What Your Dog Is Thinking

Time ^ | October 12, 2012 | Annie Murphy Paul

[rlmorel]

Hehehe...well, I can see you are a German Shepherd person, which is great, because they are amazing dogs. My dad wanted one his whole life, and about five years before he passed on, he finally got one which he named “Kessie”. My dad spoiled that dog to no end, and my mother was so stern with it that the dog would poop on command in a sandy area my mother had set up for just that purpose. I walked in one day, and my dad had left her on the porch where he was watching television to go get something to eat. When I walked in, her entire snout was buried in my dad’s coffee cup just lapping the strong coffee out! I was dumbfounded, and my dad walked in while the dog was in mid-slurp, and she didn’t even pause....my dad (an old Navy guy who lived on coffee and cigarettes) grinned at me and said “That’s my girl!” Poor Kessie, she didn’t live long after my dad died. She just pined away for him.

I have a story about one German Shepherd that I encountered when I lived in Japan as a kid. My dad was stationed at the big Navy base in Yokosuka, and we lived in a large building that used to be a parachute hanger. There were six or eight units, each one was huge. My friend, David Vasquez, lived five units over. His dad was an accomplished plastic surgeon, and with all the wounded being flown in from Vietnam, he was a busy man.

They had an enormous German Shepherd named, appropriately enough, “Sigfried”. He was a massive dog, and I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say he was close to 140 lbs. His family would tie his leash to the window of the family station wagon and drive around the neighborhood as the dog trotted beside the car.

That dog scared the crap out of me.

He attacked and bit my brother when my brother chased my friend’s older brother into the yard (presumably to engage in fisticuffs) The dog leaped at him and my brother had his forearm up in time, and the dog gave him a good bite in it, but was called off immediately by the kid my brother was chasing. He must have been a well trained dog. Those were the days when, if a dog bit a kid, the first impulse was not to put the dog down, but to ask what the kid had been doing to get bit, which is likely what my parents did.

When I used to walk over to visit my friend, I had to walk past the dog, which they kept chained in the front yard, and the sidewalk and front door were well within the radius of the chain. That dog would just lay there, erect, head and ears up, completely motionless, watching me with an unblinking stare as I walked by it. You better believe I stared right back, not taking my eyes off of him for even a second. He never ran at me, but that didn’t make me feel any safer.

Anyway, one morning Dr. Vasquez was out running with the dog, and his route was probably several miles long. It took him right past all the huge drydocks that the Japanese navy had built leading up to WWII, and that the US Navy used to perform repairs on their ships.

There was one drydock that was large enough to fit our biggest aircraft carriers in. Interesting story, It was the dry dock where the IJN Shinano was built in WWII, the first real super carrier. She was built on the hull of a Yamato class battleship and had a displacement of 72,000 tons, nearly the size of the later Forrestal class carriers. She was sunk by the USS Archerfish, and after the war ended, the Archerfish was one of the first vessels getting some repairs in that very same drydock. As she sat there, the very same workers who had built the Shinano eyed her with open hostility. The captain of the Archerfish, seeing that this might not be a good thing, decided to take the bull by the horns, and invited the Japanese shipworkers to take a tour of the boat. It broke the ice perfectly.

Back to 1968, that was the very same drydock that Dr. Vasquez was jogging by with this huge German Shepherd at the end of the leash, though the drydock was empty and drained.

For no reason, the dog suddenly bolted and took off, causing Dr. Vasquez to fall and be dragged helplessly behind the dog because his wrist was completely entangled in the leash. As the dog ran directly at the huge drydock he was able to free his wrist before the dog leaped into the gaping man-made canyon.

Amazingly, the dog appeared to survive the long fall with no visible injury. The next day, in the Stars and Stripes, the paper on the front page in Yokosuka, Japan was of this huge drydock with a speck of a German Shepherd all alone, standing at the bottom. Just amazing.

[pops88]

Great story. A few minutes ago, I glanced over at my dog, resting on the floor faced away from me while I was eating at the computer. I nonchalantly said, “You know I dropped something accidentally.” He was on his feet like a bolt and looking for the morsel under my computer. It’s stuff like that that makes me never want to own a different breed. They’re so smart.

The world is so different from growing up in the 1960s. Nearly every neighbor had a dog and no one had a fenced yard. They were all well behaved and only on a rare occasion left their yard and when they did were shooed home. All the kids were afraid of Smokey, the German Shepherd, but he turned out to be the sweetest dog of all.

When I was trying to teach my dog pool safety, he kept trying to rescue me. It was a “who’s teaching who” session. LOL. “Mom, the pool isn’t safe I’m dragging you to the stairs!”

I love looking at:
http://dog-shaming.com/

The worst things my dog has done in the last 6 months-

jumped in the pool without permission once before I was
ready to swim

sneaked into my daughter’s bedroom to look around after she moved out (he’s only allowed in common areas)

ate a cracker I dropped on the couch accidentally. I think he thought it was the same as “floor rules.”

Dog Shaming really makes me appreciate him.