Rudy, our infamous Jack Russell who has (as of this writing) 200 followers on Twitter and a tight circle of friends on Facebook, likes to imitate a goat when given the chance. So we try not to give him the chance. It does not always work. He turned one cup of a bra into breakfast this weekend. He hid the other cup under the bed for later.

We thought security gates would control him, but these gates are built to wrangle children, not a Jack Russell. Because they can jump five times their height, Rudy hurdles any gate like Angelo Taylor in the Beijing Olympics. There are no obstacles, just opportunities.

Rudy is tricky too. When we are around, he pretends to respect the gate. When we turn our backs, however, he leaps over and roots around for supplements to his diet. He has eaten, among other things, toilet paper, Kleenex, Tampons and a toothbrush, perhaps trying to brush his teeth after the Tampons. He has been to the vet three times after following his random appetite, so we go to great lengths to block doors that may lead to anything Rudy hungers for. Our lengths are not long enough.

Last year, we came home to find him lethargic and bloated in the hallway. We were about to rush him to the vet yet again when he barfed up a multi-colored thong right there on the carpet. Upon his regurgitation of it, he stood tall, barking at it and us as if to brag, “Hey, check this out! A thong! A freakin thong! I bet you can’t do that!” Jacks are quite competitive as well.

We did some research and found pages of Google entries about Jacks eating underwear. One Jack allegedly ate part of a vibrator causing one commentator to call the dogs “pervs,” as if they understand the concept of underwear and sex toys. Truth is, a Jack will eat anything, chase anything and do whatever it takes to accomplish both.

Purebredpuppy.com says: “This bright, clever, athletic breed is on top of everything that’s going on in his environment. Nothing gets by him.”

Especially thongs.

Mid-stride, Rudy jerked as if strafed by a .50 caliber, his yelp echoing through the calm twilight, a spasm propelling him into a rolling heap of Jack Russellian pain, confusion and horror carving his snout into a morbid WTF snarl.  I yelled his name, but he was too far into his grief to hear me. I thought he had broken his left leg running through a dip or perhaps had stabbed himself on a stick. Every move he made was unusual and undogish, his normally smooth motions clipped, staccato and awkward, telling a violent story with no words.

Leaping up, he twisted in a fit of tail chasing Tasmanian fury, whipping his face and ass into a blur, making it difficult to tell which end was which. All I saw were his reactions to something brutally invisible in the gloaming.

I ran after him to understand his injury and try to rescue my old friend from his torture. Within five long strides, I entered the line of fire, quickly gaining absolute understanding of the situation. Yellow jackets. Hundreds of them. Smacking my head. Stinging my arms. Bouncing off my swinging hands. Below me, Rudy flipped in a double-full like a gymnast. Even in such a nightmare circumstance, it was an impressive fete for an eight year-old dog.

Screaming for Rudy to run to the house, I battled the same striped demons he had already outrun in a hunching, tucked-tail sprint. I was not as fast, unfortunately, and the little bastards overtook me again halfway to the house. I killed two, maybe four. Rudy saw me in mid-fight and turned around, barking and biting valiantly at the buzzing squad. With each one he bit, he took a stinger in the mouth, yelping, but never stopping until I was on my way to safety. It was heroic and I heard music in my head like in the final, sappy scene of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie when the good guy wins.

Running up the steps to the deck, I yanked open the sliding glass door, Rudy bolted in, and I slammed it behind us with several trailing yellow jackets in full-on chase mode ricocheting off the glass behind me, thudding like bugs on a windshield.

Inside, my family stared in shock as Rudy and I rolled into the kitchen nursing our wounds. I’ve never heard a dog curse before, but while he licked his leg, I distinctly heard Rudy murmur,  “Son-of-a-bitch!”

Standing to tell the story of what had happened to us, I realized just how many yellow jackets had Trojan-Horsed their way into our house – in my pants. Instead of saying, “We just got attacked by yellow jackets,” what came out was a reiteration of Rudy’s previous verbiage: “Son-of-a-bitch!”

The burning stings came instantly below my knees and I knew exactly what was going on as I danced my pants off into a denim heap on the
floor, stomping in my underwear, pissed-off jackets escaping into the dining room, Rudy going medieval on them once again and getting stung
even more as he chomped with angry gulps.

