Everyone is so up in arms over the senseless death of Cecil the Lion, and with good reason. It was really a jackass move to lure him out and take off his GPS collar so a rich American guy could shoot him. You know what else was a jackass move? Posting a picture of it on Facebook. Nobody wants to see that: animal lovers will be calling for YOUR head on a wall, and hunters will just be pissed that you’ve got $50K plus travel expenses to blow on trophy hunting.

But this post is really about a more appalling event that occurred in recent weeks. Yes, more appalling than shooting a protected lion. I’d read an interesting article a weirder-than-boiled-shit article about a man who lived near my parents’ neck of the woods, a man who’d been cheating on his wife… with his wife’s dog.

Yes, it appears that this man, jealous of the love and attention that his wife gave to her Shih Tzu, decided to get back at her (the wife) by defiling the dog…repeatedly. Yes, this man apparently began to have a sexual relationship with the dog on the sly. The wife, who saw a change in the husband’s demeanor and suspected he was having an affair, set up a camera in the house only to discover that it was her beloved dog and not a trampy woman who lived in their trailer park.

Now, at the risk of providing too much visual, when this man began secretly boinking the dog, you’d have to assume there was no obvious trauma that would prompt the wife to take her adored pet to the doctor. So what does that tell us? It tells us that this man got back at his wife by putting his member in a dog that’s smaller than most gym bags, and that it didn’t damage the dog. Who’d he think he was getting back at since the world now knows his penis fits… never mind.

I couldn’t wait to share this news item with my parents, and I’ll readily admit I had intended to use more than a little “bwahahahahahaha!” during this phone call. But as I was dialing their number in my car, the radio broke into the song with an important alert. Yes, the DJ interrupted a song to give us the following emergency bulletin:

“Folks (yes, he said folks), we interrupt this broadcast to update everyone on the bear situation. The bear is still hanging around downtown near the courthouse, but I’ve been asked to remind our listeners once again that you can’t shoot it. I repeat, it is against the law to shoot a bear, even if he’s on the sidewalk in front of the Tastee Freeze. The authorities are trying to tranquilize him, so don’t shoot him.”

Please note the important news item there: it’s not to update us on the bear situation, since bears wander into town all the time in these parts. It’s to remind us that bear hunting is illegal. Yes, we’re so gun-crazy and animal-shooty that we’ll take down an animal just for walking in front of us. And the cops said don’t, during a Niki Minaj song.

I was so disappointed that I now had no moral high ground leg to stand on that I had to hang up the phone and not laugh at my parents for living near a dog molester. I relayed the sad situation of my thwarted scoffing to my oldest offspring, who said, “Theirs is still worse. We may have had to be told not to shoot a bear, but at least we didn’t have to be told not to have sex with it!”