household and lets the other four take the heat.

I have one Chihuahua. She responds to roughly nothing and judges me approximately constantly. She is, I should admit, much better at being a Chihuahua than I am at being a person. She knows exactly who she is. I have spent forty-one years on the same question and made, by my own generous measurement, around 12 percent progress.

So when I think about the person with the five Chihuahuas and the sewing machine and the gowns, I do not think they are crazy. I think they looked directly at the chaos, fully understood it, and then chose, on purpose, to multiply it by five and add couture.

That is not madness. That is commitment. And somewhere right now, in a home that smells faintly of fabric and small dog, five Chihuahuas are wearing outfits nicer than mine, barking at a leaf, and absolutely certain they are the largest animals in the room.