Hauling Secrets

The City recently put in a dog park on a big tract of land close to an intersection that’s right on our usual route to the MRF.  It’s an interesting location for a dog park, because people who bring their dogs there - perhaps inspired by thoughts of their dogs running free or catching frisbees or something - are reduced to watching their beloved pets run up and down along the fence barking rabidly at passing vehicles.  Especially big, loud vehicles like our truck.

Today as I was stopped at the light, I got to witness the precise moment when a dog set its sights on the truck.  It had been barking without focus in the general direction of the intersection, but when I pulled up, its barking quickened and I saw its muscles tense as it did a little pirouette in anticipation of the upcoming chase.  And there was its owner, leash in hand, watching helplessly in the distance.  When the light turned green I took off slowly, keeping my eyes on the dog.  It ran at breakneck speed straight along the dog park fence, somehow managing to turn its head and bark every few strides.  As I reached the speed limit and the dog reached the limits of its physical abilities, we proceeded neck and neck for a short while.  Looking over at the dog, the way it ran with such single-minded abandon, I felt for a second like a woolly mammoth or something must have felt millions of years ago being pursued this way by an ancestor of this dog.  I have no idea if dogs were around at the same time as woolly mammoths, but you get what I’m saying, don’t you?  How beautiful pure instinct can be?

Anyway.

And then there’s learning.  Environment.  Suddenly the dog stopped dead in its tracks, and I realized that what neither I nor a dog going 40 miles per hour could  actually see - the precise location of the end of the roadside section of the dog park fence - was indelibly etched into its memory from so many of these chases.   It stayed there in the corner jumping and barking until I couldn’t see it anymore in my side mirror.