Endless Thread - Dogs in Elk

Episode Date: February 25, 2022

"I know how to take meat away from a dog. How do I take a dog away from meat?" This was a real question posed in Salon.com's Table Talk forum in 1999. What ensued from there played out like, well, a play. The Endless Thread team performs the accidental, online, collaborative comedy that came to be known as "Dogs in Elk" by the people who made this strange story an early viral internet sensation.

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Why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? and, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. What was your initial reaction to the story when you first came across it? Well, you know, to be honest, the first one is like, wow, this is kind of gruesome. Yes, today we have a story for you that is kind of gruesome, as our new friend Janet said.

But, you know, and then you read it, you're like, well, it's also really fun. This gruesomely funny story came to us from a listener, Ann Pells. And the story came to Anne from her good friend Janet Burge, who's a computer science professor at Colorado College by day and by night. You play D&D? I do. What's your character? What do you got? What's your character? Well, my current one is actually a rogue, and this was actually one where my DM had created. All right, all right. I'm going to spare you, Ben and Janet's Dungeons.

and dragons nerdery, because this story isn't about D&D. It just came up in Ann and Janet's D&D group. Most of my friends, we all were living in Massachusetts when we started playing the game together, and one of them has a bit of land. You know, we were talking about wildlife, because, of course, in Colorado, where I live now, I get lots of wildlife. And they mentioned, oh, yeah, there were coyotes, and he had a deer carcass in his yard. And I'm like, oh, have you guys heard of dogs and elk?

And they're all like, what? So I put the link in the chat. And Anne put that link. in the ET inbox. And we, too, were like, What? Ben, it's time to fire up the old time machine. It's different every time.

Well, we're doing that because to tell this story, we got a party like it's 1999. I can't do a prince impression. I would really like to be able to do a prince impression, but there is no... That's what you were trying to. I know. I could do Bob Din, L.D.

But, Prince, like... All right. Enough. Tell them why we're going back to 1999. We're going back to the early days of widespread internet use. Remember those? And the early days of online forums and chat rooms. And we're transporting us to a specific conversation in one of these forums that ended up transcending the chat room itself. What happens when the chat room?

chat room don't stay in the chat room. Yeah, because this conversation turned internet story was so wild, literally, that it experienced a level and style of virality that was before its time, and that even computer savvy folks like Janet hadn't seen before. I'm Amory Sebertson. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you're listening to Endless Thread. We're coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Do you think this story is real? I don't know. It's kind of on this threshold where the details are almost too strange and specific, but you kind of think, how would somebody make this up? You also have to almost wonder if it was made up if the other people were involved in this. In the ruse? Yeah, because, you know, you get the question and then there's like this response like, oh, yes, I did call my vet and this is what happened.

So they're like putting on a play? It really kind of reads like this in a way. Huh. Huh, indeed. So you know what we had to do, right? We had to round up some of our colleagues and... Lights! Places!

Curtain. September 9th, 1999, 101 p.m. Pacific time. 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. Um, can you give us a few more specifics here? They're inside of it.

They crawled inside, and now I have a giant, incredibly heavy piece of carcass in my yard, with two dogs inside of it, and they're not getting bored of it and coming out. One of them is snoring. I have company arriving in three hours, and my current plan is to, one, put up a tent over said carcass, and two, hang thousands of fly strips inside it. This has been going on since about 6.40 this morning. Oh my God.

What sort of carcass is big enough to hold a couple of dogs inside? Given the situation, I'm afraid you're not going to be able to create enough of a diversion to get the dogs out of the carrion unless they like greeting company as much as they like rolling around in dead stuff, which seems unlikely. Can you turn a hose on the festivities? I'm sorry, Anne. I know this is a problem, and it would have driven me crazy,

but it is also incredibly funny. Elk. Elk are very big this year because of the rain and the good grazing and so forth. And they aren't rolling. They're alternately napping and eating. They each have a rib cage. Other dogs are working on them from the outside.

It's all way too primal in my yard, right now. We tried the hose trick at someone else's house, which is where they climbed in and began to refuse to come out many hours ago. I think that the hose mostly helps keep them cool and dislodges little moist snacks for them. Hose failed. My new hope is that if they all continue to eat at this rate, they'll be finished before the houseguests arrive. The very urban houseguests. Oh God, I know it's funny. It's appalling and funny and completely entirely representative of life with dogs. I'm so glad I read this thread, dogless as I am. Dogs and elk. Dogs and elk. It's like that children's book. Dogs in elk, dogs on elk, dogs around elk, dogs outside elk. And there is some elk inside of, as well as on each dog at this point.

Anne, aren't you in Arizona or Nevada? There are elk there? I'm so confused. We definitely need to see picks of Gus Pong and Jake in the elk carcass. I'm in New Mexico, but there are elk in both Arizona and Nevada, yes. There are elk all over the damn place. The dogs don't look out very often. If you stand the ribcage on end, they scramble to the top and look out all red. Otherwise, you kind of have to get in there a little bit yourself to really see them. So I think there will not be pictures.

