"Must love (all) dogs"

One woman's existential wrestle with the pets people have

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We are supposed to love animals. According to popular culture and the dating profiles of many men, I am supposed to love dogs. Cat people also want me to love cats. It seems universally accepted that, to be a good human being, you must love all dogs, and all cats. I don’t, and you’ll see why.

The spring of my high school senior year I experienced a newfound interest in physical fitness and health. This was before ubiquitous health marketing and selfie culture of our times that made so many obsess over image and physique. We cared, yes. Obsessed, no. Jogging had only been invented the previous decade, gyms were only in schools and churches, and we had exciting health crazes such as “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter” butter (I can) and Fen-Phen. Now—aren’t we lucky?!—we have countless options for health crazes. The no-sugar and the all-sugar diets are two such examples.

Not one of my friends “jogged.” And ever since peaking with a sub-eight-minute mile at the end of my sophomore year, I had largely avoided this activity. I didn’t like it. But somewhere around March of senior year, I started getting up at something indecent like 5:00AM to run with our dog, Cody.

Each morning I left the house mildly terrified, and returned feeling like the world was mine. The running never became easier, and I never felt braver. But I was brave enough to get out the door. And Cody was part of what fueled my bravery. As I learned from my last corporate employee assessment, I am an Eneagram 8 or what they term “Challenger”. According to the experts, I take the slings and arrows for those I love. I loved Cody and it was for her sake that I was brave. We both knew she wouldn’t do a thing to protect me, and that I would be the one protecting her.

I hadn’t listened to any true crime at that point, and was wonderfully sheltered in what seemed to be a safe Montana town. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned about town happenings that give me pause. “Wait, that happened and we didn’t know a thing about it?” The gallivanting all over the valley we did in the Red Tercel hatchback curfew suddenly seems very brave. Especially when I found out last year that, in my high school days, a college co-ed was found suspiciously dead at Cameron Bridge, an area we wouldn’t have thought twice about visiting.

Ignorance really can be bliss, and while I perhaps ought to have feared strangers in the dark, I instead lived in dread peril of the neighbor’s black dog. This dang canine only seemed to operate in the dark, and made the most of her free reign of the neighborhood. She never actually did anything, except sneak right up on you and strike terror that this would be the time her raised hackles and menacing growl precipitated attack.

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During this same stage of life, our family had two outdoor cats. Bobby and Hunter. Hunter might have been three-legged. Bobby definitely had all four of his legs and was cream-colored.

He also scared me. My sister, Jessica, confirms that he was a creepy cat. One winter day, I was sitting at the dining room table doing important 1990s teenager things like staring idly out the glass doors to the deck. With zero provocation, and no warning, Bobby hurled himself at me. He hit glass, and I never trusted that cat again. Not that I trusted him before this, but a rubicon had been crossed.

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But scary animals weren’t just a feature of my teenage years. On a Sunday afternoon last year, I went for a walk in my aunt and uncle’s SoCal neighborhood. They live in “The Avocado Capital of The World”, a distinction about which I think the whole town of Fallbrook could make much more of than it does. Where Aunt Nancy and Uncle Kevin live, the houses are on multiple, hilly acres. This means no one would even know if you were being murdered or attacked. Well, Felix the Neighbor Kid is almost always outside and he might hear, but he’s only seven.

I had just staggered my way, panting, up the steepest of all the hills, when I saw movement behind a fence ahead. Nervous about dogs ever since I was attacked and bitten by one roughly the size of half a Fiat, I pulled out my baggie of treats and fished for my pepper spray. Despite my fear, I proceeded. Curiosity gets us to do the most interesting things. Even before knowing exactly which kind of animal I was talking with, I began talking in the kindly tones people on the internet suggest. These kindly tones trailed off as I saw a dog sort of like this one I saw in Georgia the Country.

This picture makes the dog in question look small. Please appreciate that he was of massive proportions.

Our guide said he—the gray, menacing one—was a guard dog, but didn’t know what he was guarding. There was basically nothing in his gated compound but that chair, the broom I’m only now seeing, some trash, and maybe a shed in the opposite corner. But I have a vague recollection that this compound was owned by the Georgian Orthodox Church so maybe there’s buried treasure or an underground tunnel that’s being protected.

Anyway, the SoCal version of this Georgian dog was watching me intently from behind a gate with uncomfortably-wide bars. He was an odd shade of charcoal, had no visible body fat, and disturbingly, his eyes had a red tint visible even from twenty-one feet away. Those red eyes were riveted on me with no hint of friendliness. Most terrifying of all, he held a smashed skunk in his mouth. Which means he could access the road. I was on the road. You can’t make up a scene like this.

Gone were the formerly-important thoughts related to the existential things we all work through on walks. Things like where to move, when to move, how exactly to grow my business, my writing, relationship stuff, that sort of thing. My only coherent thought as I backed away, then turned and walked fast, was “Ah, so this is what it means to ‘go weak in the knees’.”

I did not feel brave. I was not brave. I had no dog in this fight to protect. And even if I had, had the Fallbrook Skunk Dog come after me, this Eneagram 8 might’ve done exactly what the internet people say not to do: I would’ve turned and ran. But not far, and not fast. My sub-eight-minute mile days are behind me, and given the weak knees, I doubt I would even have made it to Felix’s house.

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Isn’t life cool, and aren’t animals interesting? See you in the next one…