Woof

Nobody really knows for certain when this symbiotic dance began, but dogs are likely the first domestic animals, and may predate agriculture itself. Noble Canis has been man's loyal companion for ten thousand years.

But, let's face it, and I want you to think about this a minute before you fly off the handle: dogs are freaks.

It wasn't their idea of course, I don't have to tell you that, you know who's always behind this kind of thing. It's the same old story, somebody gets a good idea, and then somebody else has to find a way to completely miss the point, and turn the idea into a caricature of itself, then a parody of itself, then a sad joke told by a late night talk show host. See what happened to Modern Art?

Anyway, the story goes like this: Once upon a time, there were some wild animals, wolves or jackals or whatever, who started hanging around roving bands of hunter gatherers because wild animals are nothing if not resourceful and they figured out pretty fast that roving bands of hunter gatherers usually had something to eat, and were often willing to share.

This is a long standing human habit, we like to feed the animals, even today, even big ones, in spite of the fact that any hunter gatherers who tried to feed lions or tigers or bears did not have steel bars or tempered glass or rangers or minivans to hide behind, and subsequently found themselves suddenly slipping a couple links on the food chain and lost the opportunity to make any further contributions to the gene pool. Lions and tigers and bears have a singularly one dimensional approach to mealtime, which is essentially: if you can catch it, you should eat it. They fail to distinguish between what is served, and the server, it's all just lunch to them.

The wild animals who became dogs however, were astute enough to make this distinction, and clever enough to see that if they took the handout and not the hand, they could keep coming back for more. Thus hunter gatherers became the first operators of fast food franchises. I can see how this might have been an immediate success among the wild animals, wolves or jackals or whatever, who were the object of this unprecedented scheme. When you've spent many millennia watching, stalking, chasing, outwitting, fighting, killing, and dismembering every meal, I can see how it would be an irresistible temptation to take humans up on the offer to just show up at dinnertime, which was always announced by the smell of cooking over open fires, and have a quick bite with nothing to clean up afterward.

Things would have been different of if there had been someone around to explain to them that in exchange for table scraps they were expected to give up their souls, or at least their freedom. And with adequate legal representation, there would have been no need to go begging anyway, because I understand lawyers are tender and juicy and don't run very fast.

But it didn't happen that way, so we are left with watching the selection process at work. At this point, it's natural selection, because the wolves or jackals or whatever are making the decisions, self-selecting which members of the species are lazy and dependent enough to tolerate the company and authority of humans. But after that, they're done for, we are in complete control.

For a long time, thousands of years in fact, this wasn't so bad. Selective breeding was done to produce dogs primarily for hunting and herding, and the qualities we were attempting to encourage were nothing to sneeze at: strength, speed, endurance, intelligence, obedience, slobbering, licking, barking, and so forth, although I can't really think of anything that I would describe as "something to sneeze at," in fact, the whole concept of sneezing at things strikes me as pretty unsanitary and disgusting anyway, so let's not have any of that, OK?

Now, what happened after that depended on progress, another idea that gets us into all kinds of trouble. In this case it had to do with the development of: leisure time. By leisure time, I don't mean relaxing after a hard day of watching your woman in the fields, or taking a couple days off because you have conquered and pillaged a neighboring village and have earned a little break from routine, no, no, I'm talking about serious leisure time, the kind that is typical of those special people who have way more money and power than sense and must spend every waking moment of every day of their lives devoted to their own amusement. These are the people who changed the status of dog from that of Friend, Companion, Partner, and of course, Slave, to that of: Animated Toy. These people realized that if someone had enough time and patience and superficiality, they could breed just about any kind of characteristics that would entertain them until they could think of some other novel experiment to try. The result of several centuries of this kind of aberrant reasoning is what we see today, the single most grotesque collection of genetic mutations in the history of biological existence. We have dogs with three foot long bodies and three inch long legs. We have dogs with hair longer than Crystal Gayle. We have thirty pound dogs with enough skin to cover any randomly selected domed athletic stadium. We have dogs that look like they have been dropped from orbiting satellites onto their noses. We have dogs that can't walk, can't see, can't breathe, and can't let go once they sink their teeth into your knee.

