Posted on 06/23/2002 9:42:29 AM PDT by Kermit
Took Jasper to the Vet on Saturday. He always does the same thing when we’re waiting in the lobby: he faces the door and stands statue-still, as if he can will himself out of the room. He has a long history with this place, dating back to mere puppyhood - we’d had him just a week when he contracted parvovirus, which has mortality rate slightly higher than ebola. It was just awful. (You give your heart to a puppy right away - they’re much cuter than newborns, to be honest; less of a grumpy greasy beet-red Churchill factor.) We took him to the vet, and they put him in a cage downstairs with IV drips and a little collar to keep him from pulling out the tubes. Sick little dog. We went to visit him the second evening and figured we’d never see him again.
But he made it. To everyone’s astonishment, he whipped it and thrived, and went home a happy dog a few days later. And now he’s middle-aged, with middle-aged problems. A little stiffness in the hip, tender gums, middle-aged spread. He’s going to get his teeth cleaned Tuesday, and they’ll also X-ray him to check for hip problems. I suspect a touch of arthritis rather than dysplasia; I’ve noticed a little hitch in his gait when he comes running up the hill. If it’s the latter, surgery will help. I have no idea what that costs. Can’t be cheap.
Not even an issue.
He took his shots without a whimper or a yipe. I blamed the extra weight on Gnat, who feeds him all her cast-offs - and to be frank, I’m to blame as well. Sometimes when Gnat’s flecked with rice and has small pasta fragments adhering to her garments, I take her out of the chair and bounce her gently to dislodge the excess food for Jasper. Sometimes he removes the food himself, very gently. There’s always a piece of mac & cheese adhering to a toddler somewhere if you sniff long enough. She’s a walking buffet.
Is that all? She’s just a pack member who outranks him, nothing more? I’ll never forget the day we brought her home; Jasper was disconsolate. I’ve never heard a dog cry, but cry he did - long gasping sobs of immeasurable sadness. He followed us up the stairs - no! No! No! No! Take it back! His position ever since has been tolerance, and if he doesn’t express a great deal of devotion it’s because he’s not that kind of dog. You won’t find him at my feet in the study, looking up with slavish amazement. He’s a remarkably self-contained dog, and sometimes I think the relationship between us is like the one between an enlisted man who’s seen a few battles and a lieutenant fresh out of ROTC. I outrank him, but that doesn’t mean he thinks I’m smarter.
Of course I am, but there doesn’t seem to be many opportunity to prove it - at least in a way he’d understand. I don’t hear what he hears. I don’t smell what he smells. I refuse to acknowledge the threat the mailman poses. He works for an idiot. There he goes again, yanking my chain.
Smart? You’ve no idea. It’s one of the things that makes him so annoying. We can’t go the park with Gnat & Wife anymore, because he sees danger EVERYWHERE. Strange dogs strange people strange things strange smells - it’s all wrong, and why, don’t, we, UNDERSTAND? He becomes unhinged when she climbs the slide. He goes nuts if she walks off in the direction of those two dogs who are always there, the badbuttstink dogs who woof so tough. So we all walk to the park and I continue on with Jasper. Usually at the edge of the park he stands up and puts his paws on my chest to make - me - go - back - and - SAVE THEM.
He’s never happy until they come home.
This isn’t just tolerance, but I don’t want to say it’s love - we want to believe that our dogs love us, and that makes us look for things that might not be there. It’s not important for dogs to love; it is important for dogs to belong. Dogs are always described as giving unconditional love, but that makes them sound like idiots and best and utter moral simpletons at worst. Yes, O Adolf Hitler, you are the greatest and I love you completely. Is it sad dogs don’t love as we wish them to? No: It’s sad that we don’t understand how belonging satisfies them so completely that the baroque complexities of love seem utterly unnecessary. Humans spend a lifetime defining and redefining love, building up edifices that can be demolished with a selfish sin; humans hover over love like a flower bed, weeding and pruning, worrying about frost and drought, mistaking the brilliance of the petals for the depth of the root.
Who wants this from a dog?
From a dog you get stolid clear-eyed constancy: we belong together and that’s how it is. There’s no mental vocabulary for the alternative. A dog’s heart never dreams of a different master.
