A long long time ago, at the dawn of the internet, there was a woman named Anne who lived in New Mexico.

One morning, just as Anne was preparing her house for guests to arrive, she discovered her dogs inside a felled elk. She couldn’t get them out. With some help, she dragged the carcass (with the dogs inside) into her yard. Then she did what any early internet enthusiast might do. She logged on, and began a plaintive, please-help-me message thread that has been preserved, thankfully, by someone at MIT:

“Okay – I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat? This is not, unfortunately, a joke.”

If you click on the link above and read “Dogs in Elk” you may just fall down in laughter.

As the Buddhist monk Longchenpa once said, “Since everything is but an apparition, having nothing to do with good or bad, acceptance or rejection, one may as well burst out in laughter.”

Even if one does not take Longchenpa to heart, one may as well take time read “Dog in Elk” or watch this duck eat peas. One may as well burst out in laughter, while one can.

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With thanks to Paul Merwin for tweeting about “Dogs in Elk.”

And yes, the story is true.