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Nothing But a Hound Dog: His Family Mocked Him When He Cried

A dog’s life: He thinks he’s talking when he barks — so we responded with an Elvis song

Joseph Serwach
3 min readSep 7, 2022
Photo by Joseph Serwach.

Ace is our hand-me-down dog — rejected by others for his annoying squeaky bark. He thinks he’s telling us stuff. So I asked him, “Want to eat?”

Instead of wagging his tail or jumping up excitedly like an average dog, he started his non-stop whiney bark, “Yipe-yipe-yipe! Yipe-yipe-yipe!”

For five consecutive minutes.

My bride is traveling for two weeks, leaving me alone with two dogs: the quiet one who gazes at me with the adoring look of love — and Ace. He debates you through his annoying crying bark.

And that is how I intuitively understood the true meaning of a classic song I had never really understood. So I ran right at this little barker and quoted Elvis Presley simultaneously by singing:

“You ain’t nothing but a hound dog, crying all the time. Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit — and you ain’t no friend of mine.”

Like an arrogant American demanding non-Americans understand English in their non-English speaking land, Ace barked back at me the entire time I sang, wagging his tail, sure we’d just made a duet.

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Joseph Serwach
Joseph Serwach

Written by Joseph Serwach

Story + Identity = Mission. Leadership Culture, Journalism, Branding Education. Inspiration: Catholic, Polish. https://medium.com/@serwachjoe

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