“I don’t understand animals.

Take dogs. Well, actually… take »male dogs.

Apparently, for male dogs, bladders are banks and piss is money.

Once outside, a male dog on a walk will carefully scrutinize every interesting opportunity to spend piss, even when being essentially dragged along concrete by its phone-drunk master. This is, in part, because they decide where to piss like the rest of their life depended on it… even when they pretend it’s all casual.

And that’s something I think we can relate to. Directly. The pretending that something’s a casual thing.

Anyway.

Every male dog has unique spending habits. You can see them evaluating traces in the air, and the moment they make the decision: ‘it’s not really worth pissing here’.

And these guys are prodigies of elite bladder control. Some spots get a few drops, others a little jet, others a stream. There’s a hierarchy of piss expenditure all along the walk. For male dogs, routes have something analysts might call ‘a piss expenditure profile’. On a known route, if a male dog isn’t allowed to visit all the spots it previously sussed, it will collapse the entire route into ‘one spot that absolutely must receive piss’.

Now, as far as I can reckon, cats »don’t save their piss. And if they spend it outside the catbox, it’s because the food was late, or bad, or I violated invisible cat protocols from other dimensions.

Then they spend it very generously — in one of my shoes. Or, if I really fucked up, on my pillow. Nor shall they cease at mere pissing. This makes some kinds of sense to me, except the rules from impossible dimensions of cat-mind.

Actually, I do understand animals. But, as a comedian, it works out better for everyone if I pretend I don’t, first.

And just so you know, I am really holding back here…

I mean, just for starters, I could go into »what dogs think of what humans do with piss… or the esoteric mysteries of female canine pissery…”

— Bobby Yingo at the Fire Hydrant