For the Love of Dog

wo weekends ago, my husband and I packed up our girls and headed to Toronto for Woofstock, North America's premier dog festival. Held annually in the St. Lawrence Market District, Woofstock is the dog party to end all dog parties. Big dogs, small dogs, young dogs, old dogs, dogs in sunglasses, dogs in wheelchairs, dogs in booties, dogs in strollers (including ours), and more. It is the one place where I can take my two little Bichons and feel perfectly, perfectly normal. The fact that they are decked out in dresses and bows and have a stroller for when they get tired is not unusual in the least.

There are some people, to be sure, who abhor the kind of extravagance we lavish on our pets. My dogs, for example, sleep in a more luxurious bed than at least half of the world's population. But they're content to conk out anywhere. Organic kibble? Wet food fit for human consumption? Sure, they snarf it up, but they also snarf up feces and dead birds. We like to pretend we pamper our pets for their sakes, but really, we do it for us. We've made our pets into surrogate everything: children, significant others, confidants. We aren't their masters anymore: pets have officially become equal members of our families.

It's no wonder why we've grown so attached to our pets in recent years: in a society that defines its people by occupation, dogs reassure us against the falsehood of such identification. When I come home from work, the sight of my two little Bichons wiggling in the window with glee, open-mouthed and bright-eyed, never fails to induce a smile. They are constant reminders that genuine happiness is not achieved as a constant state of being, but comes to us rather as a glimpse, here and there, into another level of being, a world held in place by the interconnection of souls. Your dog doesn't care if you go out to sweep the streets or to manage an office. The growing pile of rejection letters on the kitchen table doesn't make one bit of difference to her.

"So, what do you do?" It's the first line of small talk. Our identities are so wrapped up with our occupations that we come to define ourselves based on what we do for a living. So what does that make you when you're out of a job? The implications weren't as pressing when most people were getting up and going to the office each morning. But in this time of economic crisis and unprecedented unemployment rates, we have been forced to reexamine our very definitions of identity.

Unlike our other associates, dogs never defined us based on what we did when we left the house. When you walk through that door at the end of the day, your dog's reaction, unlike your spouse's, doesn't change no matter if you got a major promotion or got a pink slip. Your dog loves you simply because you're there. A new puppy will piss on your carpet whether you're a mailman or a statesman.

A dog never shouts at you. He does not scold for your mistakes. A dog will never betray your trust or your friendship. Open your closet door to show your dog all the skeletons you hide, he'll just want to chew the bones. Dogs remind us that we're only human, they show us the joys of being human. When our beloved companion passes on, we are forced to confront our own mortality; we are reminded that we, too, will perish someday, that we will all become food for worms. How beautiful, the tremors of their muscles as they sleep.