Garbology

Casey is normally an exemplary dog with very few bad habits but today his behaviour was rubbish.
I was reading in the next room when I heard a rustling sound and through the door I saw him standing up to extract something from the kitchen bin, He took it back to his bed under the table and returned to pick out something else. He did this several times until the bin fell over and the lid came off. Then he started rummaging around inside, purposefully removing more items for further examination. When I eventually went to remonstrate his bed was full of greasy paper, food wrappings, empty cartons and the oxtail bones I had thrown away thinking he had finished with them. (Evidently I was wrong about that.)

It's only fair to acknowledge that garbology is a respectable academic discipline concerned with the study of human refuse. It aims to examine what we throw out, providing useful information about consumer behaviour, and to analyze what what happens in landfills so that waste management techniques can be improved. It employs archaeological methods since much of what we know about ancient cultures come from discarded material (even the contents of latrines.) The study of trash can also provide forensic evidence and may help to solve crimes. But the science of garbology was really started by one A.J.Weberman (You don't need a Weberman to know which way the wind blows...), an obsessive celebrity stalker who in the late 60s regularly sifted through Bob Dylan's trash cans and in 1971 came to blows with the singer himself as a result of his garbological activities. You can read the story here.

Casey's defense may be that he was simply collecting evidence for an exposé of the poor waste management practices in this household although personally I think he was trash-picking for his own entertainment on yet another day that was too wet for an outing.