Does This Give You Paws . . .

Nazi guard: You muszt choose right now, between your two children.

Murphy: SQUEAK SQUEAK squoo squoo SQUEAK!

Meryl Streep: B-but how can you ask a mother to . . . ?

Mattie: HONK! HONK! BLEAT! SQUEEEE!

Nazi: You muszt dezide now, or I vill seize them both.

Murphy and Meryl: Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

We don't buy any of the frou-frou doggie stuff. Our biggest splurge in dog toys are dried, foot-long "pizzle sticks," which look and smell like rawhide but are more expensive, more organic and supposedly more healthful. The dogs love them.

One morning not long ago, Mattie engaged in another charming canine behavior and barfed in pretty spectacular fashion. My daughter, Molly, who is a veterinary student, professionally examined the result and quickly identified the culprit. You couldn't miss it, really. Mattie, who is a pretty big dog, had regurgitated what appeared to be a two-inch length of her own spinal column.

Nothing Molly had learned so far in vet school explained this phenomenon, particularly since Mattie appeared to be in no particular distress. (If anything, she seemed rather relieved.) So Molly checked the projectile more carefully.

"It's spongiform tissue, not bone," she decided. And she realized that the hole running through it was not broad enough to accommodate a spinal cord. No, by gosh, it was more like a . . . some sort of . . . duct or a . . . a . . .

It was at this point that Molly identified it. She'd seen this sort of thing before, in anatomy lab.

Apparently, if a large chunk of pizzle stick is consumed whole, it can rehydrate in the stomach and sproing back to its original shape and size and texture, before it was dried out for optimal dog-gnawing purposes. That would be the original shape and size and texture when it was attached to the bull and constituted a very long, very private part, indeed.

I actually went back to the pet store to explain what had happened. I suggested that they might re-market their pizzle sticks as a special "magic surprise" bathtub toy for kids. They didn't think the idea was so swell.

Because I was there, I bought a dog eclair. Actually, it tasted pretty good.

Gene Weingarten's e-mail address is weingarten@washpost.com.