I don’t have any kids.  One reason I don’t have kids is that my wife is younger than I am and doesn’t want to commit having short hair or a perpetual layer of pretzel crumbs in the back seat of the car for at least another couple of years.  Instead, like many young couples, we have dogs, which we regard as being “almost like” having kids, but which we secretly know is nothing like having kids.  For example if we had kids and decided to leave him home while we went to the beach, we might get arrested, whereas with dogs if we leave them alone for six hours, they will be thrilled we’re home and dance around and possibly, if I speak to them in a high pitched voice, sneeze out of sheer joy. 

But just because dogs aren’t really the equivalent of children, doesn’t mean they aren’t similar or that we can’t use them a window into just how uncomplicated humans really are.  To be clear, I’m not one of those people who think dogs are as intelligent as people or that my dogs are smarter than anyone else’s.  Quite the contrary - my dogs are 21-years old in dog years and spent the weekend eating cat poop, and I am aware of only one person who ate poop, and that was in nursery school.

In addition to believing that dogs are less intelligent than humans, I also refuse to believe that humans are able to impart materialism upon animals whose idea of a good time is rolling in coyote urine and therefore believe that the instincts that drive humans are extremely basic.   While I recognize that this probably isn’t a scientific breakthrough, it was valuable because it allowed me to use the phrase “coyote urine”.

 I mention this because the one thing our dogs do, which makes them like human children (and adults for that matter), is fight, endlessly, over possessions.  Their possessions range from tennis balls that smell like sour milk, to little bones, to a plastic ice cream that was gross when our friend bought it for them two years ago but toys are the only things that prompt strategic thinking and the practical use of memory in our dogs.  Generally, dogs only use their memory to remember who was nice to them before, where they went to the bathroom in the house, and in the case of my dog, the location where my parents’ old cat hid when he chased him more than three years ago but when it comes to bones and toys, our dogs use their basic-but-considerable intelligence to hide items, and to use subterfuge to draw attention away from often-obvious hiding jobs.  Watching my dogs set their little brains on fire thinking of ways to hide and steal bones form one another, I am reminded of the game played endlessly by the boys in my family growing up ,which consisted of exclaiming about the presence of various species of wildlife in the back yard, waiting for the gullible sibling to glance over his shoulder to sneak a peek at the moose/fox/turkey etc., and then grabbing whatever was in front of him and eating or drinking it before the victim had a chance to turn around.  

The other thing our dogs do is crave attention.  Wallace in particular has a daily tradition whereby when we return from our morning walk, he grabs some toy (usually the aforementioned disgusting ice cream) and proceeds to clutch it in his mouth and walk briskly back and forth between the kitchen where I am making my breakfast and the bathroom and bedroom where my wife is getting ready for work, wagging his tail incessantly, and shrieking in a nervous “look at me” fashion until one of us acknowledges his toy.   As I tell him that I like his ice cream for the 40^th time every morning I’m reminded of the many times my nieces and nephews have requested an audience while they did something impressive such as jump off of a footstool or spin around and am thankful for the practice.

Of course I’d like kids, but if we had them now, I wouldn’t be paying half or even as third as much attention to the dogs and wouldn’t have been able to draw these insightful parallels which will help me identify ways my children are like dogs.  Besides, after 15 years of telling Wallace I like his ice cream, I’ll probably seem more credible when my kid wants me to be excited their minor achievements.   Also if we had kids now I’d have pretzels in my back seat, which would be awful.