After the crunching of little striped bodies ended, Rudy and I nursed our swollen, red whelps and I took Benadryl. This morning, we saw two more of the attackers trying to hide in the bathroom. After dispatching them, we noticed Rudy standing at the back door, shaking with renewed anger and growling toward the spot where the yellow jackets live.

Only a few stings will convince the average person that yellow jackets are the winged spawn of Satan, but now the ones in our yard have a deviously torqued-up Jack Russell as an enemy. Yellow jackets are fast and carry serious firepower on the tips of their asses. They almost  always overwhelm their foes unless it is a can of Raid, and even then, it’s a tricky maneuver to take them down. But when a Jack starts planning revenge, my money is on the dog. It did not take long.

After easing out the back door this morning, Rudy stalked his way to the hole from which the yellow jackets had emerged. Silently he turned around, careful not to disturb their underground activities, aimed his butt over the hole, and in a quick and accurate drop, filled their little front door with yesterday’s dinner. His work done, he ran from the scene and waited at the edge of the steps, watching to see if any jackets escaped. None did.

He and I slowly walked out to admire his handiwork together, like old war buddies visiting the grave of a vanquished adversary. Still no yellow jackets. Rudy’s face was confident. Under the earth, I could hear a slight buzzing that sounded a lot like insects saying, “Son-of-a-bitch!”

Rudy, our Jack Russell, has had to become the Bodie Miller of dogs just to make it down. It takes practice and talent to navigate the frozen treachery, even on four legs. Rudy has mastered 4/5ths of it.

A few minutes ago he skated out the back door across the deck and perched at the top of the steps. He squatted in preparation before launching himself down the bumpy incline. He grunted on each 90º drop as step after step thudded under his 18-pounds.

If dogs have knees, Rudy’s are shock absorbers. At the bottom of the stairs, he leaned into the hard snow, downhill racer-style, stretching his four legs far to his right as his head and body curved left into the white, slanted yard. He moon-walked in a canine crouch, the pads of his paws gliding over custard frost in a diagonal until he was at the bottom of the backyard fence. Rudy’s grace and athletic ability ended in a skidding, violent, flailing stop. He has hit the fence or caromed off the trunk of a tree several times this winter, ass upturned, legs akimbo, gripping desperately at air and bark with teeth and toenails.

Once at his destination, he moved methodically and sniffed the area before dropping a steaming poopcicle. As it landed, he ran from it as if an alien has escaped from his puckering rear. More slipping and sliding followed. It was tricky. There are previous frozen brown deposits around and he slalomed an ugly course to avoid his previous meals that are splayed like shotgun shells across the corner that he considers his toilet.

The long climb back up to the steps pained him, his snout grooved into a rictus of determination. John Krakauer could write a novel about Rudy’s 6-minute journey. To a dog, this is Everest.

At the bottom of the steps, he clawed his way up the slickest surface I have seen since Apolo Ohno beat those two Koreans the other night in speed skating. He also knows how the Koreans felt because four minutes earlier he had hit the fence like they had hit the wall in Vancouver. Finally on the deck, his ordeal ended and he struggled through the door, collapsing on the carpet next to the fireplace, licking his paw pads.

To reward him, I filled his bowl with food. He ignored me. He knew if he ate it, the horrid decent to Poo Corner would happen sooner than later. He closed his eyes. I think he is dreaming of July sun.

If we approach a particularly tacky yard filled with, not just lights, but mobile deer and inflatable scenes, he got all jazzed to the point of hyperventilating. Rudy loves inflatable yard decorations like he loves Newman’s Own gourmet doggy treats. And he can eat those until his little Jack Russell tummy imitated an exploding episode of Myth Busters.

The problem with Rudy’s ride through our neighborhood is, he never makes it through the entire trip without having to stop – and add his own decoration to the arrangements. This pattern of gift-dropping makes me wonder if it is the lights he loves, or his own contributions to the festivities. We have started carrying a pooper bagger thing with us on these jaunts.

There is no more foolish feeling in the world than standing in a man’s lit-up yard, waiting for your dog to fertilize a blow-up snow globe while other cars filled with families drive by with faces pinched in horror.

Rudy could care less. He’s on a mission to drop off the brown family and pee on as many decorations has his bladder can muster. Last night, it happened on a corner lot in the middle of a winter wonderland of bobbing reindeer and waving Santas.

