Saturday, September 27, 2014

The Mutt-Flap

There's so much going wrong in the world and so little being done about it that I just have to stand up and cheer when someone finally comes up with a solution to something. I am referring, of course, to the makers of Rear Gear Butt Covers. Sometimes it just seems like life is a parade of assholes, even in the blue states, but now, thanks to the folks at Rear Gear, we don't have to look at them. Designed for pets with tails in permanent Sphincter Display Mode, the butt covers dangle neatly from the base of the tail and over the offending orifice, and come in Small, Medium, and Kardashian. The information online is sparse. It is still unclear whether the butt covers are washable, which is fervently to be hoped. Also, in what must be a case of false advertising, the proprietors claim that the butt covers give the pet more confidence.

Which is a crock. One of the points of exposing your asshole is to more efficiently release scent from the anal glands and waft it into the air. No one thus occupied is lacking any confidence. They are nothing if not proud of the poop chute. The only thing that would make a poodle more confident would be a dangling butt frame. The butt covers--can't we just call them mutt-flaps?--just lead to coyness. What have I got under here? the dogs project. Do you want to see? Just sweep it aside with your nose, big fella. It might as well be a geisha fan. Coquettishness among canines is like makeup on five-year-olds. It's not attractive.

The butt cover entrepreneurs also declare that their product is appropriate for cats, but it's not hard to notice that they have no cat photographs on the site. I'm not surprised; good war-zone photographers are hard to come by. Our first cat, (Saint) Larry, was strictly a tail-down cat. We would have to give her  a good tailbone-skritching if we ever wanted to pop it up for anus inspection, but, as it happened, over seventeen years, we were never that curious. But we didn't fully appreciate her courtesy in this department until we got Tater.

Tater is a whole different cat. Tater holds her tail up like an opinion. If she taped a tiny parasol to the end, she could keep the sun out of her eyes. "Put that thing down," we told her, dismayed, for the first few weeks, but she never did. After seven years, I can state that there is not one thing Tater has ever been ashamed of. Even the Christmas Tree Incident struck her as random. Her butthole, meanwhile, appears to be a particular point of pride.
And if Tater's tail is an opinion, it's a strong one. Usually, when you grab a cat's tail to keep it from going somewhere you don't want her to go, she objects. Tater not only keeps going, but she's perfectly willing to tow you through the house on your belly if you don't let go. Guests find it entertaining, but the rug burn is the worst.

Like Hugh Hefner, Tater wears nothing but pajamas, and my suspicion was that she would not particularly cotton to butt jewelry, but there was only one way to make sure. Aaaaaaaaand now we're sure.

Well, that's advertising for you. If the Butt Cover people want to re-cast a feline psychotic break as Confidence, I suppose they have that license. I suggest they hang it from the front.

Thanks to our friends at Cowango for this breaking story.

40 comments:

  1. Oh, good god... only in America. No wonder we're the punch line of a joke to the rest of the world. Have we really gotten to the point where we're so puritanical that we're not only making sure our bras are thick enough to hide nipplage (Heaven forbid that anyone should be able to know for a fact that we possess nipples!) but now we're going about making sure that domestic pets have their butts covered. (LOVE your anal-ogy of the geisha fan!) How long before we have rangers venturing out into the forests to make sure the wildlife is covered as well? And don't even get me started on the monkeys at the zoo!

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    1. Anal-ogy! Ar ar ar! And monkeys, hell. You should see the bats.

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  2. I thought this might be a riff on the other butt protectors I've seen advertised recently-for people-but this was even better.

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    1. Hmm. I've heard of charcoal underpants to filter emissions, but no butt protectors per se for people. This is not the sort of thing I want to Google first thing in the morning.

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  3. I was surprised to see no "lip print" butt covers on the site. Do you think it's because cats don't (usually) have their own credit cards?

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    1. If a cat did have a credit card, a cat would order one that looks like a cat's asshole.

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  4. Guess this would fit right in with Society for Indecency to Naked Animals from the 1960's.

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    1. I'd forgotten about SINA until now. They wanted entire outfits on cows, as I recall. Excellent idea, by the way.

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  5. I used to work with a guy who named his cat something which sounded like Milermor. I asked where he got that name, and he replied that it was because you could see the cat's ass from a mile or more.