Then there are the tiny dogs, dogs so small we should call them dogettes or dogitos. This is just an affront to the long standing, hard earned dignity of all members of the species to have a dog smaller than a housecat. It's just wrong. I've seen dogs smaller than hamsters. These are not even dogitos, they are microdogs and the next step can only be: the nanodog. Nanodogs will live on fleas.

It's time to get a grip. Dogs are living beings, not dolls, science projects, or, God forbid, art. We need to put a stop to this now or it's going to get much, much worse. Genetic engineering is going to change the whole breeding process into something from a zoo in the Zortgob Nebula or an anchovy pizza dream. We're talking dogs the size of mosquitoes here, dogs with legs like porcupine quills, dogs with six heads that bark in harmony loud enough to sterilize frogs, there'll be no end to it. If we really must use genetic manipulation to produce bizarre physical forms for our amusement, we don't need dogs. Imagine what forms teenagers will take once they have this kind of power over their appearance. No, on second thought, let's not.

These are just the physical changes, we have introduced various behavioral changes as well. The first issue I would like to address is the subject of intelligence. I have heard it said, for instance, that your average dog is as dumb as a fencepost. I don't think this is fair at all, your average dog is at least as dumb as four or five fenceposts, although even I will have to admit that ten fenceposts operating as a unit could think rings around your average dog on his best dog-thinking day.

This is not true of the animals dogs were made from. Case in point: I was at a party one summer in the mountains of Western Colorado. We were outside on a sunny afternoon when someone called my attention to something happening on the hillside facing us, maybe a quarter mile away. Four of five coyotes were in a big circle with a medium size dog in the middle, I can't remember which breed. It worked like this: Mr Dog would chase Coyote #1 until Coyote #1 got tired. Then Coyote #2 would cut between Coyote #1 and Mr Dog, causing Mr Dog to think, "Hey look! This coyote is closer than the other one, I'll chase him instead!" Then Mr Dog would chase Coyote #2 until Coyote #2 got tired, at which time Coyote #3 would cut between Coyote #2 and Mr Dog, causing Mr Dog to take off after Coyote #3. This went on for awhile and it was pretty clear Mr Dog's little dog brain was not getting the picture that the game he was playing was not the game the coyotes were playing. I am someone who does not like to see animals suffer, to the extent that, for most of my adult life, I have not been willing to eat pieces of them. In fact, I was meatless at the time this incident occurred, but in spite of that, I was really curious how the coyotes were going to handle things when Mr Dog got really tired. Fortunately for Mr Dog, someone called his owner who came to the rescue.

The coyotes took off, since they are descended from the animals who didn't enter human intenture and are much too smart to have anything to do with people, which is the reason you will never see a coyote wearing a pink sweater with a matching knit cap. The point of the story is this: If you dress your dog in cunning little outfits, STOP IT RIGHT NOW AND SEEK PROFESSIONAL HELP IMMEDIATELY. You are VERY, VERY SICK.

In any case, whatever it is that wolves and jackals have in the way of intelligence must have been baked out of domestic dogs by the heat of the hearth they were lying by all those centuries. Since nature abhors a vacuum, which is obvious because nature is covered with dirt, something had to occupy the empty space in dog's heads where the brain used to be, and we all know what that is, because whatever they have lost, dogs have gained something wolves and coyotes and jackals don't have. That's right, barking.

Now, I suppose it could be argued that barking evolved somehow over millennia, or even under it, I don't know, but I don't think it happened that way. I'm convinced that dogs learned this from television.

You see, predators in nature don't make a lot of noise when they're hunting, because, and I want all you Hollywood producers, directors and screenwriters to listen carefully, it scares the prey away. They roar and snarl and make all kinds of noises to frighten things, usually another predator of the same species who has designs on the possessions of the roarer, his "turf" as predators call it, his hunting "range" or his "significant other(s)." But when they are actually trying to catch something to eat they are very, very quiet, because they are not trying to excite an audience, they are only interested in a square meal, and in nature, square meals have legs and run fast.

