I have a very intelligent dog who is also a bit of a drama queen. Actually, if I am being honest, she is a full-blown prima donna. In an eye rolling contest she could send any thirteen-year-old girl running to back to mother in tears. She sulks. She sighs. She casts contemptuous glances over her shoulder. She reminds me of me when I "DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT," but I "DAMN WELL WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT I AM NOT HAPPY." We make quite a pair.
As my dog gets older, I notice her behavior becoming more and more polarized. At any given moment she appears to be either overcome with joy or wallowing in misery. No fair-to-midland days for her. She has adopted the same attitude toward exercise, which is where her polarization and my frequent motivational crashes have reached a troubling intersection. This dog has only two settings: comatose or berserk. Comatose is for home, and berserk is for the dog park which I am grossly overpaying to live near but cannot actually utilize for fear of being sued.
When at home, my darling princess either wants to be laying in closet # 1 behind a pile of my shoes, or laying in closet # 2 where she can keep a wary eye on things as she drifts in and out of sleep (insert your own closeted gay dog joke here). In a shift from her younger years, she does look out the window, does not follow me around, and does not play with toys unless another dog is on the premises. At the rent-busting dog park, however, she loves nothing more than to run full-speed toward the first dog she sees, barking at the top of her lungs and snapping at its face. Snapping...as in you can hear her teeth clack and gnash against each other as she bites down over and over again at the air just centimeters from her chosen victim's eyeballs.
The dog does not like to walk and lets me know this in no uncertain terms every time I drag her out of the house (see: eye rolling, sighing, etc).
Given her propensity for inactivity, I really have to prioritize exercising this dog. Given her propensity for appearing to be homicidal, my choices for exercising her are:
1. Take her to the dog park and invite the contempt of my fellow human patrons
2. Walk her and guarantee the contempt of my pet
3. Drive her far away from civilization where she can roam like a wild creature but possibly get eaten by a mountain lion
I could have included "4. Take her running" on that list but...let's just keep fantasy and self-delusion out of this, shall we?
The upshot of all this is I find myself in yet another deeply loving but mismatched relationship: myself, a luke-warm exerciser and my darling mutt happy only when either completely sedentary or going full throttle and snarling. I force her to take the middle ground with me out of duty and necessity, but when we walk she literally drags her feet until we turn around, at which point her little nails start clicking the pavement in joyful anticipation of her pending reunion with the closet floor.
Clearly, I know what it would take to make my dog happy all the time. The truth is, however, that I am unwilling to build my entire schedule around the activities it would take to accommodate her very particular set of personal desires/neuroses. "She's a dog," I tell myself. "You're the person. She goes on multiple walks every day. She shouldn't have the power to make you feel so inadequate." But it is a little painful to know I could never (not that I would want to) wear one of those T-shirts that says, "Lord, let me become the kind of person my dog thinks I am." My dog knows exactly what kind of person I am. I can only hope to become the person we both wish I was.
One things I will say for our relationship is that much of the time we're walking together, particularity first thing in the morning, my dog and I are sharing exactly the same emotion. As we skulk along at 7 am each day, we both want nothing more than to return home and lie on the floor for a few more minutes, to give over to gravity for just a little longer before the the day--and the realities it holds--becomes unavoidable. At the very least we are excellent partners in sloth.
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