Is this some kind of joke?

by Carla
(Grand Rapids Mi.)

We always had a big garden when I was a kid. One year my mom went kind of crazy and she planted about forty tomato plants. When the tomatoes became ripe we got busy canning juice, sauce, salsa and anything else we could think of doing with tomatoes. We still had tons.

We called Grandma, "don't you need about two bushel baskets of tomatoes?' we asked. She took them.

We still had tomatoes, so we called neighbors, friends and more family. The tomatoes just kept coming.

My Dad would get up early and pick them . He put the ones that needed a little more sun time on the picnic table to ripen.

One morning I looked out my bedroom window and saw all these red "balls" all over the yard. It was really weird because it seemed like each one was carefully spaced so there was about three inches around each one.

At first I wondered who was playing a joke on our family by putting red balls all over the yard. But then I watched and our collie Susie walked up to the nearly empty table and gently picked a tomato off the table and turned and started toward the barn.

She got almost there and she set it down near another tomato.

Puzzled I got dressed and went outside and picked up a couple. Looking them over I realized why Susie set them down.

Apparently she didn't like the taste of tomatoes and as soon as a tooth broke the skin, she set it down. I checked some more and sure enough every tomato had one or two teeth marks on them!