All red. I'm not sure the deeper or heart. horror of all this was fully borne in upon me till I saw that little phrase. Well, you know, the Bessengee, that would be Jake, is a desert dog naturally and infamous for its aversion to water. And then Gus Pong, who is coming to us live, unamplified, and with a terrific reverb, which is making me a little dizzy, really doesn't mind water, but hates to be cold, or soapy. And both of them can really run. Sprints of up to 35 miles an hour have been So if they ever come out, catching them and returning them to a condition where they can be

considered house pets is not going to be, shall we say, pleasant. What if you stand the rib cage on end, wait for them to look out, grab them when they do, and pull? They wedge their toes between the ribs and scream. We tried that before we brought the elk home from the mountain with dogs inside. Jake nearly took my friend's arm off. He's already short a toe, so he cherishes the 15 that remain. Have you thought about calling your friendly vet and paying them to pick up the dogs and elk

and letting the dog state your vets overnight? If anyone would know what to do, it would be your vet. It might cost some money, but it would solve the immediate crisis. Keep us posted. Yikes. My sympathy. When I lived in New Mexico, my best friend's dog, the escape artist, was continually bringing home roadkill.

When there was no roadkill convenient, he would visit. at the neighbor's house. Said neighbor slaughtered his own beef. The dog found all kinds of impossibly gross toys in the neighbor's trash pit. I have always had medium to large dogs. Our current dog, daughter's choice, is a Pomeranian, a very small Pomeranian. I'm afraid I'll break her. I bet you could fit a whole lot of Pomeranians in that they're elk carcass. And my condolences on what must be an unbelievable situation. I did call my vet. He laughed until he was gagging and breathless. He said a lot of things, which can be summed up as, what did you expect? And no, there is no such thing as too much elk meat

for a dog. He's planning to stop over and take a look on his way home. Thanks, though. I've almost surrendered to the absurdity of it. He is planning to stop over and take a look on his way home. So he can fall down laughing in person? Basically, yeah, that would be about it. Quote, no, there is no such thing as too much elk meat for a dog, unquote. Oh, sweet Lord, Anne, you have my deepest sympathies in this, perhaps the most peculiar of the Gus Pong adventures. You are truly a woman of superhuman patience.

Wait, you carried the carcass down from the mountains with the dogs inside? The carcass down from the mountains with the dogs inside? inside? No. Well, sort of. My part in the whole thing was to get really stressed about a meeting I had to go to and say, yeah, okay, whatever, when it was suggested that the rib cages, since we couldn't get the dogs out of them and the dogs couldn't be left there, be brought to my house. Because, you know, I just thought they would get bored of it sooner or later. But it appears to be later in the misty uncertain future that they will get bored. Now, there's still interested. And very loud. One singing, one snoring. And very loud. One singing, one snoring. Wow. I can't even begin to imagine the acoustics involved with singing from the inside of an ilk.

Reverb. Lots and lots of reverb. Two hours later, I'll tell you the thing that is causing me to lose it again and again. And then I have to go back outside and stay. there for a while. After the meeting, I said to my extraordinary boss, look, I've got to go home for the rest of the day, I think. Jake and Gus Pong are inside some elk rib cages and my dad is coming tonight, so I've got to get them out somehow. And he said, pale and huge-eyed, Annie, how did you explain the elk to the clients? The poor, poor man thought I had the carcasses brought to work with me. For some reason, I find this deeply funny.

All right, I'm going to pause for the weekend. Monday, September 13, 1999, 8.37 a.m. Pacific time. So what we did was put the rib cages containing the dogs on tarps and drag them around to the side yard, where I figured they would at least be harder to see. And then we opened my bedroom window so that the dogs could let me know when they were ready to be plunged into a de-elking solution

and led in the house. Then I went to the airport. Came home, no visible elk, no visible dogs, peeked around the shrubs, and there they were, still in the elk. By this time, they had gnawed out some little portholes between some of the ribs, and you got the occasional very frightening glimpse of something moving around in there if you watched long enough.

After a lot of agonizing, I went to bed. I closed the back door, made sure my window was open, talked to the dogs out of the window until I was sure they knew it was open, and then I fell asleep. Sometimes, sleep is a mistake, no matter how tired you are. And especially if you're very, very tired and some of your dogs are outside, inside, of some elks. Because when you're that tired, you sleep through bumping kinds of noises, or you kind of think it's just the houseguests. It wasn't the houseguests. It was my dogs,

having an attack of teamwork unprecedented in our domestic history. When I finally woke all the way up, it was to a horrible vision. Somehow, three dogs, with a combined weight of about 90 pounds, managed to hoist one of the ribcages, the meteor one, of course, up three feet to rest on top of the swamp cooler outside the window and push out the screen. What woke me was Gus Pong, howling in frustration from inside the rib cage, very close to my head, combined with feverish little grunts from Jake, who was standing on the nightstand, bracing himself against the curtains with remarkably bloody little feet. Here are some things I've learned this weekend. One, almond milk removes elk blood from curtains and pillowcases. Two, we can all exercise superhuman strength when it comes to getting elk carcasses out of our yard. Three, the sight of elk rib cages hurtling over the fence really frightens the nice deputy sheriff who lives across the street.

