People who don’t care for pets don’t talk about it. If it absolutely must come up, there’s usually an excuse of childhood trauma or a strange family history to go along with it.
I never knew why but out of a large family of animal lovers, one aunt of mine didn’t care for them, especially cats. To her credit, she never said anything bad about them, but she couldn’t stand them trespassing in her yard.
She was never one to raise her voice (in my family that was the worst thing you could do), but she wanted them out of her yard and would spread a newspaper over their backs to pick them up and drop them, one by one, over the fence where they belonged.
But even if you like cats, to be called a “cat lady” is somewhat snide, bordering on insult. There’s not really a comparable term about a dog lover, man’s best friend is more equivalent to the closest of relatives.
Statistically, 46% of the US population are dog owners and 32% are cat owners. Of those who have pets, 62% say they are more attached to their dogs as opposed to 33% more attached to their cat.
I’ve been more of a dog person-- from show dogs to shelter dogs-- throughout my own life. My current dogs (rescue sibling poodles) just turned eight, and it doesn’t make me happy now to consider each coming birthday for them. I’m hoping to have two more prime years with them until their tenth year starts a downhill slide. I’m already on that slide, and I just hope
I can last long enough to keep them happy to the end of theirs.
Dogs have taught me a lot over the years; they’ve been some of my greatest joys and also part of my greatest failures. Considering the lifespan of a family dog, I think one of its most important roles is teaching children how life works.
A new puppy is one of the high-water marks of a family as a whole; likewise, how to treat a dog might be a child’s first lesson in kindness and responsibility. Dogs are frequently the first of a child’s best friends.
In a time mostly gone now, our dogs ran fenceless and free around us while we played outside. While fun in lots of ways, it happened more than once that a dog would be hit by a car, and because we were all together outside, we saw it happen.
Even if it’s not sudden, the end of a dog’s life is frequently a child’s first experience with death. Seeing the decline is one of the hardest experiences of all, and we do see it up close, usually to the very end.
A dog’s life teaches a child how to be sad. And how to be resilient, because after the grief of losing a dog, most of us want to do it all over again.
Marilyn Stokes is a retired public-school teacher. Before teaching school, she worked for Ford Motor Company, Southwest Region where she retired as a zone manager for the small dealers in the southern half of Texas. She also worked four years for KERA public television. She lives in Collinsville where she is an active community and church volunteer.