It’s a cool morning with a hint of fall in the air and Toby is stretched out on the floor near my desk.
Toby is my son’s beagle hound and I’ve been elected dog sitter for the day. We just returned from an energetic romp through the woods—searching for fresh air and exercise—and now my four-legged companion is trying to sleep it off.
Having a dog around the house reminds me of my younger days. It seems like there were canines everywhere in the rural neighborhood where I grew up—big dogs, little dogs and all sizes in-between. Some belonged to our family, but many lived with the neighbors.
They were mostly mongrels, I guess, with every kind of name you could imagine—Snorky,Wags, Cocoa, Nipper, Tony, Sport, Chip and Joey. I remember them all. Saber and Shane were male German shepherds with questionable dispositions. Penny and Princess were female beagles. It seemed like Princess was always pregnant, waddling and bellowing across hill-and-dale on her regular hunting expeditions.
The lucky dogs roamed free in those days. Others—such as the unpredictable German shepherds—were kept chained, or penned.
One of the first dogs I remember—Skippy—was struck by a car when I was perhaps five-years old. He retreated under our front porch and stayed there whimpering in pain until my father mercifully took a rifle and ended the misery.
Dogs can bring much grief when their relatively short lives reach their inevitable conclusions (see Tom Springer’s column on Page 6). Maybe it’s the memory of this pain and loss that made me not want a dog for many years, along with a personal resistance to the constant demands that dogs place on their masters.
Yet, energetic animals like Toby add a lot of joy to our lives. Their ebullient personalities and unwavering loyalty are infectious, and may be worth all the extra work that goes into caring for them.
Toby, for instance, is occasionally in need of a bath—thanks to his penchant for seeking out and rolling in the foulest-smelling odors that perfume the ground along woodland trails. It’s not always easy to understand the ways of a dog.
It can be just as difficult to understand the ways of men and women. Despite all our good deeds and wonderful inventions, we often insist on polluting the earth, abusing natural resources and disparaging each other. Then we find perverse satisfaction rolling in the stench that we create—until bath time, at least.
This phenomenon seems to happen the world over. It is found throughout our lives and culture—in politics, sports, entertainment, media, business, religious institutions and interpersonal relationships. We know we need cleansing—and are often pointed toward the soap and water—but decline to scrub ourselves down. We’d rather hold our noses and blame the filth and offending odors on someone else.
Toby doesn’t necessarily think about the things he does. He’s wired that way. But we humans should know better. A dog merely follows his instincts. We are supposedly gifted with reason and logic.
If we’re going to improve our relationship with the earth, work better with each other and make greater advancements for the common good, we need to take personal responsibility for the outcomes of our actions.
As some political strategists like to say, we’ve all got a dog in this hunt. We might as well train it to do the right thing.
Otherwise—with apologies to the late Hank Williams—we’ll just keep chasing cars, scratching fleas and howling at the moon.
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