Nonetheless, when predators are chasing meals or people in movies and on television, they are always making a hell of a racket. Every T-Rex or lion or monster has to let 'er rip into the camera just to make sure everyone knows they're there before they head off to find breakfast, which, in real life, would already be ten miles away, in a heavily armed bunker, calling in an air strike.

Dogs see this on TV, and think it must be a great idea. I'm not sure "think" is the right word here, since dog's brains have melted away, I think the sounds just go in, amplified by those giant ears, and rattle around until they reach some critical mass, and then erupt in a torrent of barking, each individual bark a tiny, miniature, short, high pitched imitation of a T-Rex roar.

Dogs bark for only two reasons. The first one is to make us think they are doing their job. Some dogs do this selectively. My parents had a Dachshund like this, I'm sure you'll recognize the pattern. If you were anywhere in the house awake and someone would come to the door, he would go off like fifty pounds of illegal fireworks, which is more evidence of the melted brain theory, because no animal in nature would actually be dense enough to viciously antagonize a creature that outweighed it by a factor of ten. But they do, with a ferocity resembling an epileptic fit. But if someone came to the door in the middle of the night, when the house was dark and everyone was asleep, he would discover that he had somehow lost that brave noise someplace, and there was no sense looking for it in the dark, he may as well wait until daylight and everyone was awake and could help him look for it.

Some dogs are not selective, they just bark, and keep on barking. I have seen dogs who can go on barking while they sleep, on automatic pilot, 24/7. The people who own these dogs are not deaf, but they may as well be. They are probably the people responsible for the record sales of groups like the Beastie Boys and Sugar Ray. So, if you have a dog, I want you to listen for a moment . . . do you hear your dog barking outside? THEN GO BRING HIM IN, HE'S DRIVING YOUR NEIGHBORS UP THE WALLS AND MAKING THEIR LIVES A LIVING HELL.

Not that I blame the dog. Dogs are social animals and, like humans, evolved with a need for close contact and interaction with other beings, so when someone keeps a dog, who in nature would be roaming a ten square mile range everyday with his family and friends, in an eight by fifteen foot run, or chained to a stake, or in a garage, all alone, all day, every day, they can get a little neurotic.

Imagine Kang and Kodos kidnapped you and took you to Rigel IV to keep as a pet. Imagine they don't speak English or have clever things to say, either. They keep you in a big place all alone. All day. Every day. In the evening they come home and pat your head and feed you the same thing they always feed you every day for every meal, say, Corn Nuts. Then, they let you outside for ten minutes. I don't know about you, but I would get a little wierd, even if I had grown up that way. Especially if I had grown up that way.

Which has brought us to the other reason dogs bark: other dogs. Imagine you are there on Rigel IV and another human you don't know walks by outside. You would freak out. "HEY! HEY YOU! YOU OUT THERE ON THE SIDEWALK! I SEE YOU OUT THERE! WHO ARE YOU? WHAT'RE YOU DOING? WHAT'S GOING ON OUT THERE?" Of course you would already have been alerted by any other humans in the neighborhood, and you would have to pass this warning along. "HEY! THERE'S A GUY COMING! HE'S ALMOST TO THE CORNER! HE'S CROSSING THE STREET! WATCH OUT!"

They have to take all this very seriously because they have nothing else to do, and we have made them as neurotic as we are.

No one should be able to own a dog or any other pet until they can prove they will not breed mutations, keep their neighbors awake at night, or let their dogs leave lumpy brown calling cards on my lawn, or in the park, or on the sidewalk, or on the bike path, which many dog owners think of as a doggy public restroom.

I can hear libertarians growing now, and I don't care, it has to be one way or the other. If it's legal for a dog owner to act like this, then it should be legal for me to strangle any dog owner who wants to eat in a restaurant seated at the table with two Yorkshire Terriers wearing jewelry.

The moral of the story is this: If you keep a ninety pound Malamute in a studio apartment all day every day, give him to a family with another dog and a big yard. If you need some company, get some friends. If you want a pet, get some fish.

Next time: Fish are freaks.

copyright © 2000 Dan Manthos