I know enough about dogs, mostly from TV documentaries, to realize that they live in a different world from ours. According to numerous actors narrating for PBS, we live in a visual world, looking at things, and dogs live in an olfactory world, smelling things. Dogs do look at some stuff. As I’ve indicated several times on this very blog my dog watches TV. Actually, he sees things on TV, and then either ignores them, or barks at them.

Now I can’t discern the subtle differences about what my dog is smelling when we go for our daily walk… Well, car ride and then walk, but I have made some observations about what the little white dog seems to be seeing when we’re out and about. To my mind it appears that the great panoply of the world is neatly divided into four broad categories; 1.) The ‘Evil Postman’ (which may or may not be our actual postman, and consists of all letter carriers, and may therefore also be either a man or a woman) who must be viciously threatened where ever encountered, 2.) Dogs, who must be viciously threatened, unless it turns out that we’ve actually met them once before, 3.) People, who must be viciously threatened, until they come over and pet him, 4.) And squirrels, which are apparently the rodent version of the Postman, and thus would be savagely dismembered, if only we could get up into the tree and eviscerate them.

Once, whilst taking our car ride to the place where we then dismount and take our walk. – It’s a long story, involving costly canine operations, and several weeks of substituting car rides for dog walks when the little white dog was physically incapable of walking – the ‘canine passenger’ looked up from his fluffy, going for a car ride, pillow and saw a squirrel running along the phone line directly above us. He leapt up, bumped his nose on the windscreen, fell back on the pillow, and erupted into a tirade of barking with his emotions running so high that he finished up ‘extruding his breakfast all over the passenger compartment of my automobile.’ (He shat all over us to use more conventional English.)

Now every time we pass under that specific phone line he looks up at it and barks. Fortunately, we haven’t had a repeat of the automotive effluvia episode. For some time I thought that he was barking at the memory of the squirrel, but a few weeks ago I noticed that he’s actually barking at a specific section of the phone line. The point at which a large plastic junction box is located. Well, to me it’s obviously a plastic junction box, but perhaps to him it looks like a squirrel cowering in terror from his heroic barking.

A few days later as we drove past the ‘plastic squirrel junction box’ he indulged in some horizontal barking out the passenger window. I looked across and there at the curb was a half dozen crows having a drink. At least to me they looked like crows. From the dog’s reaction they were clearly black, feathered squirrels splashing about in the gutter.

Later, once we’d reached the actual walking portion of the ride/walk, he went positively nuts, slipped his lead, and darted ahead two houses. He looked positively crestfallen when what I suppose he thought was a wounded squirrel on someone’s front lawn turned out to be a twisted, dry leaf rocking back and forth in the breeze.

And the next day, he made exactly the same mistake, at the same location, with the same leaf. Perhaps he has a bad memory, or really does need spectacles for his vision.

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