For My Dog Loving Friends

[billroper]

I'm a dog lover from way back. I'd have a dog now, except that we're doing too much traveling and the girls are really too young to have a dog. And I've been pretty firmly convinced that my dogs -- the good ones, anyway :) -- have loved me too. So when I read Eric Zorn's column explaining how my dog doesn't love me, well, I thought that was pretty wrong.

So did Jonah Goldberg.

Our best dog ever, Rusty the genius Irish Setter (no, that's not an oxymoron), lived the first two years of his life in a pen on my grandparents' farm. And even after he spent years living with us, he was always delighted to see my grandpa again.

We've spent thousands of years breeding the perfect companion animal. Of course, we bred them to love us. :)

Comments

[bedlamhouse]

Hey, if I choose to define fawning behavior and an inability to be more than 10 feet away from me as "love", then I'm a guy that's my prerogative.

[scarfman]

"Wait a minute now! Snoopy likes me!"

"Now, now. He just pretends to like you because you feed him. That doesn't count."

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

Idiots like Zorn, the guy who tries to tell you that your dog doesn't love you, are heavily into control -- and one great way to control somebody is to make them feel very depressed. That's what Zorn's claims are: power-plays designed to make people feel bad. Zorn may also be one of those unfortunate individuals who cannot love, and therefore doesn't understand what people experience when they love someone or when someone loves them. Like the psychologist who studied psychology as part of his quest to find out why he was so weird, or to get the jump on others, Zorn seems to have taken his position with an eye to gaining advantages of some kind, not as the result of normal experience. Of course, if he has a dog, the dog loves him anyway -- poor thing.

[polaris93.livejournal.com]

We've bred dogs, cats, ferrets, horses, and other creatures to love us. Those that didn't, and showed it, didn't get to pass on their genes. The tragedy is that they are as much our children as the children of our bodies are -- and too often, people treat them like dirt, which I regard as gross and flagrant child-abuse.

Dogs

[markiv1111.livejournal.com]

I have been slowly getting it about my friends and their dog-loving proclivities over the last 15 years or so. I started out as anything but a dog person (though I love cats) but am beginning to understand how a dog can be truly part of the family, and for some people, an essential part. Let us hope that a few years down the road, you can adopt a puppy that will be right for the four of you.

Nate

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

It is the nature of animals that they are what they are regardless of what we want them to be. What they are is wonderful but it is not everything that we may imagine.

If what a dog feels for us is less than the highest ideal version of what we call love, it's nevertheless a nobler thing than what many humans hold in their hearts for others who are supposed to be close to them.

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

I think people so want to be "better" than animals, they deny them emotions, and minimize those feelings down to "instinct."

Animals feel, animals love, animals think. Without anthropomorphisms involved. They can, and do care.