There’s nothing like a little dog-inspired laughter to get in the mood for the weekend.

One of my favorite scenes is the opening clip of the small dog taking a leak on the big dog and then kicking dirt on him. That reminds me of one of our dog stories.

We used to have two pooches named Shelby, a German Shepherd/Labrador mix, and Peanut, a Corgi/Dachshund/Terrier mix. Shelby was the runt of her brood but still more than twice the size of Peanut. But Peanut was older and was tough on Shelby when she was a puppy.

Peanut paid the price when Shelby was full grown. The two occasionally fought, usually over food, and Shelby always won. We were the real losers, though, because of the vet bills to repair the damage to Peanut. We eventually decided to keep the dogs separate at all times — one in the house and one outside or one in her crate on bad weather days and the other roaming free in the house.

But before we implemented that strategy, we had an incident involving a third dog, my brother’s Westie Terrier when it was a puppy. Bailey came to visit us when my brother did, and all three dogs were in the back yard with us.

I was tossing the tennis ball with Shelby, and Bailey wanted to play, too. She chased the ball with Shelby and jumped up to try to take the ball from Shelby when she was bringing it back to me. Shelby seemed irritated, but I didn’t expect her to pounce viciously on Bailey as she did.

I ran to pull her off Bailey, and as I was struggling with Shelby, Peanut sensed an opportunity. She jumped on Shelby’s back, grabbed her by the scruff of the neck. I separated them once, but Peanut pounced yet again. It was her way of figuratively taking a leak and kicking dirt on Shelby for years of abuse since Shelby had become the big dog of the family.

The fight wasn’t funny at the time, yet in hindsight I couldn’t help but admire Peanut’s spunk. She was a dog with a carpe diem attitude.

Peanut died a few years ago from kidney problems, and we had to put Shelby down a couple of years after that as she wasted away from a similar ailment. They taught us never to own two dogs at the same time, but we miss them.