And four, the dogs can pop the screens out of the windows. without damaging them from either side. What I am is really grateful that they didn't actually get the damn thing in the window, which is clearly the direction they were going in, and that the nice deputy didn't arrest me for terrifying her with elk parts before dawn. Imagine waking up with a gnawed elk carcass in your bed like a real-life godfather with an all-dog cast. There is not enough almond milk in the world to solve an event of a little. that kind.

And there you have it. Dogs and elk. What the elk was that? In a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science. Neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing.

Or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you. the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab, Adventures on the edge of what we

think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice. Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the creative studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your we can help. Discover how the magic is made at wbUR.org slash creative studio. So where did you first encounter this particular story? So I encountered this story on salon.com in their early days had a kind of a message board called Table Talk. Again, computer science professor Janet Burge.

The original plan was people were going to use it to discuss salon articles, you know, and kind of build engagement. But then it just sort of, took off into sort of its own thing, you know, where they'd have all of these different forums, you know, they had one. I remember there was one I thought was memorably titled Mothers Who Think, you know. Oh, no. That is like, that is like SNL-level satire title. That is amazing. We're going to have, that's a separate radio play for a separate day. Mother's suits.

The dogs and elk conversation did not come out of mothers who think. Janet thinks it was part of a pets forum that she was in. I don't remember if I saw it while it was being posted or if I saw it later or as a repost, but, you know, it was quite memorable. Different forums for discussing different topics. Sounds familiar, right? And it has some similarities to something like Reddit, except this was early search engine days and this wasn't really something.

something that the search engines couldn't pick these kinds of things up anyway. So you would really only find out about things if you were on these forums or if you had a friend who was on these forums and then was disseminating this. So one of the copies of this online was something that clearly somebody had captured this and mailed it. Like emailed it. Emailed it because it kind of says on their subject date and then it says forwards removed. So someone had seen this and the way that funny stuff got disseminated back in 1999 was people were emailing everybody. You get on these giant email threads that you can't get out of. I remember those.

I do not miss that part. Oh, God, the forwarding. I have to point out that the subject of this email that I'm seeing is, I'm glad I have cats. Yeah, the cats just bring you tiny little carcasses. Yeah, that's true. And they do leave them on your pillows. Yeah.

They're usually missing a head. One time I only found the tail. Oh, no. So the dogs and elk story was making its way around the internet in 1999 fashion, getting forwarded and distributed across the insufferable, inescapable email lists. But Janet says there are many things about the conversation itself that make it feel like an artifact of the internet. Well, certainly, you know, things. I think people were very careful how they were presenting themselves.

You know, you'll notice it's everything is very well written. You know, people weren't typing this out on smartphones. They were doing this on computers. Many of them were probably doing it on computers at work. Because you'll notice it's a point in the story where they say pause for weekend. Well, it's because home internet then, you know, you didn't really start getting broadband into the home instead of, until like the early 2000s. Pause for weekend is a thing I think we got to bring back.

There was something to be said for that. I actually, I kept my dial-up for probably longer than I should have because there was something to be said for not being able to spend all my time playing around on the Internet. To me, when I first read through this story, it feels like something that you would find on the subreddit today I effed up. I don't know if you're a Reddit or if you know that subreddit. But that's how it reads to me. We're like today, yes, this story is crazy, but this is the kind of thing that people, there's a, space for this kind of story. Whereas probably in 1999, that space didn't quite exist yet. And so this

felt extra shocking and weird. Right. You know, and of course, looking back on it, it's fascinating how it's sort of unspooling over time, you know, because now I would more expect to see, you know, something all written out. But this just sort of started with a question and then the story kind of built as the people reading it were engaging with the original poster. And as Janet also pointed out to us, the commenters and the original poster all appear to be using their real names in this forum. You know, usually first names, but, you know, and it was different on other threads. There were some where people would make up their screen names and have a little bit more anonymity. But it was definitely, definitely felt a bit different than the Internet now, where I think most people realized that nothing is going to be private.

The person at the center of the dogs and elk story used just her first name and last initial, Anne V. But I found her full name, easily enough, and a few potential phone numbers for her. Your call cannot be completed as dialed. All right, all right. The first was a bust. It always says user busy, as was the second. But the third, Hi there, my name is Amory. It went to voicemail, both times. haven't heard back. But someone did reach in about a month after the dogs and elk incident went down.

