Decrypting The Codebook – The Dogs are in Charge!

by Chris Robinson

The other day, a friend of mine sent me a t-shirt that gets to the nub of my relationship with my dogs. It says, “The dog is in charge. I just pay the bills.”

It’s true that the dogs, over the years, have created a very well-trained human. I buy their food and serve it to them on their schedule. I provide their recreation, frequently at their insistence when I’m most busy trying to meet a deadline or, during the months when the area where I live is ruled by King Boreas, in the most godawful cold imaginable. There is NO clothing that both allows you to throw bumpers and stay warm when the wind chill is at minus-57. If you live south of I-70 you’ll have to trust me on that because I have had a considerable amount of experience trying to do both and failing. At the slightest hint that all might not be beer and skittles in their lives physically, they are rushed immediately to the best medical care available.

I’m too much of a realist to think that those things just “happen” and I’ve long suspected that somewhere there is a canine manual titled, “How to Train Your Owner.” While I think I may have uncovered such a document, I can’t guarantee that my interpretation of its hierogylphics and runes is totally accurate. It’s a lot like what Commander Joseph Rochefort, the man who with his codebreakers at Station HYPO at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii managed to crack JN25, the Japanese Naval Code, just after the start of WWII, said when pushed by Admiral Chester Nimitz, the commander-in-chief Pacific, to give Nimitz an answer about just how much of the Japanese Code he could actually decipher. Rochefort, who accurately predicted that Admiral Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Combined Japanese Naval fleet, would launch an attack on the American base at Midway Island and whose staff deciphered the Japanese radio intercept that led to the death of Yamamoto and most of his staff at the hands of a squadron of American P-51 fighter planes in the Solomon Islands in April of 1943, answered Nimitz with, “We get a glimmer here and a flicker there. As to how much we can really accurately decode, ah, hell, I’d say 10 percent.”

Since I don’t pretend to be in anywhere near CDR Rochefort’s class as a cryptologist, I can’t guarantee that one word in ten of my interpretation of the Canine Codebook is accurate. I’m not even certain I’ve received so much as a glimmer or a flicker as to what’s in the dogs’ code. But, for what it’s worth, with all these caveats attached, here goes.

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Posted by Alex on May 1 2019. Filed under Current Articles, Featured. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.