I visit many Mac-centric pages, and one had a brief item about the return of Clarus the Dogcow. It’s a small icon who’s been hanging around the Mac environment for years, but was yanked a while back - supposedly, the rumors went, because some cultures (ahem) regard the dog as the lowest of the low, a filthy beast fit only for skulking in the flickering perimeter of the town dump.
Individuals are welcome to like or dislike dogs as they choose, but there’s something odd about a culture that despises dogs.
Dogs want to be with us. Every other animal on the planet can take us or leave us. Some tolerate us out of boredom or stupidity; some, like cats, find us useful and amusing equals. Most animals have no idea what’s going on in our world, and correctly see Man as bad juju, the same way we’d worry about a Borg Cube that assumed orbit around Earth and emitted an unceasing high C. But dogs want to belong to people, and I am mystified why any culture would codify rejection of these creatures. Yes yes yes, many understandable reasons from hygiene to . . . well, hygiene. Cultures produce curious strictures that seem bizarre and ridiculous to other societies. But the fewer taboos a society has, the more important they are, the more they are observed, and the more likely the society to be progressive and adaptive because it’s not picking its way through a mine field every time it points a camera at the heavens or dissects a human body. You can almost look at the position of dogs in a culture as a barometer of social health - on one end, hatred of dogs; in the middle, tolerance and consumption of dogs, and on the other end love of dogs so intense there are surgeons who specialize in reconstructing their hips so they may chase squirrels three years into their second decade.
Hypothesis: To hate dogs you have to hate the part of yourself dogs represent. Frolic. Drooling enthusiasm. Blind trust. Perhaps at the absolute extreme some see dogs as an affront to God because they live in the moment, unconscious of tomorrow let alone eternity, and have no desire to govern their appetites. Show them a steak and they deploy that pale purple tentacle and stare at you with desire. They have no word for shame.
But who civilizes the dog? Man. And it’s so very easy to do; it requires only connection and the will to do good. Which is why I’ve often said, half facetiously, that the relationship between man and dog is the same as man to God. Dogs don’t understand our books or physics or spacecraft or lawn mower engines or flat-screen monitors or 99.8% of our world. They do not know what it is that they do not know. They don’t even know how to pose the question, frame the argument, find their way into to realm of the human mind. The connection to the human being is sufficient. And that’s why I’m not an atheist, as much as every single rational fiber of my being tells me I should be: don’t know what I don’t know. (And I know that for a fact.) I find no more empirical proof of God than my dog finds proof of satellite TV. But at night when we’re on the sofa he sees the inscrutable stories flickering on the box in the corner. I note his disinterest: one of those things, whaddagonna do. But the fact that he doesn’t get the story doesn’t mean there’s not a story being told.
He got a bath tonight in preparation for his hospital stay, and Gnat found this hilarious. Puppy bath. Puppy bath! When he shook off the water and doused us all she laughed so hard she fell on her can. Then Jasper stood in the hall and barked his demand for a biscuit. He goes in Tuesday morning and stays all day; just one day without him will seem odd and empty.
Practice for something at which you do not wish to excel.
I'm taking up falconing, and some of the training films use Arab falconing footage as an example of what NOT to do.
These people are incredibly cruel to dogs and falcons at a minimum.
My T'bred mare will do ANYthing for me (including going to horse shows and hunter trials and jumping over large objects that she could easily go around) but that's because I treat her with considerate kindness (slipping the reins rather than hang her in the mouth, making sure she's walked, fed, and watered before I sit down, etc.) and she repays with interest. We brought home a sackful of ribbons this weekend from a local show (actually, my kids got most of them, but the Grace and I entered a few classes and won) and she lips at them hanging outside her stall door because it makes us laugh . . . but she really has no idea about the honor of the blue and multicolored ribbons, she does it because the humans want her to. Good girl.
Laz, I'm not really surprised that you're getting into falconry . . . it seems in character :-D I have a friend here in the ATL area who is a falconer and also has a permit to rehabilitate wild birds . . . if you're ever through this way I could introduce you . . . his whole back yard is enclosed in chicken wire and he has some beautiful birds.
OOO! I love rehabbers! We have one up here by the name of Bernie, and she has a bald eagle who has a bad wing ligament (permanant injury, can never be released or used for exhibition). The name of the bird is Deshka, and it thinks it's a dog or cat or some other pet. It talks to Bernie and does tricks even. :o) Really great bird.
Too bad for you My dog loves me.
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