Dogs Dogs Dogs

http://digg.com/pets_animals/Dog_Surprises_Officer_After_Being_Freed_From_A_Fence?OTC-bd1e#

I don’t understand how anyone can have a dog and then not have a dog and forget about them. Isn’t there a teeny dog icon, a dog ap, inside us which once activated, jiggles around on the dock of our unconscious? (Note to pc users: Mac icons dance when you activate them. Very useful.) How can you not look into a dog’s eye when you park next to a dog-in-car or pass one leading its mistress down the street?

Doesn’t have to be your own dog. Any dog. They all have dogness which is something in common with humans but not altogether common. Their dogness goes way, way back, before they sat outside our campfires and drooled at the smell of our meat, perhaps the beginning of our mutual passion. Long ago they ate us. They would again if they were hungry enough and we too feeble or dead to protest.

They are older, almost as old as the rocks in the mountains. Their ancient, wild dogness connects us to our knuckle-dragging, prehistoric ancestors. They jiggle the ancient, deep right sides of our brains.

Now some people who never had a dog who can still feel the tremble of that dog icon deep in a mysterious unconsciousness. People who have felt a puppy kick to free himself from loving arms, who have watched a terrier leap for a Frisbee, these have seen the arc of wolfy leap he makes against a blue sky. Dog icons remind us that the earth is very old and our lives are very short.

Play Farmville or enter Second Life but there’s nothing like a dog’s eye, watching you. Look back.