When we dogs get together, we invariably end up talking about how to make sense of our favourite humans, who continue to confuse us.
We reckon it’s the job of a dog to understand humans without much attempt at the reverse.
Take your thoughtless act of leaving us alone. We’ve been loyal companions to humans ever since you needed us to help hunt for food, warn you of danger and keep you warm on a cold night — for many thousands of years. It means we like being with you.
Leaving us alone is akin to misery, if not a stake through the heart. At least leave us with another human, or another dog, for company. We don’t do alone well.
Then there’s our olfactory existence, which you’d think you would appreciate after millennia of using our sense of smell to stay out of trouble. Not to mention picking up cancers and COVID, drugs, explosives and finding lost kids. That’s how we work, and we like to keep moving to explore the world. Just because you are visually driven doesn’t mean we are going to enjoy watching the TV or scrolling a screen like you do.
It follows that, if you gave a moment’s thought to the importance of smell to us, you wouldn’t change your smell so carelessly. All that soap, deodorant, perfume and shampoo confuses us, as do the strange smells your jumpers, coats, suitcases, shoes, towels and hats acquire after you’ve been at work or shopping or travelling somewhere.
The thing is, we change our coats about once a year whereas you are doing it every day — and since we use smell to identify you as well as friends or intruders, it doesn’t make it easy.
Not to mention your shape-shifting when you wear all sorts of different clothes, coats and outfits (in different colours as well) that make it hard to pick you from a distance, or distinguish you from other humans.
You also use your hands a lot, not always in a good way. While you might hand us a treat or fill our food bowl, give us a scratch or rub our ears, you’re also likely to stuff a worm chew down our throats, apply some eye ointment or rub flea repellent along our necks, not to mention giving us a whack if we step out of line. So, a lot of us are wary when your hands move around us.
You’re huggers too, you humans, and you seem to think we dogs should enjoy a hug too. But we just don’t. Think about it: as a pup we soon learn that being pinned down by a bigger dog is a bad thing and stops a ready exit. We might eventually put up with human hugs when we realise you like it — but hugs are just too close for comfort for a dog. You are doing it for you, not for us.
And apart from our excellent noses, which tell us much about the world, we have to use our mouth, tongue and teeth to tell us the rest of what we need to know. A little more tolerance of playful mouthing (short of sinking molars into your wrist) is overdue.
And tolerance too, of opportunistic snaffling of scraps off the kitchen table or the bench — a food bowl is your invention: for us, it’s just another option.
The Boss says I should be grateful for a warm place to sleep and a feed every day, but he forgets that home is my territory too, and a dog's job is to defend it — so don’t get precious when your dog doesn’t like the smell of your best friend or your mother-in-law.
I tell him he shouldn’t get offended — he should lift his game. Woof!