Making Out With A Gator

Barley, a dog, sticks her tongue in the mouth of an alligator-shaped rubber chew toy that has enzymatic dog toothpaste spread among its teeth.

Barley doesn’t abide having her teeth brushed particularly well. She doesn’t get nasty about it, but she will keep her mouth closed and her jaw clenched in a way that makes getting at the inner surfaces feel pretty precarious. As such, part of her dental hygiene routine is to be given semi-regular time with toys that are designed to have toothpaste for dogs put inside them, to be accessed by a lot of chewing and licking. I’m very tickled by my most recent of these toys, which is both gator-shaped and gator-colored, because Barley was at one time a University of Florida dog.