Another Dog Blog Post

Is this one of the "good" sponsored posts I've promised to spread through the month of January? I'll let the sponsor decide. It's being typed straight into the blog as the words come to mind, but it is about dogs. The sponsor is a dog person, though not the same dog person who sponsored more "good" posts in February last night. Gentle Readers, if you want to see more "good" posts on other topics in addition to cats and glyphosate, you too may pay $5 for a standard-size blog post, more for a longer or more heavily researched post. No, Paypal isn't back on board yet. Payment may be mailed to P.O.Box 322, Gate City, Virginia, 24251-0322. I like cash but letters containing cash have been deliberately "lost" by mail sorters, so the safest option is a U.S. postal order, payable to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322.

Anyway last night, for the third or fourth time, people saw a large dog walking beside me as I walked home through the first cold wind of 2019. The dog is male, a mixed breed, bigger than most coon hounds and much bigger than a purebred bull terrier; he has a hound-shaped body and a bull-terrier-shaped face. His patchy coat is quite an interesting study in colors with black legs, white paws, and patches of black, white, brown, and brown-flecked white on his head and body, and a long white tail. He's not the kind of dog I find easiest to look at, but he's perky and polite and adventurous. And he's embarrassing me, because he runs out into the road in front of cars, and drivers are looking at me nonverbally saying "Why don't you keep your dog on a leash as required by both town and county laws." The answer is, of course, that he's not my dog. I wouldn't take him as a gift, but he's not been a gift. He is an obviously beloved, but overindulged, pet of someone else who is obviously going to feel terrible when somebody runs over this dog.

The first time this dog escorted me part of the way home, in December, it was late, and dark, and snowy, and I had no idea where he came from or where he went. Since it was bitterly cold I reported him to the police. The dogcatcher had gone home for the night. The regular police don't rescue stray dogs. Obviously nothing was done.

The second time, I saw him walking beside a man and assumed he was that man's dog. Then the man went into a convenience store, and the dog barely paused before it started walking beside me.

The third time, I'd stopped to talk on someone's porch--we've had weather that's favorable to porch-sitting from Christmas up to about midday yesterday--and we saw the dog walking with two other people, who also went into the convenience store. "Is that their dog?" I asked the owner of the porch. "No, he belongs to that boy in town. He runs loose all the time," the owner of the porch said. I went home, and the dog, which was loitering outside the convenience store, followed me as far as a house where some other dogs live in a properly fenced yard, where it turned aside to talk to them, probably about ways they might be able to roam around town unsupervised too.

This time, I was walking past a house barely outside the "downtown" section when I heard a loud, deep, cheerful bark as of a dog greeting a friend. It was that dog, and the person it was claiming as its friend, across the street at its busiest hour of the day, was...the writer of this blog post. "Hello!" it nonverbally boomed. "Wait a minute and I'll walk home with you!"

"Go home," I said.

"Just a minute!" the dog insisted, watching traffic.

"Go home!" I shouted, not looking at the dog in case looking at him might encourage him. "Go home! Stay home!" Looking straight ahead, I walked double-time past a string of commuters in cars.

When the traffic cleared up, the dog was not actually shoving its head under my arm, but it was close. "Go ahead, pat me! You know you want to," it was nonverbally saying, trotting at my heels.

"I am not your human," I said. "Go home. Your human will miss you."

"He'll be all right," the dog nonverbally said. "As you know by now, I am the sort of dog people call 'Rover.' This whole neighborhood is my neighborhood. All the humans on the west end of town are my humans. I will make sure no other dog, such as big old shaggy Sydney or that hysterically cute little Mop or that friendly little Cocoa, barks at you. I'm bigger than all the other dogs on this street, except for Sydney, together."

I happen to like Sydney and Cocoa and the Mop, I refused to say, in case speaking to the dog might encourage him. The dog darted off to investigate something on the other side of the railroad track. I moved briskly along. No train was coming, and ten yards down the road, there was that dog trotting beside me again.

I thought how convenient it might be to have that dog walking with me if I met any evildoers. This is Gate City, however; we don't really have evildoers, at least not the kind who beat up little old ladies. Meanwhile anyone relying on a dog for any kind of protection would have to feed the dog. I thought how much a dog of that size would eat, and how easily it could be tempted to kill a chicken, or even a cat or a possum, for a snack if its dinner was not served on time. I tried projecting thought waves at it: Go home, go home, go home, go home, go home...

The dog darted out to sniff at something in the middle of the road. I walked briskly forward. A minivan approached. The dog walked right into its bright headlights. The minivan slowed down but did not stop. The dog trotted back to my side. The driver glared at me. I walked briskly along. The dog trotted beside me. It took a detour past a house where another good-sized dog lives. The other dog was not out in the yard, however, and at the other end of the block the dog trotted back out to meet me at the cross street.

A police car passed, not in hot pursuit of anyone else. I wondered whether the cop was going to write me a ticket for being accompanied by a dog who had a collar but was not on a leash. Maybe the owner of the porch could tell the cop the name of "that boy in town." Maybe the policeman could even take the dog home...The police car didn't even slow down.

Two blocks later, we finally passed a house where another dog was out in a fenced yard. The dog whose name ought to be Rover went to visit that dog. I all but ran out of sight of that house.

I still don't know the name of "that boy in town." My guess would be that he's an adult, probably sixty or seventy years old, because that's the age range people like the porch owner call "boy" or "girl"; a younger adult they'd be likely to call a "kid," and a really young person (or one with major brain damage) would be "child" or "little boy/girl." Then again, occasionally that type of person uses a word the way the majority of the English-speaking world do. The person who needs to take better care of this dog may actually be a boy or a young man.

Anyway...although enforcing leash laws on cats or small dogs is silly, there are valid reasons for enforcing them on animals the size of this one. Big dogs have big appetites, and are likely to kill and eat other people's smaller pets. Friendly though this particular dog seems to be, big dogs can be aggressive and can injure or kill humans--or trigger humans who have phobias to kill them on sight. This dog has the dreaded "pit bull" face, only he's bigger than a real "pit bull," so he is a phobia trigger waiting to go off. Big dogs damage property--including the motor vehicles that often kill them. Big dogs have short lifespans at best, and when they are lovable pets, as this one appears to be, why shorten their life expectancy further than nature already does?

People who couldn't afford a fence high enough to confine a big dog, or whose landlords didn't want them to have one, used to keep dogs like this one tethered on chains all day. Props to "that boy in town" for at least not doing that; straining against a chain is demeaning and frustrating, even for a dog, and can turn a dog against humans and make it vicious. But this dog needs to be confined away from strangers and traffic when he's not with his rightful human companions, anyway.

Dogs, like social cats, like to take long walks just to check up on things. Merely feeding and neutering has not reduced this dog's interest in exploring the neighborhood, nor will it do. I offer two suggestions to "that boy in town":

1. Put some good solid limits around this dog's territory, and try to build up his evidently weak instinct to monitor his own territory.

2. Walk with him. This dog has become accustomed to being able to tell, at least by the "P-mail" other dogs leave in their yards, what every other dog in town is up to. In order to be content while being kept out of motor traffic, he's going to need for you to walk with him for at least a mile from home, regularly. That will do you as much good as it does him, and may save you a lot of money on the kind of "daily medications" that people who walk a mile or two every day don't need. If you're not able to walk with him yourself, hire someone who is.



(I've not read this book; it just has the right sort of picture on the cover.)