Still not a fan of dogs, but I love Buffy

I don’t like dogs.

I’m not a dog person. I don’t go up to people and ask to pet their dogs. While I agree that being cruel to dogs in immoral, I don’t spend time trying to fight for that cause and I wouldn’t be caught dead reading a dog magazine.

However, I love my dog.

Okay, if this doesn’t seem to make any sense, let me try again. Many people have children, and most of these people love their children. However, few people in society like kids enough to want to devote their life to teaching kids. You can love your kids without loving “kids” and you can love your dog without loving “dogs.”

The people who are most awkward with dogs like me are people who did not grow up with them. I clearly remember the first time I spent an extended period of time with a dog (which I wrote about in this earlier post) I stood their looking at the dog having no idea what to do. I mean, it’s not like the dog talks back. They are nice to pet, but they also kind of smell funny. Anyways, I got over that in time but I still find that I can be pretty awkward with dogs.

I wrestle with Buffy, flip her over and do pick her up in weird positions. I feel confident that I know how to handle her and there is nothing that she does that intimidates or scares me. Other dogs on the other hand, not so much. There’s a dog in our puppy class who is from shelter dog. The owner is dog fantastic work with the puppy but the puppy continues to be scared of men, which may be because of some trauma.

In class we like to help each other out with these kinds of issues so I walked up to the dog after the instructor asked me to and the dog lunged towards me and growled and I jumped back and at that moment I was ready to consider wearing adult diapers next time I did this exercise.

Not cool.

But I wanted to be helpful, so they calmed the dog down and the pup eventually got to the point where he let me pet him and I did but that was one of the quickest and most disingenuous “good dogs” pets I’ve ever done.

At a recent party one of my friends mentioned to me how this early photo of Buffy and I made her understand why anyone would want to get a dog.

This friend of mine had been bitten by a dog as a child and has never understood why anyone would want a dog in their lives. But there was something about this photo of Buffy taking a nap on my chest that made sense to her. She has niece and nephews and she has pictures of every one of them sleeping of their mom or dad’s chests just like Buffy sleeping on mine and started to make sense for her.

When dogs used to come up to me and lick me, jump up or smell my crotch I used to just get uncomfortable and question why anyone would chose to have one of these slobbering, poo-producing things around the house. Now when a big dog greets me, I still get a little uncomfortable, however after having Buffy in my life for almost four months I understand what it means to share your life with a little ball of fluff.