UNITED STATES—They say we dogs give unconditional love and I am bursting at the heartstrings to show this free and untainted love.
Amidst this love there can be pain, and my tail is curled up around my hind paws. My “master” the one whose every effort to trick me to go on a walk and lose some of the high energy stored up in a puppy-beast such as myself, all muscle and bone. As I rocket vertically from within the fence, the mailman takes the precaution of keeping his hand well aloft when handing over the day’s crop of grocery fliers, bills and the welcome paycheck.
I have caused my master no end of distress, I admit. His brain almost exploded the other day when I spoke to him, briefly, in human syllables.
“Please call me Luna.”
Don’t go all Hollywood on me.
“Time for a change,” I said. “Luna suits me much better. Than. Lorna or Lana or whatever it was.”
My master’s now on the porch, face screwed up in a quandary, as he tries to salvage a bright side from all the upheaval is his house. To come home, after proudly inspecting the kitchen tiles for any smudge of yellow micturition in the dawning hours, he sallied forth in his car to indulge his growing addiction to round pieces of bread with a hole in the center, and of course coffee. There must be coffee. He’s a terrible coffee fiend.
But a sidelong glance via the porch window showed him the disturbing tableau of me snarling indoors and lunging with my razor-sharp teeth toward the neck of Baby Deville, the Chihuahua Terrier. A horrible validation of the bloodlust bred in the pitbull lab.
Yes, it is alarming, nay unnerving to him. A recent story of a dog adoption from the city kennel has had him on pins and needles. A real heartbreaker, it was, the four-year-old beige pit bull fostered by some folks. Unbeknownst to them, when they brought it home, the dog with the warm, pleading and eerily human gaze peculiar to the breed, had a history of biting.
He was a sweet thing, Sarge was, but had been placed with the shelter, after biting the owner’s mother on the face. Here this cuddly but unpredictable dog known as Sarge, started acting strange when he got to his new home. In the pound he had been red alerted for bite worse than his bark.
According to the case file, Sarge’s happy and proud owner ran out of ham or hotdog pieces to lure him outdoors. The woman tried to scare him by raising her cane (not recommended either for children or canines) and yelled at the dog. That’s when he retaliated. Once upon a time it happened to a neighbor who really loved her dog. Then one day she went in the back yard and got clawed by her dog, but she loved that dog. It took a few seasons for her to heal. For this and other reasons, my master is somewhat wary about four-legged friends. And two-legged ones, too.
To be continued…
