Dog Person™

When you live with two dogs you realize you have become a Dog Person.™

We didn’t have dogs when I was a kid. We had cats. I always thought of myself as a Cat Person™ even after I developed an ER-grade allergy to cats. They are so aloof! So independent! So wild! “Just like me,” I thought. Not like dogs: so needy, so drooly, so…domesticated. I mean: you have to train a dog. You have to socialize them. They have to learn how to be in your family. Ugh, amirite?

As a person ages, you realize that “what you thought you wanted to be” and “what you really want to be” are different things. I am not aloof, or independent, or wild and I never really wanted to be those things. I wanted to be the kind of person who wanted to be those things.

I also wanted to be a person of big abstract ideas but that’s not me either.

I was about thirty years old when I first fell in love with a dog. That’s the way it is with dogs, for me. My future ex-wife adopted Sitka during our first separation, and when we briefly reconciled he became our dog. We shared custody of him for a while after our divorce but he eventually became “my” dog. When he died, I unexpectedly tapped a well of grief I never knew I had.

After Sitka was Bismarck, then Newport, then Kuma, and now Bozeman.

I have only ever had black dogs and I think I only ever want to have black dogs.

I am fond of saying “dogs are humanity’s wingmen.” They were the first animals we domesticated, or more likely they domesticated themselves because they liked being near us. They love humanity the way we have never deserved to be loved. Speaking as an archaeologist: for at least the last 10,000 years, wherever you find people, you also find dogs.

Not everyone is a Dog Person™ and that’s OK. I really do like cats OK. They were among the last animals we domesticated, or more likely they “domesticated” themselves by hanging around granaries and eating mice. Cats are bizarre little alien predators who deign to live with us, which is fun and fascinating. If a cat shows you affection you are either very special to them or very deluded by them, which is a fun thing too. Dogs are the animals of humanity but cats are the animals of civilization. If we didn’t have allergies in this house we’d probably have a cat or even two.

I will contest the common argument that cats are “less work,” but that’s only because I like taking a walk three times a day so it doesn’t seem like a chore.

But the difference is: you have to have a lot of cats before you become a Cat Person™. It only takes two dogs before everyone agrees: there goes a Dog Person™.