Hiking Skyline Park in the forested hills of Oakland, enjoying the flora (coast redwoods, wild iris) and fauna (dogs and people of all kinds), I was in the company of plenty of mixed breeds. A Eurasian woman laughed at her Afghan-Foxhound mix as he raced ecstatically up and down the trail.
A Nigerian man, his three-year-old son on his shoulders, complained in his distinctive dialect about the latest election fraud in his native land to his petite Caucasian wife. No one was calling the little boy a “half-rican American,” as certain talk radio demagogues call Barak Obama, nor the Eurasian’s dog a “half-ghan.”
I love living in the Bay Area where people appreciate mixed breeds of all species. (For those who think genetic purity equates to superiority, I have two words: Tiger Woods.)
It was good to be far from the madding crud of talk radio. Speaking of which, when I saw a Chronicle headline reading “Rush to Rebuild Maze,” my first thought was: Good. Penance for his sins.
Did you catch the Nature documentary called “Dogs That Changed the World”? It promotes a fascinating theory that the wolves that evolved into dogs did so because they preferred life with humans and their stone-age garbage dumps to life running with the pack. I don’t blame them. Who’d want to hang with a social order in which one overbearing alpha male monopolizes all the females? (Sounds vaguely old-school Mormon to me.)
Give me a tenderhearted Lassie who doesn’t mind a dinner date at the dump down the street now and then and I’m a happy junkyard dog. Beats me why you’d want to be the big, bad wolf when you could be somebody’s cuddle puppy. What’s it all about, Alpha?
Here are a few of my favorite doggie bon (or should I say bone?) mots:
“There is no psychiatrist in the world like a puppy licking your face.” —Anonymous (Nothing like unconditional love to “un-condition” our neurotic tendencies.)
“In order to keep a true perspective of one’s importance, everyone should have a dog that will worship him and a cat that will ignore him.” —Dereke Bruce (To help us walk that fine line between self-esteem and egomania.)
“If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principle difference between a dog and a man.” —Mark Twain (Unless that man is a presidential appointee under indictment. Then, of course, he can be loyal to a fault.)
Perhaps my favorite quote is by Holbrook Jackson: “Man is a dog’s idea of what God should be.” It started me thinking: If I’m God to my dog, then every flea in a hundred-yard radius must think of my dog as a Garden of Eden where only the un-chosen are tormented by the gnashing of teeth and scratched off the face of the girth by the vengeful hind leg of an Old Testament-style deity.
I think Jackson would agree that we are more like the New Testament God to our dogs. Like Jesus washing the feet of the disciples, we minister to our pets with patience and understanding, cleaning up after them all the while.
I guess a poop scooper is not that heavy a cross to bear if it makes you a god in the eyes of those you love.
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