We have this picture of dogs as frolicking creatures, leaping about in an open area, splashing happily in water, and never seeming to tire of playing games of fetch. While those pictures are real, they’re misleading, they’re occasional, because as anybody who owns dogs can tell you, they are basically lazy. Unless another dog comes on the scene, or strolls by, your dog will essentially spend entire days just flopped down on the terrazzo (in a hot climate like Guyana, they love that) often falling completely to sleep.
Even when strangers come to your house, your dog will go into watchman mode and bark furiously, and threaten, and seem ready to kill, but once he susses out that there’s no threat he often becomes just another wimp to the stranger, even cuddling up for a head scratch from the same guy he wanted to decimate ten minutes earlier, and before you know it Rover is prostrate in some corner taking another one of his frequent fives.
Now, there are exceptions. For reasons known only to dogs, dogs will not take to certain people no matter how often they encounter them. Also, if you make a sound of anguish or fear, or if anybody demonstrates a physical threat to you, even playfully, your dog will often leap to your defence. Sometimes, even if a friend chucks you playfully your dog will go after him.
Dogs will share water, but they will frequently fight over food. Indeed, in certain circumstances (as when it appears the food is being taken away) a dog will sometimes turn on the very person who provides food on a daily basis. When I lived in Canada I had black Labrador who was a delightful dog, but once he had his head down eating I would get a low warning growl if I tried to move his bowl. Two minutes prior, and two minutes after, he would be romping and playing with me, but if the hand he just licked comes within two inches of his food he becomes this creature from the Black Lagoon.
We have two dogs now. A full-bred German Shepherd named Saga (he is a genuine saga boy; good-looking; super cool; doesn’t take on any hassles) and a German Shepherd mix, named Choo (she was a chewer in her youth), who is the whirlwind to Saga’s calm. Choo is super inquisitive. She checks everything that moves in the house and in the yard. Any new object you come home with she has to sniff it before you pass. As the Trinis say, she’s a police, oui. She noses around wherever you are to see what you’re doing. She is also one smart lady. When I come home, she walks behind me to the door then sits there, eyes locked on mine, waiting for a “stay” or “come in” signal; she wasn’t trained to do that; she just picked it up. On her own rhythm, she will frequently stop and give you that questioning stare. It’s spooky. Recently I’m watching TV, lying on the floor. She’s about 6 feet away staring at me, God knows why. I tell her to lie down; she doesn’t blink, just keeps staring. It gets unnerving. So I cross my legs to block her view, but the way my foot is positioned there is a space next to it and her left eye is in the space, staring at me. I look away and look back. The eye is still there locked on me. It’s unnerving. What’s wrong with this dog? So I shift my foot to the left and both eyes are now blocked. She instantly raises her head up above my foot and resumes the stare. At that point I just laugh. Up to now I have no clue why the stare.
Anything that moves outside the gate, Choo is out there barking and leaping; a visitor, a passing stranger, the dog across the road, Choo is in an uproar. The newspaper man has been coming to the house, every day, all week. Every day Choo goes nuts and tries to get over the gate at the chap – every day; five years and counting. Saga will give the occasional woof – he sounds like a lion – but most of the time he’s just lying around, looking bemused. You can almost hear him, “Why you all interrupting a man rest?” On the other hand, both dogs love to go for a drive, so the second I put on my shoes and come out the house, car keys in hand, they go frantic, flying towards the van; even Saga is cranked up. But here’s the thing: if I come out the house with the car keys, but without shoes – I’m just getting something from the van – Saga will go into his usual drive frenzy, spinning and turning, but Choo doesn’t move a hair. She is on her haunches, looking at him, and practically yawning. You can almost hear her: “Why you don’t relax yourself? The man ain’t going anywhere. You ain’t see he don’t have on shoes?”
Dogs love you unreservedly. Five minutes after you’ve shouted at them, or shoved them, or locked them in their pen, they will come at you with unstinted affections – what happened five minutes ago is forgotten. As Cesar Millan says, dogs live in the moment. No other creature on earth has that relationship with mankind; as somebody noted in the newspaper this week, dogs are just plugged into people’s behaviour. They even read our body language. Depending on how they’re socialized, dogs can become part of your family; they become part of you. But generally speaking, once they’re in their home surroundings, they will bail out from most strenuous activities. Now, they will bolt in the yard and leap at birds, or challenge any visitors at the gate, and they have this invisible dog clock that tells them when it’s chow time and they start to spin. They are also jealous as hell, so if you show one dog affection bet your life the other one, or ones, will quickly show up to get some stroking, too. Choo, in fact, will bounce Saga, her much bigger pal, out of the way if you’re petting him, and even snap at him, to get her belly scratched. But those exceptions aside, most dogs will spend most of the day flopped down in some cool spot, often sound asleep, and only getting up when it’s close to chow time, or when the newspaper man shows up. They’re basically lazy.
