What dogs of war? Dogs are love

My two dogs are hilarious. They’re almost human in their sweet contrariness. I would use their names, but neither has given me permission to share that information in this column. They’re just like the humans in my family: They don’t want to be associated.

As I write this, both dogs are snoring in the background. In the years in which my wife and I have cohabitated with them, I have never seen them vigilant about anything except “what’s for supper?”

Despite their fearsome barks, it is hard to have confidence in their ability to do more than temporarily intimidate someone. That’s because Big Dog, a white pit bull with a large head and a relentlessly muscular jaw, is deep into middle age. When she’s not barking for show, her disposition alternates between sweetness and exasperated resignation. You haven’t lived until a pit bull has rolled its eyes over something you’ve said or done.

The Little Dog, a black pit-bull Chihuahua mix, sails through life on snippiness and false bravado. For a dog incapable of backing up his big yelps with anything more than a nip-and-run, Little Dog creates 95% of the drama in the house.

Are my dogs absurd? Of course they are. Every dog is absurd. That’s why we love them. We’ve been palling around with these mangy opportunists for about 40,000 years. Scientists believe dogs descended from a particularly fearless, but friendly breed of wolves that stuck close to us during the Ice Age because we generated a surplus of meat and succulent bones after a hunt.

Because we liked having these creatures around, they shared in the spoils of the hunt long before they were trained participants. Soon they were sitting around fires with us complaining about how undercooked the mastodon kidneys were.

Once their puppies started growing up with our children, the next thing you know, we had a Neolithic love story on our hands. We couldn’t imagine life without these creatures at our side.

In exchange for unconditional love, all they asked from us was that we continue to feed them, treat them kindly, let them think they were boss occasionally and not be totally grossed out if they urinated in the corner of the cave every now and then. Seems like a fair trade to me.

As Americans head back to the office, recent headlines about dogs and other pets being returned to shelters after being adopted in record numbers during the early days of the pandemic turned out to be alarmist clickbait.

Yes, dogs are being left at shelters at alarming rates, but these are mostly pets who belonged to now-dead owners who didn’t take COVID seriously. They’re the collateral damage of irresponsible guardians and policies that don’t make allowances for pets in many scaled down rental units.

When I look at my dogs huddled together on an enormous cushion exchanging heat and sleeping the day away while I write, its obvious that they take everything for granted now.

Both are rescue dogs who probably had harrowing lives before we adopted them. Despite her sweetness, the Big Dog feels very threatened by dogs outside of our immediate household. Was she once part of a dogfighting ring? When my wife brought her home five years ago, she looked emaciated and vaguely scary. Now she looks like Buddha.

The Little Dog had been adopted and returned to the animal shelter at least two previous times before we took him in. He was timid in those days, and suspicious of everyone and everything. He shivered excessively and kept his distance from Big Dog, who feigned indifference after administering a savage bite to establish her dominance.

Once Little Dog got comfortable enough with his new surroundings to tease the bigger dog by stealing her toys, prompting constant “Tom & Jerry” style chase scenes throughout the house, his true personality as a yapping malcontent began to assert itself.

He nipped at my mother-in-law, who is the closest thing to a saint this world has ever seen. He nipped at visitors who tried to pet him. He drew blood from a drunk neighbor who, despite our shouted warnings not to do it, reached into our yard to pet him despite multiple signs blaring “Beware of Dog.”

None of that bad behavior got Little Dog into as much trouble as last year when his habit of “marking his territory” indoors reached crisis levels. My wife, whose sense of smell is as acute as any dog’s, absolutely lost it when she found a fresh puddle of urine under a chair after she had just finished washing the floors.

She wanted him gone, and yelled loud enough for neighbors on both sides to assume I was murdering her. I couldn’t imagine taking him back to the animal shelter, but it was clear they wouldn’t be able to coexist under those circumstances.

An appeal for advice on the Swisshelm Park community Facebook page turned up information about a heretofore unknown product called a “belly band” — basically a diaper and wrapper for a male dog. It did the trick, though I’m sure there’s a landfill out there somewhere with his name on it.

Little Dog still annoys my wife whenever she catches him lifting a leg to pee on something, even though the stream is restricted to his diaper. The fact that he still has the desire to do so in front of her is enough to set off a minor tirade. I accept it as the cost of having a mischievous dog that has tricked me into loving him no matter what.

Sometimes when I’m watching the news showing the latest war crimes in Ukraine, the misery of ordinary people causes me to wonder how those with dogs are navigating the war’s barbarism. Then I remember: we’ve experienced war and peace with our canine friends for 40,000 years. Mutual love has helped us get through even the darkest days.