Yesterday the biggest dog in the neighborhood, a six-year-old Great Dane named Salisbury, tried to mount my friend’s Jack Russell pup. Setting aside the obvious physical obstacles, I think the Jack Russell passed on the opportunity out of principle: Salisbury is notorious for his fickle desire. Besides, last week he was with some other bitch.
A dog park sits across the street from where I live, though there are no signs, postings or memoranda to indicate that the park is for the exclusive use of canines. I imagine if one were unobservant or, say, blind, the park might seem like any other swath of city green space: a few wood benches, an underused softball diamond and a water fountain that dried up sometime shortly after Moses parted the Red Sea. Of course, one must notice the overabundance of canines enjoying their only access to green space and the opportunity to socialize (read: sniffing other dogs’ asses).
I have waited a long time to get a puppy. I feel that now, at the end of my college career, I have something to offer a dog. Of course, I could have gotten a dog immediately after arriving at college. Obviously, as shown by some Georgetown dog owners, there is no law against a college student getting a dog before he or she is ready.
The idea of dog ownership can be extremely tempting. Caring for a puppy delivers even the lowliest of men the joy of genuine affection. Puppies, strays, mutts and even the infirm ole’ Yeller are reminders of the world beyond our quotidian existence. And college students are in need of a constant, reliable friend. Some say dogs are too easily won over, that their affection is given easily and is therefore not worth much. But people who say things like that are the same sort of people who might pass up a date with Lil Kim just because she gets around.
Others have attempted to elevate dog ownership to a position of social elegance. This is, in my opinion, obnoxious. That dog ownership is a mark of social distinction is nothing new. “The Spaniel of the King is a pound in value,” Howel Dda laid down in his Book of Laws. And when we remember what the pound could buy in the year A.D. 948-how many wives, slaves, horses, oxen, turkey and geese-it is plain that dog ownership was already of immense social importance. But, to make dog ownership exclusive to a certain class of people is to entirely miss the point.
An awful lot of other nonsense has been written about dogs by people who don’t know them very well. A Harvard Lampoon article states, “Dog ownership is for the resource-endowed only.” I don’t think dog-ownership revolves around resources in the least. Owning a dog is like sexual intercourse: Even the poor or unemployed are capable of it-they just do it minus fancy collars. If dog ownership requires any resource at all, it requires patience. If the Lampoon people don’t know that, they have never been around dogs.
“If you don’t have enough property to exercise the dog, you should not have a dog,” the article continues. I don’t know of a single college student who owns property-unless there is a cadre of landed yeoman in the Nursing school that I’ve yet to meet. Perhaps up north, college students live on sprawling plantations instead of the three-by-three foot dorm rooms popular here at Georgetown.
Keeping a dog cooped up in a plastic under-bed storage box is wrong. I am willing to admit that much. But many a live animal has been well cared for in a Burlieth townhouse-conditions far less commodious than a feudal estate. Indeed, I should like to call attention to the number of young Hoya coeds who capably control their live animals-the beer drinking, video-game playing variety-without any reserve of space or property.
Now I am not through with those Lampoon people yet. The Harvard humorists assert that the students who are unable to take care of themselves, are wholly incapable of taking care of their pets. Thus, they write extensively on the necessity for leash laws and “poop” penalties. If members of society are incapable of realizing that dog ownership is for a select few, then the practice should be made cost prohibitive.
An elderly friend of our family-neither rich nor poor but a member of the solid American middle class-has this much to say in response: “What the hell business is it of anyone if I chain my dog to a tree or let my dog crap on my neighbor’s lawn? Sounds like those Harvard kids have been walking in a lot of dog s#*t.”
