Jack
There are people in this world who don’t think dogs are clever. These people clearly have not seen what I have seen. If they had, they would have bowed down to the humble hound. They would, upon seeing a dog in the street, remove their jacket and lay it on the floor for them to step on.
Dogs are clever. Clever in ways that seem impossible. Take my dog for example: Jack, like all dogs, knows what a gun is and what it looks like–and he’s never even seen one! (I can’t be sure of that, of course. I got him from a kennel. But I find it hard to believe that the old woman who had him before me had AK47’s up in the loft–)
How I discovered this miraculous fact was this: one day, while Jack and I were watching Rambo, I made my hand in to a gun and pointed it at Jack. Jack had a good sense of humour, so I thought he might find this amusing. But low and behold Jack flinched, stared at my hand as if it were a lethal weapon, and hid under the sofa. It took me twenty-five minutes to coax him out. By that time Rambo had become emotionally unstable and was on the war-path. Jack’s eyes had become wet, and I noticed in the grim light that he really could do with eyebag surgery.
Eventually I regained Jack’s trust. A hard thing to do for a dog that has lived with the constant smell of lavender and wee, and oldness in general. Once he’d come out he stared me in the eyes with the look I knew to mean: Don’t you ever, ever do that again, otherwise this is over. We are over.
That’s how I learned about dogs. I suggest you tread carefully.
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