Dogs and squirrels have just never gotten along in life.  Most canines find the little guys to be scurrying backyard pests who seem to have no other meaning in life but to taunt them from up high.  Hard to believe, but had it not been for that longstanding relationship between rodent and hound, none of this would even exist.  We all have a dog named Annie Camaro to thank…

Real cases, real animals.

Annie’s a greyhound who refers to herself as a brownhound.  Her interests are science (recall the physics picture in the Evil Squirrel post), opera (Annie is a huge fan of Mr. Mozart), and learning new things on her laptop.  She also takes a strong interest in the squirrel who wreaks havoc in her backyard and loves to throw anything not nailed down at her (though, as Annie will point out, his aim is usually pretty bad).  She often referred to this creature as an “evil squirrel”, and in a typical odd series of events, that name soon began to be applied to the little gray squirrel who began showing up in the various crude pictures I was drawing at the time.  Evil Squirrel was born, and Annie gets plenty of the credit for helping to make him an internet star.

You'd hug your mom too even if she was a different species.

The truth is, Annie is a real dog who lived in Oklahoma who I, along with all of my other internet friends, got to know very well over the years, just as if she were truly a person herself.  Sadly, Annie passed on in August of 2010, but her legacy lives on through ES and his drawings, as well as her other two sisters….

Lizbit is the younger sister of Annie, who often gave Annie just as much trouble as ES did.  Lizzie’s a wild child and an attention ho, with a tongue that never saw a face or a set of bare toes it didn’t like.  Knowing Lizbit was much more of a pushover than her big sister, ES would often choose her as his playmate, and when those two got together, they were a veritable Pinky and the Brain….

Verrrrry interesting!

Above we see ES assisting in Lizbit’s training she is undergoing to become a soldier dog.  We can all sleep easier at night knowing our freedom rests in the paws of such capable critters.  But Lizbit isn’t the only member of the family who is trained in the art of deadly combat, there is also her youngest sister BeBe….

a.k.a. Ninja Dog!

BeBe is the athletic one of the trio, and used to run in the dog races.  Retired from that lifestyle, she now focuses her energy on the secrets of the ninja assassin.  Using her God-given talents of being able to move around quiety and having dark fur that blends in with the night, BeBe will have assimilated you before you even know she’s there.  Of course, that only involves sneaking up on others and then claiming victory at the element of surprise…. she would never harm a fly.  After all, she is not that kind of girl…

Because the Camaro sisters were all patterned after actual dogs, unlike almost all of my other characters they most often appear in non-anthropomorphized form.  There are exceptions….

But you will generally just see them as ordinary run of the mill dogs…. not that they fit that description by any means.  After all, not many dogs can give birth to a family of squirrels…..