Gone To The Dogs
“What did you say, Lassie? Little Jimmy fell into the well? Let’s go get ’em, boy!”
This is certainly my idealized view of dog ownership. A friend to the end, noble and without guile. A companion that curls up by the fireplace on chilly nights, watching and waiting for the next adventure. Someone who will listen without judgment and respond with, “What you need now is to give me a good belly rub, Tomorrow, it will be better. By the way, what is ‘tomorrow’?”
For more than four decades, I was a cat advocate in the First Degree. I still melt at the sight of a cute widdle fuzzball kitty-widdy and even cruise the web for cat photos, especially the famous lolcat site, icanhascheezburger.com. It’s Kitty Porn of the highest order.
As far as domestic pets are concerned, cats definitely rule. They are, first and foremost, cute. Next, they have a huge range of available personality motifs, even within the same kitty. They are scrupulously clean, having inherited this as a survival mechanism from their big cat ancestors, with such techniques as the hiding of their digestive output, let us just say, to the built-in self-cleaning feature, just like a late model GE range. They are very cheap to acquire and maintain, they don’t make much noise and what sounds they give up are generally quite endearing, such as “purrrrrrrrrrrrrrpurrrrrrrrrrrrrrpurrrrrrrrrrrrr” and “row” and “meowk.”
Some dog owners claim that dogs are smarter than cats and that cats are un-trainable. To this I say, “phooey” and “pschaw.” I had a cat that loved to play fetch and was the ringleader of a team of two other cats and one dog in many illicit nighttime raids and several daring daytime sorties in the successful effort to obtain favoured foodstuffs from my pantry. It was clear to me that the dog only represented muscle and, on her own, would have been unable to think up a reason, let alone a plan. I described this particular incident in detail way back in twenty-ought seven, in this post.
While that cat, the White Cat, has passed on, I sometimes think of her. She wasn’t all that friendly in the lap-cat sense, but she was shrewd and clever. Another of “my” cats, Mrs. Cat, was motherly and a good listener, highly empathetic, yet another, Joe, was a redneck bore, another, Tux, was hip, warm and outgoing, prone to hugs and face-licks.
I found dogs, like small children, very frightening at first. Even the small ones could be prone to rapid, fang-borne violence for no apparent reason. Maybe it was me. “He’s never done that,” it has been often quizzically said of a given dog’s lunge at my privates. And if they weren’t busy reconsidering their wolfish roots on my behalf, they would seem to be capable of nothing more than loping around goofily, waiting for their human to do something, anything, interesting. And, of course, we shan’t leave out their collectively copious output of bodily fluids.
These tense interactions led me, naturally, to adopt a dog not once, but on three different occasions, the first two times much like my first two marriages, executed for the wrongest of reasons. Dog One was a German Wire Haired Terrier, or Terror, as my non-plussed neighbors would whisper as he bounded down the hall to the elevator, desperate for something other than the twelve or so wall of the condo she with me in a luxury Bay Ridge mid-rise. I had been just divorced and my new girlfriend thought that a scion of industry such as I was should have an animal companion befitting my station. To please her, really, I went to find Misty at the animal shelter in Long Island whereupon, she peed on the back seat of my brand new Chevy Caprice Classic on the way home. Not a good start as this was before I had a child who would do pretty much the same thing, generally desensitizing me to lquids that I might have previously thought were horrendous and fairly insulting by their mere presence.