RIP Bess
Bess was a mutt from a rescue home (some lurcher, some Irish wolfhound, some whatever). She was medium-sized, incredibly energetic but with a nervous disposition: in particular, presumably due to earlier mistreatment, she had a mortal fear of wobbling lampstands. Once during a thunderstorm she was so scared of the noise she jumped out of second-story window.

Anyway, she was also a wicked escape artist and loved nothing more than challenge of getting out of the house off her lead. Being all-black she'd often lurk in the shadows near the front door, then bolt past your feet as you went out. The back garden was her favourite route, though: even after we'd put fences all around she learned to climb the tree and lob herself off a branch to freedom. One time I saw her take a run-up from from the top storey of my parents' house (it has 3 floors), out through the back door and leap at the 6-foot-high fence, hook her paws over the top and scrabble over. Amazing.

She would eat anything and everything. Her particular weakness was the rotting food found in a neighbour's compost heap. But her crowning glory was when she got into the bag of dried dog food (imagine a bag half the height of a man, filled with stuff like cereal and horse pellets) and ate her way through the lot. When my mum found her, wedged face-down in the bag, she was square. She'd literally started at the top and eaten her way down.

Ultimately it was her undoing: her liver failed from eating too much that she shouldn't.
( reallywittyname veraciously conspues lexiphanicism on, Fri 8 Jun 2007, 14:04, Reply)