It’s a Dog’s World

When I was around 18 years old, I purchased a chow-chow puppy. I am partial to all puppies, but I find chows the cutest (with apologies to labs and golden retrievers who I also find quite adorable). My mom is a sucker for cute puppies too, because she really didn’t want a puppy in the house but couldn’t say no when she saw this one. She was a red-orange chow with a black face, and we named her Ginger because of her color. Chows are sometimes known as having a bad disposition, but Ginger was the sweetest dog that we ever owned. However, she was also the dumbest. We could trick her so easily that it became comical to watch. If anyone “meowed”, Ginger would immediately begin snorting and sniffing as she darted around to find the invisible cat. If you complimented the meow with a toss of a rock into the bushes, she would go into full destroyer mode. If she did anything wrong, she would try to hide, but much like a small child, she thought that if her head was hidden that her entire body was also hidden. If she dug up a bush or made a mess, I would find her with her head under my car and her backside exposed to all of us. Actually, her ploy worked, as I would be so tickled by her dumb antics that I would have trouble scolding her.

One of my favorite memories of Ginger is the time she caught a rabbit. She was so proud of her captured prey. She would strut about with the rabbit in her mouth and then bury it in my Mom’s flower garden right outside of our garage. She would dig it up often and prance around with it. The humorous part of this story is that most of the rabbit was flat as a pancake with tire marks. Yep, she caught herself some road kill. I had seen the dead rabbit in front of our house the day before, and she had retrieved it. She was just as proud, though, as if she had tracked, captured and killed the rabbit herself. She also expected us to share in her pride. At this point in my story, you are probably expecting some type of spiritual lesson or insight or wondering why I am telling you this. Right? Well, the reason is that our dog Paska had a Ginger moment this week. It wasn’t a dumb dog moment or picking up road kill; rather, she was proud of something that we were not happy about.

The boys are still out of school so I had taken them to go swimming for a couple of hours. When we pulled back into our gated compound, Paska did not greet us in her normal manner. Usually, she is standing at the gate, sniffing the air, and running around our car waiting for us to get out. By the way, she is a really good dog and has quickly adapted to our family and adopted us as her own. Anyway, this time she was acting differently, and I immediately noticed. She wasn’t at the gate but was running in the yard. She also had a different gait and a prideful strut in her walk. I could tell that something was different but I had no idea what. When I got out of the car, Pamela greeted me and was acting equally strange. She had a sheepish grin on her face and was acting odd. She began to speak in low tones so that our sons would not hear (nor loud enough for me to understand either). Finally, I understood…Paska had killed a monkey. It was a vervet monkey and had been visiting our compound for two days. The boys were so excited because we had been hoping to see monkeys since our arrival. He would usually perch himself upon our wall for a few minutes and then run off. Apparently, he got a little more brave while we were gone and came all the way in. I still don’t know how Paska caught him, though. We have several trees and I would have thought that a monkey could get away from a dog. Unfortunately for the monkey, Paska is very fast. I really told you this whole story to let you know that our dog is a monkey killer and that no monkeys visit our compound anymore. It also brought back memories of my dog Ginger being so proud of her rabbit. Paska was just so pleased with herself. However, we didn’t allow her to prance around with the monkey and instead threw the monkey in a nearby swamp. It was really sad to see the poor thing. This incident also made me think of something else.

I have owned several dogs including two collies, a stray sheepdog, a stray husky (both strays were brought home by my dad), and a rottweiller in addition to Paska and Ginger. All of the dogs were males, except for the latter two. All of my dogs have done dumb things and gotten into trouble. However, the males always seemed to know when they had done wrong and walked around with their heads hung low. Sometimes acting suspiciously even before their crime was discovered. Only my girls were proud of wrongdoing. Is this a female dog trend or just two separate incidents loosely connected across continents?

I expect that this trivial blog will draw more comments than anything else that I have written.