A woman honked her horn at us. Kids toked up on hot chocolate laughed. People gave me dirty looks. Rudy calmly sniffed his way into the middle of a plastic navivity scene, peed on a wise man and pooped next to baby Jesus. This is a new low, even for him.

Hurriedly I scooped up the evidence and followed Rudy, trotting across tangles of extention cords in the yard. He jumped through the open car door like Bonnie and Clyde after looting a bank. I caught my foot in a bloom of plugs the size of a large crab and began to stumble. But I did not fall. I did, however, let go of the little bag. I am not sure where it went. I just jumped into the car and peeled shameful rubber.

On my way to work this morning, I had to drive by the house in the truth of daylight. The decorations were naked and disturbing in their unlit blatentness. The most disturbing thing was the little bag of poo hanging on the outstretched hand of a wireframed caroler. We won’t be passing that house again during the holidays.

Now Rudy can hardly go into the backyard and eat rabbit poo without inquiring canine minds wanting to know. He can’t even travel to the Deep South without dogs down there standing in the yard and watching his every move. How these dogs and cats have come to admire Rudy was a mystery to me – until I clicked on the history on my browser.

Several years ago, I wrote in these pages about him calling me on my cell. He’s become a social media hound since then. Rudy set up a LinkedIn page where he has a resume and brags about his triumphs and has garnered almost a hundred recommendations. He has a Facebook fan page with 12,908 fans. He Twitters his adventures. So far: 34,652 followers. He’s doing Posterous and Ning and Delicious and Flickr. It is the strangest thing. I didn’t even know he could type. Not only can he type, he texts and has jacked up a ridiculous bill.

This is what he has been doing in my office while we were asleep. He has been building his social network. Guy Kawasaki and Steve Rubel may be giving him advice for all I know.

When animals get loose on the Internet, it will be – well, actually, it will probably be a better place.

I have lost my tomato war with the squirrels. I admit it. I tried to fight the good fight, but I am beat, whipped, defeated. My plants grew the size of trees, yet furry-tailed thieves stole every tomato but two runty lumps, which I ate like a cave man right off the vine while staring at them in anger. After that small taste, the minute a little tomato appears, so do three hungry-ass squirrels.

Worse than my defeat is Rudy’s defeat. It had to be tough for him, being a Jack Russell and all. The squirrels just gangsta’d up on us and overtook the place. They flaunted their fruitlifting, too. A group of them sat on the deck rail this week, brazenly munching away so Rudy and I could see them. One of them flipped me off, I swear.

Only once did we have a chance at justice. It was last Monday afternoon. I came home and saw three squirrels on the rail again, doing their culinary damnedest to eat the few green tomatoes that had sprouted. They were lined up like at a Chinese buffet and were going at it.

I snuck to the door and let Rudy out. He charged. They leaped. It’s almost 15 feet to the ground from that rail. Rudy galloped down the stairs. Two squirrels dropped their booty in free flight, landed and took off. The third squirrel held his tomato tight, catching it in the gut. Hell, yeah, it knocked the breath out of him. He struggled, heaving and gasping for breath. Rudy was on him like stink on a plumber’s friend.

I jumped into the air, arms pumping, yelling like it was a Super Bowl tackle. But the squirrel sucked in enough breath to contorted into a wiener shape and was gone in a scramble, leaving Rudy with a snout-full of tail fuzz and a confused look on his face.

We were both deflated. Adding insult to indignity, Rudy injured his back in the attempted apprehension. Now he is limping around, tail-tucked, mopey-faced and embarrassed, schooled by a gut-punched squirrel.

At eight, Rudy is old enough in human years to get his AARP card. He’s not as fast as he used to be. His back hurts and his joints ache when he runs too much. I can hear him moan in his sleep. Even jumping on the bed is getting difficult at times.

He has outlived his two neighborhood archenemy cats. The birds he used to lord over are gone. He is physically restrained from the Dyson Animal vacuum he deeply despises. Now these tomato-chomping tree rats taunt him into gimpiness. He has one last beatable adversary: The water hose. Even it has a downside.

When we turn on the hose. He attacks it like Shark Week on Discovery. When he is finished gulping a belly-full, he heists his leg a hundred times and pees for hours on everything in the yard. All of the leg-heisting causes him more pain, more limping, more moaning. Yet still has his Jack pride and gives it all a first class try. Deep down, however, he and I both know that he is running out of things to hate.

