Hello, reader. How are you doing? I need to tell you a story about dog feelings. Basically I upset a dog, and I don’t know why. But I have theories.
work party
Once upon a time, there was a little dog who had strong feelings for me at a work party.
What did I do to this dog? Nothing!
Folks were tearing apart blackberry bushes and burning the blackberry canes. The little dog was barking at me. The owner seemed distressed.
“Would it help if he smelled me?” I asked the dog owner.
“Yeah, let him smell your hand,” the owner said.
The dog came to me to sniff.
“I’m not so bad,” I said to the dog. “Not bad for human.”
Temporarily, the dog calmed down and ignored me.
staring problem
Then later the dog barked more at me. It ran over to me and stared at me a lot. It gave me this look.
When I was sitting down, the dog put its front paws on me again and again. Once it slightly growled.
“Hey, what’s going on?” I asked the dog.
I went to the car and got a small quantity of food I was eating out of a ziplock bag and feeding to Ming. We sat under the beautiful plum tree which is in bloom. The dog was watching in a hungry, envious way.
“This food is not for you. This food is for my spouse. You are not my spouse. I don’t know what kinds of food you eat. Maybe another time, I’ll give food to you,” I told the dog.
Honestly I was disingenuous to the dog. I don’t intend to ever feed the dog. But maybe one day, we will find ourselves in that situation.
Something felt strange about the “you are not my spouse” comment. Did the dog want to be my spouse? Was the dog previously my spouse?
past life
“Maybe that dog has beef with you from a past life,” my friend speculated.
“Maybe I smell weird,” I said.
“No, he started barking when your car pulled up. There’s no way he could have smelled you from inside the car,” my friend said.
Maybe I look like somebody else who the dog had an intense relationship with before.
spirit
“Maybe a spirit was stuck to me from the land,” I told Ming.
“Yeah, I thought of that too,” Ming said.
“But the dog was looking right at me,” I said. “Not looking at my shoulder or something.”
The dog was looking into my very soul.
“Maybe the barking scared the spirit away,” Ming said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe the dog saved me!”
realization
Then I had a realization about the strange dog feelings. I was interacting with Ming in a playful, caring way. At a certain point in our interaction, I growled.
Suddenly, it became clear. Maybe the dog was having big dog feelings about me because I am also a dog. To human eyes, I appear to be a human being; I’m human shaped. But what if my true nature is what the dog perceived?
Then I growled at Ming again, and I had a new realization. What if I am Jaguar now, and the dog was upset because it had never seen such a big cat? Cats aren’t supposed to be this big.
dog feelings
Hmm, what do you think, reader? Dogs, cats, and babies have strong emotions about me sometimes. Kids and adults have strong reactions to me sometimes too.
Do babies stare at you? Maybe they stare at everyone.
I remember a child who didn’t talk to almost anyone talked to me, and my friend who was the mom of the child asked, “Do forest animals come up to you and sing to you?” She was shocked that her child felt safe with me because it had not really happened before.
This is a picture I drew that day, having an unusual strong impulse to draw in the garden. That’s not how the dog really looks. I just kept drawing ears.
Trying to draw the seaweed-looking lichen on the plum tree I failed. But one day when I have a different mentality, maybe I can get more accurate.