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  7. I assume you wrote this after retrieving Dave from the ER.

    Excellent fun this morning! Snortworthy AND lolworthy!

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    1. It's probably not the worst thing Dave's had to do to illustrate this blog.

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  8. One of our earlier cats INSISTED on putting her best side forward. And yes, any such product she endorsed would have a picture of her own beautiful arse.
    There is an expression we human's make known over here as either 'lemon-lipped' or 'cats-bum'. I hope we are not expected to conceal that face...

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    1. I hope you're not PROUD of that face...

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    2. Of course I am. I have learned much of what I know about life from cats...

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  9. We here at Cowango.com have one "up" cat and one "down" cat and one dog with a built-in butthole cover, her stubby tale which she keeps firmly clamped against it unless she sees something that makes her happy. At which time she furiously wags it (her tail, not the thing that makes her happy.) Thanks for alerting your readership to this timely product to protect our country from such unsightly assholes. It really is our public duty.

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  10. Getting here at the ass end of things, I dunno, I hate to get in at the rear end of things here, butt I'm not sure you got to the bottom of this. I could be ass-wrong of course.

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    1. No, not at all. I try never to get all the way to the bottom of anything.

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  11. Rear Gear Butt Covers? didn't someone already come up with something similar? Doggy Diapers?
    My cat, Angel, is mostly a tail down cat, but even when the tail is up, there is no butt on view, he simply has too much hair. (fur?)

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    1. I guess if you had enough fur to work with, you could do some artful braiding, too. Tater has a remarkable coat--softest cat I've ever known. But it's not long.

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  12. Tater's Rear Gear is the kind of redundancy I can really get behind!

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  13. Now, if they made something that would work on male goats in rut....

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  14. And they say American entrepreneurship is dead. Seriously, one would have to be pretty freakin' anal to insist on covering their dog or cat's butt hole.

    Another gem, Murr.

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    1. You're right. Maybe a plug would be more to the point? I live with Tater, and if her sashaying doesn't DEFINE anal, I don't know what does.

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  15. I always like to grab a couple of my favorite lines and then quote them back to you here--so I can feel clever w/o trying. Tonight, I'm tired enough that copy and paste seems like a blood-letting, so I'll just say Christmas Tree Incident and rug burns are the worst.

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    1. I actually love when someone picks out a favorite quote, assuming it's one of my favorites too. Every now and then someone appreciates something I didn't even think was all that funny, and that seems just sad.

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    2. Don't be sad about that - we all see stuff through our personal lens of experience. I often find stuff funny that other people didn't intend. And I miss stuff that others "get" because I didn't see the same movies or hear the same music or have the same interests. I'm pretty sure that in some of your posts I have missed half of the good stuff, but you do have a way of planting so many good lines that everyone should get their money's worth. Which is a bad expression to use, seeing as you post it for free. But you know what I mean.

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    3. It's FREE? Y'all aren't PAYING for this? It must be time to rethink my life strategy.

      Okay, I rethunk. It's okay this way.

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    1. Double-posted due to "service unavailable" message - sorry

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  17. Now if we could only get butt covers for plumbers.
    the Ol'Buzzard

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    1. We had a guilty plumber that would have required one the size of a manhole-cover. As it were.

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  18. When I was doing black-powder era re-enactments, I wove and sold linen breechcloths - much more comfortable than buckskin. A woman once wandered past my tent with a trail of kids in stair steps from teen to terrible two. "What's that?" she asked, pointing to the work on my loom. "It's a linen breechcloth." I replied. "What's a breechcloth?" she asked. "Um, - it's an indian's underwear?" I suggested. "Indians don't WEAR underwear," she told me severely. "Have you seen the movie, 'George of the Jungle?'" I asked.
    And the curly-headed moppet at her elbow caroled, "It's a butt-flap, Mommy! A breechcloth is a butt-flap." The teen took it up as a chant and the assorted sibs gleefully followed suit. Mom gave me a look that would have frozen Helium and stalked away, trailing her multiple spawn. I have it on best authority that well washed linen makes the best butt-flaps.

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    1. I have absolutely nothing to add, Roxie. Nothing.

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  19. Do they make one in the size of Rush Limbaugh?

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    1. They'd have to section a redwood. It would be too ironic.

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