If you have one of these beasts, you know all about this subject. Some dogs shed more than others – pounds of hair a week. Rudy, our Jack, sheds so much he spends half of his energy just re-growing hair. We finally got a Dyson Animal. This thing is suppose to suck like Snakes On A Plane, but it struggles with the refuse of Rudy.

I had an uncle – whom I will not name, to protect the reputation of his children – who resembled a primate. He was so werwolfy hairy he could have gone naked and people would have thought he was wearing a fur coat. After he showered, the drain had a hair ball the size of a small child. After a visit to our house one weekend, my mother thought a beaver had come up through the pipes and drowned.

A Jack Russell Terrier is an MBA on four legs. An extremely successful business model is coded into the traits of a Jack. Business and Jacks are always evolving, always-adapting and usually unpredictable. During turbulent economic times, being a Jack is indispensable. Let me explain.

Humans desire predictability and every time we are faced with capitalistic chaos theory in action, we journalize it into catastrophe. A Jack understands unpredictability and turns it into a game.

A Jack is arguably the smartest mammal in the room due to a genetic disposition for information retention. The old adage, “Smart as a fox,” hardly holds up under the mental ability of a Jack – a canine that was literally invented to hunt foxes and kill them – for fun.

Jacks notice all kinds of things you miss and they take it all in like a recordable Blu-Ray DVD. They have long memories – something you may want to remember as well since they will use that information not to get even, but to get ahead.

A JR is often called a big dog in a small package when it comes to mind-over-matter confidence. In these skinny times, that’s known as a competitive advantage. A Jack is all business even when playing.

Want to see a relentlessly brutal and simply genetic ability to keep both eyes on the ball and yet mentally juggle seven things at once and focus on all of them minutely – while running ridiculously fast? Find a Jack and watch closely. When a direction change is needed, a Jack can react instantly. The slippery little greaser possesses a smooth-shifting, nose-dropping top gear that will shave most other animals bald on a dead sprint. Think of a hairy Porsche 911 Turbo.

The compact beast is the poster-dog for loyalty and work ethic. Yet they never confuse work and pleasure. They see no difference between the two. When their loyalty is abused, however, find a thick pair of teeth-proof underwear. Payback is a bitch, especially when the bitch is a Jack. Put a Jack in the cube farm and the squares may, indeed, get adjusted, as the quicker pace repels laggards.

Losing to a Jack is humiliating, mainly because, strange as it may sound, and contrary to sports metaphors, winning means nothing to a Jack. Your defeat will be wagged off on the way to the next chase. That can leave a mark on a loser’s ego.

Jacks get their kicks from the work. That’s why they make other dogs nervous – it’s just their job, nine days a week. Jacks in a race don’t seem to care about beating each other; they just want to chase. That is known in business books as single-minded focus.

The late Heath Ledger playing The Joker is classic Jack Russell. Only a Jack could consistently twist an entire city and a billionaire superhero into such knots and appear to have so much fun doing it. That’s because everything matters to a Jack.

Successful sports teams need Jacks at every position. Political parties need Jacks top to bottom. Government and armies need Jacks. Brands need them and need to be like them. If your brand needs a shot of adrenaline, put a Jack behind your logo. Every president should get a Jack Russell as part of the cabinet. Every CEO needs a few Jacks in the office.

A Jack will have the nads to bring dead stocks to life, make lame investments walk, jerk a knot loose in operations, plunger a clogged sales effort and build powerful brands that get noticed. Want to build a Purple Cow (thank you Seth Godin)? Hire a Jack.

Jacks mean business because business is all Jacks know. A Jack comes self-contained with everything it needs to teach you enough to create a niche brand in a tough market. A Jack is a niche brand in and of itself.

Our family’s Jack Russell, Rudy, is sitting in my lap as I type this. He has been studying the screen and the words as I type. Perhaps he is thinking Jack Theory. Perhaps you should too.

Squirrels scampered at the perimeter of our yard, cocking and spasming on the fence in horror, their faces pursed and puckered into expressions that were either disgust, shock, or anger. When the cutting was finished, the squirrels wandered around their former fiefdom, rooting around like tornado victims searching for their possessions in the flattened debris. Now and then, a squirrel would look up at us and snarl. I knew this offense against them would not go unpunished.

