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On Becoming a Dog Person
The essential happiness of these humble companions
For much of my young adult life, I had myself convinced that I hated dogs. I proudly asserted that I “was not a dog person” and often said (rather pompously) “I prefer cats.”
Whenever I visited people who had dogs for pets, I’d avoid touching them or interacting with them, convinced that I couldn’t stand to get their scent on my hands, or that their shedding fur and slobbery mouths were disgusting to my hygienic sense of self-preservation. I found their hyper-active appeals for attention annoying, their simple-minded efforts at people pleasing nothing but off-putting.
But, all of that was a lie.
Sure, the aesthetic portrait of the Hemingway-like writer plunking away at a typewriter while a cat purred in his lap seemed pleasing to my search for personal identity, but cats offer very little in return reationship-wise. They are are loners who simply cohabitate with us out of convenience and reliability of a food source. I told myself the lie of despising dogs not out of a genuine emotional response to my experiences with them, but more of a psychological self-defense mechanism, due to much of my childhood history with them as pets.
It took a lot of introspection and a bit of a personal crisis to make me realize my…
