In November of 2007, we welcomed a three-year-old golden retriever into our pack. He was under 60 pounds, emaciated and neglected, saved from that life by golden rescue. We named him Darwin.

Despite his trauma, he was the sunniest, bounciest, happiest, cutest golden retriever I’d ever seen. He was also extremely ornery. This Classic Fermented Fur post describes when I pondered that he might actually have an evil agenda.

Though I describe him as “barely sixty pounds” in the post, which first appeared exactly ten years ago today, he was still recovering. He eventually chunked out at around 85 pounds, which was a little too much, despite his enthusiastic fence-running, but he was healthy and happy, and we sure did adore him.

Darwin didn’t know how to not be enthusiastic about every single thing.

Darwin doesn’t play fair. He is some kind of canine nuclear reactor with the ability to take a finite number of cute doggie molecules and fuse them in an out of control chain reaction, creating an infinite Cuteness Output.

He’s a smallish golden retriever, but he has about a million dogs’ worth of adorable packed into his barely sixty pounds.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a direct correlation between Darwin’s Cuteness Output and the Orneriness Quotient. If I could find a way to break the link between those, he’d be the perfect dog. I imagine it’s some sort of evolutionary defense mechanism. In fact, the more I think about it, the cuteness is probably multiplying in proportion to his orneriness because it’s much more difficult to bash a really, really adorable dog in the head with a boot. Clever, Darwin, very clever.

It’s impossible to throw him off the bed when he gets all curled up just where I need to be and looks at me and flutters his tail. When he has his head on the pillow, too, I can’t even muster up a good glare.

It’s impossible to refuse to pet him when he’s draped over the back of the love seat, toy in his mouth and tail wagging.

Try to resist this. I dare you. It cannot be done.

I can’t yell at him when he slurps up all the coffee in the cup I left on the end table, because it makes him so happy, and he seems to make a real effort not to make a huge mess. Clearly, I am the untrained one, if I’m still leaving coffee on the end table in the first place. And this is a dog that does not need caffeine.

It’s impossible to ignore him when he finally comes back in after an extended fence-barking episode, because he looks at me with that huge golden grin on his frosty, bark-breath encrusted face (Seriously! Whisker-cicles!), seeming to say, “Wow, I just had the best time, but now I’m overflowing with indescribable joy merely to be in your presence.”

There’s no way I can shove him down to the foot of the bed so I can reclaim some small scrap of my own blanket because he then rolls over on his back and I am compelled to scratch his chin and chest and hold his enormous paw for a while.

When he first began getting clear up in the bay window, my instinctive reaction was to make him get down. Dogs don’t belong in the window, right? But he looked so cute standing up there. Plus, his tail thumping on the screen greets me as I make my way from the garage to the house after work.

Then he started sacking out on the windowsill, watching the world go by, and that was even more adorable. It is now Darwin’s window. I’ve given up my claim. I’m thinking of padding the windowsill so he can be even more comfy. One additional benefit is that Brody gets up there less (though he mostly confined his window-time to only his front two paws), because when he got excited over something outside, he tended to claw the screens to shreds.

After coming across the Obey the Purebreed website, I’m developing a new theory. Dogs use cuteness as the ultimate weapon. If they amass enough “cute,” they gain the ability to get away with anything they want, moving them further along in their diabolical plan for world domination.

I’m not sure, but I think Darwin may soon become their leader.

I just hope the chain reaction which generates all that dog-appeal is not truly nuclear. Because if it is, I am so doomed. He does have that golden glow, but so far I have no reason to believe he is radioactive.