“What do dogs want? They want each other. Human beings are merely a cynomorphic substitute.” — Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Hidden Life Of Dogs
Tag: dogs
Quote of the Day
“Humans are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life, the worries and bills and the mechanisms of jobs, the doltish psychologies we’ve placed over our lives like a stencil. A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned.” — Brad Watson, Last Days of the Dog-Men
Quote of the Day
“Your whole house smells of dog, says someone who comes to visit. I say I’ll take care of it. Which I do by never inviting that person to visit again.” — Sigrid Nunez, The Friend
Quote of the Day
“The dog has got more fun out of Man than Man has got out of the dog, for the clearly demonstrable reason that Man is the more laughable of the two animals.” — James Thurber, “An Introduction,” The Fireside Book of Dog Stories
Talking Dog
According to my mother, my first words in English were “Go away!”
We had just arrived in Canada and I did not think that the dog visiting our front yard would understand a command in French. I wanted to go out and play, so I asked my mother for the words I needed to talk to the dog;
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My mother believed that French was the best language for talking to dogs. She felt that it was the most expressive of the languages she knew and therefore the easiest for dogs to understand.
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Everyone speaks to my daughter’s dog in French. When people see that she understands me when I speak to her in English, they tell me how amazing it is that she is bilingual.
When it’s an anglophone that makes the remark, I get to show that it’s all about being expressive and making my intentions clear. I call her over: “Monster,” get her wagging her tail by asking “who’s the fugly” and get her to sit by asking her to put her cheeks on the floor. The words are not always the same; the results are.
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