Someone who got her attention by making what may have been the first meme of dogs in elk. It was called dogs and elk in vegetables. Yeah, so what somebody did was they actually sort of took the text of this and they had on one side of the page, they have the O.P. story and then they have all of the, you know, the other people responding to this. And then they had, as the story went on, they had a carved pumpkin with little carved pumpkin dogs and some tomato sauce to put blood in it. And it had the pumpkin looking like a rib cage. And it was very strange. Of course, now you have all sorts of fan art with these funny internet stories.

Yeah. One of the recent ones is the Jorts and Jean and there's George Cross Stitch and there's a little, somebody did a little crocheted jorts. They posted on Twitter. And we all. see these things because they post them on the, on social media. So things can go viral in very different ways than, you know, when it's a email thread where you usually know the people sending it. I look at stuff like this and I'm like, people are so weird. Humans are so weird.

This is what we choose to do with our big brains. I love it. The person behind the dogs and elk in vegetables, a guy named Rob, emailed AnVie and asked the uncomfortable question. Is this for real? She responded. Sure, I can attest. I mean, I can tell you that it really did happen. The thing about the dogs and elk thing is this. With the dogs I have, especially Gus Pong, who's a New Guinea singing dog and a complete freak of primitive dogdom, dogs and dogs and elk is in some ways a fairly minor event, in that it involved fewer people than usual. Sharing a house with a very primitive, deeply attached, and wildly inspired animal has led

me into all sorts of situations I never anticipated as a pet owner. She goes on to talk about how Gus Pong is a subspecies of dingo and a hunting dog, so he eats a lot of game. And the elk carcasses that Jake and Gus Pong were in, Anne had picked them up from a hunter who didn't want the meat. She just made the mistake of bringing the dogs with her to pick them up, and then couldn't get him out. She also mentions how astonished she was that a conversation on table talk made it all around the internet and beyond.

She writes, My mother has gotten multiple copies from friends, asking if my dogs are really that out of control. Here's Janet again. And yeah, and thinking of the fact that when we put something out online, you know, unless it's living on our own personal machine that we're backing up somehow, we don't really have control over both where it goes necessarily and also it's a lot. longevity. Dogs and elk has continued to pop up in unexpected places around the internet over the years. The link sent to us was from the blog of the late science fiction writer Jerry Pernell, for example.

The story is even outlasted its birthplace on the internet, salon.com's table talk message board. These forums started in, I think, 1995, and I think it was like 2011 before they finally shut it down. and think of all those years of posts and things that people have been writing. And some people were very invested in their writing. And then all of this just sort of went away. It's interesting to think what things we preserve, what things we don't preserve. The Internet operates very differently now than it did in 1999. But it's nice to know that some stories can make it from message boards to email lists, to pumpkins, to blogs, to D&D groups, to you.

Thank you for. talking to us, Janet. We really appreciate it. Oh, you're welcome. And now, pause for weekend. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Do you want early tickets to events? Yes, we will be having events in the spring and summer. Maybe swag, bonus content, my elk field dressing videos, Amory's vegan dog food recipes. If you want any of those things, join our email list. Yes, you can find it at WBUR.org slash endless thread. Also, do us a huge favor. And people always say this, but it is true.

It is a huge favor if you review us on Apple or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps us find new friends like you. Yeah. Yeah, don't be that person that only writes reviews when you don't like something. Yeah. Write the good reviews, too. This episode was written, produced, and co-hosted by me, Amory, Severson. And I also helped with the co-hosting, Ben Brock Johnson, mix and sound design by

Emily Jankowski. Thanks to our teammates who lent their voices for our Dogs and Elk audio play. Dean Russell, Norris Sacks, Quincy Walters, Grace Tatter, Emily Jankowski, Matt Reed, and Paul Vikis. Our web producer is Rachel Carlson. Thanks again to listener Ann Pels, who sent us the Dogs in Elk story. Not to be confused, by the way, with Anne V. At least we don't think so, conspiracy. Anne V was the owner of the dogs and elk, who we are still hoping to hear from. Anne V. Call us. Call us, because Anne Pels wants to know why you have a dog named Gus Pong.

As do we. Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and the raw, shredded, cavernous ribcage of a large beast. If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet, or playing out in your yard right now, that you want us to tell, hit us up. Email endless thread at wbUR.org. We'll just be sitting, staring at our inbox, waiting for you.

That's all we do. Just wait by the inbox. Send us an email. Please send us an email. Lights. Places. Coitins. No, just curtain.

Oh, curtains. No, singular. Curtain. Yeah. You guys. You gotta do one that's like more definitive, like lights, places, curtain. Coitin. That's like, ugh, I don't have time for this shit.

Curtin.