But nothing beats the horror of one holiday weekend about ten years ago. I owned a Great Dane in a small five bedroom apartment. Around thanksgiving, my then best friend’s house had burned down and she needed a temporary home for her 10 mos. old, newly acquired and poorly disciplined Doberman. I volunteered to take him in.

Well, one very cold Friday night I left the dogs in the house loose (the dobie had a crate) and had to skip out to run an errand. When I came home about an hour later, the house was dark and cold and smelled like a sewer. Unable to turn on the lights and seeing the darkness in the neighborhood, I surmised another winter power outage. The thermostat wouldn’t kick on the furnace either.

One step forward into the kitchen from the entry caused a slide that nearly took me down. I walked again and again, I slipped on something oozy on the floor. Once I got a candle from the kitchen cupboard and lit it, I made the discovery: Doggie diarrhea all over the apartment, not just in the kitchen, but on the rugs, in the living room and any other room that was open.

Try cleaning up your house from a literal shit storm, during a storm in a freezing, dark apartment with barely any light, enough methane to render you nearly unconcious and the most obnoxiously hyper animal in the world standing on your once beloved couch with his shit-shod feet barking non stop. It was a night I’ll never forget. Big dogs, big messes.

I have no doubt it all came about because I bought a different brand of dog food than their usual, dogs don’t take change of diet too well.

And I have a 16-year-old cat who, in the last year, started regularly pissing on our bed or laundry. Thank gd for enzyme-cleansers and a washer&dryer in our unit…

I did once years ago have a cat (not my own) crap on the middle of my bedspread once, but that was because my mom locked him upstairs because he was yowling. Turned out he’d been accidentally shut out of the cellar where the litterbox is and was yowling because he really had to go. He was pretty ticked off and decided to take it out on my bedspread, in the absolute exact center (he must have sighted the bedposts diagonally to find it). It struck me as a political statement, and anyway I couldn’t really blame him. Of course I made my mom clean it up, and gave her a lecture about listening to the cat to boot.

We had another cat who got locked out of the cellar and had to pee. When we ignored her and she couldn’t hold it any more, she chose the bathtub. The non-absorbent, easily cleaned bathtub. She was really a kind soul.

I’m laughing with you, really! My cat is a binge-and-purger, so I’m allowed!

She was also there as a witness the day the same cat farted in his own face while he was washing up.

Other than that, there was the cat I was taking care of for a friend who had diarrhea and proceeded to release it while running pel mel around my apartment…including on the bed. That took far too long to clean up…then kitty got to have a bath since he’d also gotten it all over himself.