The truth about cats and dogs
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
THERE are but two kinds of folks in this world - those who relate to
dogs and those who cats tolerate.
I am in the latter category. My cat, for seven years now, has chosen to allow me to house her, feed her and provide my family heirlooms for disembowelment. In return she brings me dead rats.
If the symmetry were any more perfect, you’d weep.
But it’s the dogs of this world I have been watching with undisguised intrigue of late. There used to be two dogs living at my gym. Two big hulking grey wolf-like creatures who’d sit all day in the eternal
dumb dog hope that someone would pat them. This was their whole, sole goal in life: Attention.
This is interesting. See, for cats their aim is to be left alone in
peace to sleep, eat and to sleep some more. Uninvited attention requires the swift dissection of human body parts.
But you’ve got to admire how focused dogs are on their attention-seeking mission. There’s no guile, it’s just: pat me, pat me, pat me, wag, wag, pat me, pat me, pat me ... If I kept writing that sentence over and over, I would sum up a dog’s whole day, then week, then month ...
The other thing I notice about the dog’s life is that it seems to
comprise an endless series of excited vignettes. There’s the excitement of
their owner walking by - the correct response being to perk up the ears, bark joyfully, wag the tail, jump up and down, and set globs of saliva to the wind.
In the dog world, there’s also the thrill of seeing a car go - by the
correct response being to try and catch it, eat it and, failing that, to
insert themselves somewhere between the wheels, while still wagging the tail and asking the car, in dogspeak, to pat it.
(If the dog’s very lucky, it won’t.)
There’s also the pure joy, even just two minutes after the last
encounter, of seeing their owner yet again. In the dog brain this registers
as: ‘‘Oh my God, look it’s him, it’s him! Oh wow! Woohoo!’’
That the dog did this just two minutes ago is utterly irrelevant to
it. All it knows is that this moment in life is surely the most thrilling,
most wonderful it has ever encountered or will ever encounter again.
If this reaction seems excessive, fear not, an encounter with any piddle-riddled telephone pole merits the same response.
But don’t think dogs are not smart - they just don’t wear it sullenly
on the sleeve the way cats do. Dogs, while willing to give you the benefit
of the doubt that you are top dog, will, with childlike mischievousness,
test the boundaries at every turn. The wolfy ones at my gym were as cunning as they came.
Banned from going beyond a certain door, both dogs would magically seem to creep forward at 30 second intervals when backs were
turned. And then they’d adopt a bored, ‘‘It wasn’t me, it was him’’ look
when challenged. To be honest, they seemed most disappointed when we didn’t notice their infractions - as though their efforts had been wasted on
amateurs.
But really that’s what we are to our pets, dog or cat. Yep, the
truth is that pets all know the best way to humour their human bodyservants is to keep us maintaining the illusion that we are in charge.
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr & The Advertiser, 1 Feb 2001