This Is Not a Dog

A brief cautionary tale about how, if you really think about it, what you see is definitely what you get, especially if what you get (a “dog”) spends three months under your care and starts to resemble something else entirely.

A woman who is only identified by the Daily Mirror as Ms. Wang purchased what she thought was a Japanese Spitz dog for roughly $190 from a pet store. Over the next three months, she watched as it rejected dog food and transformed from this tiny ball of fluff—dog adjacecnt, sure but, respectfully, Ms. Wang….this is not a dog??—into a freakin’ fox.

Ms. Wang’s suspicion’s mounted as her “dog” continued to grow, sprouting thicker fur, a long, fluffy tail, and the pointed snout of a fox, because that, indeed, is what it was.

Here he is:

It’s a fox! That’s a fox.

(Me, running down a sidewalk in Jinzhong in Shanxi province, home of the pet store where Ms. Wang purchased this “dog”: “HELLO, excuse me—This! Is! A! Fox!”)

“Other pet dogs seemed to be scared by my pet so I walked it with a leash,” she said. Yeah, girl! They were scared of your pet because, I am sorry, it is a F-O-X.

Perhaps because of this worrisome new development, Ms. Wang took her “dog” to the Taiyuan Zoo, where someone confirmed for her that yes, yep, oh dear, so sorry, but this animal is NOT a dog but “based on the size, it is a domesticated fox. It carries a smell in their body and the smell can get stronger as it grows older.”

For the record, this is what a Japanese Spitz dog, not a fox, is supposed to look like: