once bitten

Earlier this week I was waiting for something else to happen and watched a woman with a small dog get her wrist bitten. She deserved it--people who get bitten generally do--but what was interesting about the transaction was her complete surprise and her apparent inability to see life from another creature's point of view.

Here's what happened: The setting was an urban (well, sort of urban) campus, and it was a warm day between classes--the sidewalks were very full. Even from about 500 feet away, I could see the little dog was signaling a lot of unambiguous anxiety about the crowding, the feet, the bicycles, and the periodic outbreaks of humans running with Frisbees. Whenever some new alarm was raised, the dog would flatten its ears and half-lower its rump, pulling backward on the leash, and the human on the other end would pull the dog forward. They progressed at a snail's pace down the block, slowed by anxiety on one end of the string, exasperation on the other.

When the pair came to the crosswalk, the woman reached down to pick the dog up and presumably carry it safely across the busy street, and this is when the bite occurred--just as she moved to get one hand under the dog's ribcage while the other hand was flapping around, busy with winding the slack of the leash around her palm. Suddenly a balky, worried little dog became a biting dog, a frantic bundle of defensive rage. The dog latched on to the woman's wrist, just for a second, but with the momentum of sheer panic. I'm sure it hurt, even if the dog was diminutive, and this hurt escalated when the dog got thwacked fairly hard for misbehaving--an event that probably reinforced the original message that humans do unpredictable, hurtful things with their strange appendages.

Why does our species find it so easy to disregard clear signals from other creatures? Episodes like this are a form of cruelty that seem to be off the radar of people active in the animal-rights movement, perhaps because so many people in the movement don't seem to know very much about canine or other species behavior. Yes, PETA, puppy mills are bad, and you can take a picture of how very bad they are, but I argue that this is worse.

If a dog has rights, then one of them is to be understood, especially when the dog is yelling at us, as loud as possible, at the top of a pair of tiny lungs.

the rules of the game

It's not my place to criticize football, since I don't understand the rules. And I like it that way--every now and then someone decides to correct this defect and begins the Lecture, but I don't listen. I'm 58, and life has gone pretty well up to this point without understanding football. Why risk it?

But I've been on a little jag lately, looking at the things people do to their animals that do not need to be done, and I'm disturbed by this. I do know enough about football to know that they are a common target for a well-placed kick. This outfit has a subtext.

I am not now, not have I ever been, a member of PETA--from reading what the PETA people write, it's obvious that most of them have never had prolonged or meaningful contact with the animal world, and most have no grasp of the important difference between a wild animal and a domesticated one. The difference matters, but we won't go there--it's a good idea not to pick a fight with people who buy ink by the gallon.

It's tempting to wonder, "What were they thinking?" But the real question is "What were they not thinking?", since putting a football outfit on a dog is more about mindlessness than its opposite. People who do things like this invariably insist, sometimes over and over, that the animal "doesn't mind." But the lack of minding isn't coming from a compliant and dependent dog, but from an owner whose neurons aren't firing correctly. After the requisite Super Bowl beers have had time to work their magic, what's the outcome? And what's the dog's position about that?

call me old-fashioned

I hope this isn't the start of an obsession, but it could be. I mean, if you have a perfectly nice pony, why cover her with cotton balls and pretend she's a sheep? Or a dragon you are setting out to slay?

Call me old-fashioned, but I think horses are fine the way they are, and don't really need much decoration.

a sight for sore eyes, part two

I've spent my entire life around horses and have never once entered, or understood, the costume class. It's a bit like a cake wreck sung in a different key, in that it seems to evoke hopefulness and wrongheadedness in about equal proportions. And a fashion sense that's just a tad creepy--this picture actually scares me.

ask again later

Jen Yates, the author of the blog Cake Wrecks, made the metaphorical milk come out my nose this morning with her depictions of what happens when baking and professional sports collide. "Is this a football?" she wonders aloud below the picture to the right. "Ask again later."

Yates has written a book by the same name, and I'm going to buy it--this is one of those topic areas that shows zero promise until someone with the right weaponry aims and fires; life may not be hugely better but it's definitely stranger after you've spent some time looking at the foot-shaped cakes she found, one fully equipped with greenish toenail fungus. Yes, it's gross, but it's also a compelling demonstration of how much thought and attention can be expended on a bad idea. Icing becomes transcendent; or, as one of her followers comments, "Why, why, why do wreckerators do such horrible things with chocolate frosting? I used to like it. Now I just think of poo."

What pleases me most about this particular mess of a cake is the packaging--it's clearly going retail, complete with a price tag. Somebody, somewhere, thinks this is alluring and yes, even purchasable.

unfair warning

There are plenty of entertaining road signs drifting around in cyberspace, many of them confusing or just stupid, but this one is actually different--it warns of of something that might happen, but no amount of driver diligence can prevent it. If the airplane is going to ricochet off the roof of your car, then that's what the airplane is going to do, and proceeding with caution is not going to change that.

This clearly falls into the category of unfair warning.