The Town Crier: Life as doggy

Published 3:00 pm Wednesday, March 27, 2024

When scientists want to study humans they usually use monkeys or apes of some kind. They say rhesus monkeys are extremely similar to humans biologically, and for behavior studies they’ll use chimpanzees who differ from us in the DNA department by just a few percentage points. If I could curl my lips like they can when they are being funny, I would say it’s even closer than that.

But when I think about it, I think my life as a kid was most like the life of a dog. I’ve had dogs as pets and also cats and bunnies and fish. The cats I didn’t have until I was an adult, the bunnies didn’t do much more than nibble clover when outside the cage and manufacture raisins, and the fish ended up being mainly guppies since the guppies ate all the other fish.

I’ve never had a pet monkey and after learning about their inability to be house broken and needing a diaper all the time, I’ve kind of lost interest in that. My mom says back in the ’50s and maybe early ’60s you could mail order little monkeys from the back of comic books or such. She had a girlfriend that did just that and would bring her monkey to town with her when she ran errands. I’m willing to bet the monkey was born and raised in captivity and so enjoyed getting out of the house every once in a while with the lady.

Dog people and cat people

They say there are two types of people in the world: dog people and cat people. and they mean more than just people who own dogs and those who own cats. Some people, like my family, have both.

What they mean is people are “like” dogs or cats. Some are outgoing and happy and optimistic and ready to go anywhere and do anything: “dog people.”

That last bit makes you think that’s why they have dog catchers. “They go anywhere/do anything” kind of people frequently end up on the wrong side of the law and in jail.

On the other hand are “cat people.” They do the least minimum work unless (like a cat after a canary) they are really interested in it. They chase balls like a dog … but only when they want to. A dog is generally unable to refuse a thrown ball (or stick or shoe or Frisbee or …). A cat can refuse anything and usually does. A dog and cat both like naps in the sunshine, but dogs can enjoy it in a pile of leaves outside while the cat wants a window-side bed or sofa and wants the TV on and a small drink with a paper umbrella in it. I spot the difference between “cat people” and “dog people,” can you?

Very much like a dog

And so, looking at the two animals and their reflections of human behavior, I must say, especially as a kid, I was very much like a dog, with the possible exception of running into the house on no specific schedule and eating a snack before wanting to go back out which is kind of cat-like.

Doggies are territorial: Dogs roam a certain territory and unless they are out seeking romance will stay within their homeland. The males will go out and literally mark their territory with scent, and the females don’t have to as they seem a bit smarter and can figure out “I don’t go past this tree” when out and about.

We’ve discussed before that Dalton kids back in the day were given restrictive boundaries and within those boundaries no adult supervision was necessary. It might be as small an area as “Stay in the yard!” or as expansive as “Don’t go past such and such road and don’t go past the creek.”

Within those boundaries a kid could wander, bike or play as much as their heart desired. Usually the furtherest reaches were based on the extent of the human voice. If your mom hollered for you, the geographical limits would be within range of her bellow, much as my dog will bark at midnight when the neighbors are lying in bed with the pillow pulled down over their head because my dog is barking at midnight, and I can hear the distant bark of a far-off neighbor dog, perhaps a half-mile away or even further.

If you were outside the range of “mom’s klaxon” then it was either you were at a friend’s house and your mom could call their mom and their mom would yell for you to go home, or if playing in the woods or along a stream you were given a specific time to be home by. This last instruction was always frustrating for me because, like a dog, I didn’t have a wrist watch. Combine that with a young boy’s and a dog’s complete lack of any kind of timing mechanism apart from “I’m hungry now” and you’ve got a recipe for either getting home too early and being frustrated by “I left too early” from whatever dinosaurs I was imagining, or getting home late and getting in trouble. It was real trouble if you weren’t just late but she’d been calling you as well. Us dogs hated it when playtime ended.

A pecking order

Dogs are hierarchical: Dogs have a pecking order. Just like school kids. There’s an alpha dog and then some beta dogs and then whatever other Greek letters one uses for a pecking order. Although if you say a gamma dog I’m going to think that pooch is radioactive.

And those vertical pecking orders are included in the dog packs, or cliques if you like, that dogs run in. The head dog gets to mark the tree or fire hydrant first. The others get second or later marking positions or avoid the marking altogether. If you’re on the football team, you’ve got the captain and/or the quarterback. There’s the head cheerleader and the first chair trumpet in the band. There’s the person in the glee club that can hit double high C, and then there are the superlative kids: the student most likely to … fill in the blank with some type of success. They mark the yearbook like the alpha dog marks the … well, not exactly like, but still.

Picky eaters, or are they?

Dogs are picky eaters: Put down spinach leaves in the dog bowl and the dog gingerly sniffs, cocks its eyes up at you as if to say “What is this and what’s it doing in my bowl?” and then slinks away. and if you try and give them a pill, forget about it. Like the Princess and the Pea, who was so refined (supposedly) that she could sleep on a bed stacked with mattresses and her sleep would be disturbed by a single pea put between the bottom two, so a dog can discover a pill cut into eighths and slipped into their favorite wet or dry dog food or in the center of a hot dog weenie (especially weenie dogs!) and spit it out. and so with kids. Anything green and not covered with ketchup or cheese and you’ve got a whiny hungry kid instead of just a hungry kid. On the other hand …

Dogs are not picky eaters: Put down dog food and the dog is overjoyed. Put down moldy bread and the dog is happy. Put down various and sundry other things of incredibly questionable safety or flavorable eats and down the hatch they go. There’s even Bible verses about what a dog will eat. Kids will eat any kind of potted meat, fish stick or flavor ice cream (who wants ice cream that tastes like gumballs?) and be delighted at their culinary luck.

They love to play

Dogs love to play: and kids, too. If TV watching, and these days, staring at eight-second funny videos on the phone counts as play, then they play almost all the time. The younger the kid, the more healthy the play, whether it’s playing outside in the fresh air (pickup game of driveway basketball anyone?) or inside with toys where their imagination is running free and they are developing creativity.

They are happy

Dogs are happy: Most dogs, like most kids, are wired to be happy. They are ready for anything fun and anything where there’s action going on, even if they have to create the action themselves.

A dog will go to great lengths to paw open a closet door to get at a slipper to chew up. Likewise, a kid, left to its own devices, will scale the Mount Everest of the kitchen counter to get to the top shelf of a cabinet for those cookies that are up there, placed in the highest point of the kitchen to keep the kid from getting to them. Clearly the parent has forgotten their own childhood desires and mountaineering capabilities. A series of sheer cliffs will not deter a kid from cookies, so why think a kitchen cabinet will? Are there not chairs to slide over to use as a base camp? Are there not handholds on the cabinet handles to grasp?

And what happens when the dog gets the slipper and the kid gets the cookies? Happy! That’s what happens: Happy!

And there you have it in a nutshell, my life as a dog!

Mark Hannah, a Dalton native, works in video and film production.