Dogs, Praise Be, Have No Political Agendas

By Chris Robinson

It seems that everything is political these days. Every little thing, no matter how innocuous, somehow becomes controversial. Whenever anything happens, good or bad, there’s a frantic rush on both sides of the political divide to score points. About the only things that are not political are dogs although I did read a comment the other day about a couple who had pulled their puppy out of its play group because there were people in the group who had voted for Donald Trump. Someone who clearly had way too much free time on their hands had apparently checked the voter registrations of the people in the puppy play group and passed that information around to the other members of the group via social media. For both the couple who pulled their puppy out of its play group for political reasons and the individual who wasted his/her/zis et al time checking the voter registrations of the people whose pups were also in that group, I’ll quote that famous Beagle owner, Charlie Brown, “Good grief!” and add “Get a life, people!”

Except possibly for a few extremely radical enclaves in the country, dogs apparently remain one of the few apolitical topics probably because dogs don’t care about political correctness, they don’t want to make America great again and they have ab- solutely no interest in joining the “resistance.” As long as you are good to them, dogs don’t care whether you are rich or poor, successful or a bum or what color your skin happens to be. Two dog-owning people who can’t agree on anything except that the sun comes up in the east every morning–and sometimes not even that–can talk to each other about their dogs at length and still be civil in their discourse. Talking about dogs with another dog person lets you cut across partisanship, income inequality, abortion, gay rights and all the other issues that divide us these days. I can talk to total strangers about their dogs and not have the slightest disagreement with them except possibly about the value of jerky strips as treats/rewards over, say, sausage sticks.

Dogs are oblivious to the artificial worlds of politics or industry or trade and are all about companionship. They’re only really interested in the next meal, the next ear scratch, the next tummy rub, or in the case of my dogs, the next opportunity to find and fetch birds. Many of the people with whom I’ve had a friendship through the years have shared that same bird-finding interest with their dogs or something similar in the case of my hound and terrier owning pals whose dogs love chasing critters, both large and small. I know a woman who gets positively giddy when her Westie presents her with a mouse, rat or chipmunk that he has ferreted out and dispatched. Another man I know says he gets shivers up and down his spine when he hears his Black and Tan Coonhound’s changeover bark as the dog goes from trailing to treeing. But, I digress.

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Posted by Alex on Mar 11 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.