Over the years, squirrels have chewed their way into our attic, to be expensively caught and extracted like political prisoners by pest experts. We didn’t kill them. We captured them in little cages on their way out through the holes to gather food. We relocated them to the woods, thinking we were being humane by not executing them. They saw this as a grave injustice and started keeping score by chewing anything that would fit in their mouths.

One Christmas, I had strung lights on the deck. Rudy and I watched on a December afternoon as a squirrel hopped up on the deck rail and carefully selected a multicolored light to nibble, thinking it was a glowing nut. His own glowing nuts were visible when he sunk his squirrelly incisors into the cord. SMACK! A tiny puff of smoke rose over the animal like a halo and the bristly little 3rd cousin to a rat was knocked backward off the deck and to the ground 12 feet below.

Rudy saw the entire episode and curled his dog lips in a moment of infamous pleasure. Jack Russell’s are as territorial as Fidel Castro was in the 1960’s, but a lot less hairy. The squirrels, by their mere presence, have tortured him for years. Watching his enemy ride the lightning was payback. He has chased them with focused diligence, but never caught one. They prance and preen in front of the window while he makes sounds like someone choking an American Idol contestant with a piano cord.

The squirrels were patient, however, and devious and conniving and several other words Rudy would use if dogs could curse. Unlike the full-out-attack mockingbirds from a few stories ago, the squirrels would gather in small meetings and plan sneaky terrorist chewings and tauntings. Then the trees came down.

When the work was finished, Rudy stood in the middle of the clearing, his head high, and his neck stern, muscles rigid, his chest swollen with challenge. Slowly he turned in a circle and eyed each of his nemesis. They perched in the shadows, watching him.

The implication was obvious. With no close trees, Rudy held the advantage, as that was their vertical escape route. He has slammed his dog bark into tree bark many times on the heels of a squirrel darting up a tree to safety.

In Rudy’s face the truth creased his snout, however. The squirrels were just biding their time, planning, waiting. The battle might be won for today, but the war with the squirrels is not over.

He crunched an acorn below his foot, grinding it into the turf. His enemies have buried millions of acorns, nuts, berries and seeds on the contested ground. Soon, new trees will sprout; new escapes will grow.

Rudy looked at me, dropping his head with the realization that neither his life nor mine would last to beat them. One lone squirrel, the big one we call Conan, edged into a long limb over Rudy’s head and dropped an acorn. Rudy watched it bounce, and there was a faint chuckling sound from the trees. It has started again. The future belongs to the squirrels from hell.

“Rabbit.” He goes to his stash and returned with Mr. Rabbit (a stuffed rabbit).

“Get the ball.” Another trip to the pile and he’s back with a tennis ball.

“Get the fly!” He attacks the kitchen towel hanging on the stove handle, slinging and neck-snapping it like a bullwhip while growling like he’s saving the house from a dangerous predator. I said he was smart, I didn’t say he wasn’t a little eccentric.

He taps on the back door when he wants to go in or out. He knows the difference when we say, “Want to go for a ride or walk?” He hates baths so badly that the mention of the word “bath” elicits snarls and an immediate bolt upstairs to hide under the bed where he positions himself in the diametric center, on his head, shoving all four legs into the springs above him for maximum extraction difficulty.

The new move involves Rudy facing his intended object of desire, sitting down and raising his front paws to sit at attention, like a rabbit or squirrel – not a big deal, except we didn’t teach him to do it. We sort of take credit for the fetching skills and the other stuff except the fly with the towel thing (we have no idea why he thinks the towel is a fly), but this move is his own invention and it is evolving.

Now he has added grunting or humming to his erect posture. Sometimes he will pop up on his haunches, nod his head and murmur like my grandfather used to do when asleep and in full-tilt dream mode. Last night I watched as he fixated on my face and did his thing and as I looked at him, he smiled. No joke, he arched his eyebrows and curled his lips. Not his lips, dogs don’t have lips, but he curled his little doggie jaws into a rictus that kind of reminded me of Jack Nicholson in that Batman movie when he played the Joker.

We have no idea what it means since no response on our part seems to satisfy his begging. Treats don’t do it. Letting him out doesn’t end his Jack Russell jones. Tossing the ball isn’t his objective. I even tried saying “sausages!” like the dog in the Bud Light TV spot. Nothing.

If we figure it out, I’ll let you know what it is he desires. It’s a mystery. I did catch him doing it in the direction of my cell phone the other day. Maybe he has some calls to make. He’s done it before.