”Men are dogs,” my friend Elizabeth said. ”All men are dogs.”
”That`s hardly fair,” I said. ”I mean, I appreciate the compliment, but I don`t know what you have against dogs.”
I haven`t gone a year in the last 25 without at least one dog, and I think I can tell the difference between men and dogs by now.
Dogs shed on your rugs, furniture and clothes. White dogs shed only on dark sweaters, and dark dogs on light sweaters. You can`t keep a dog from shedding, but you can dye them the same color as your sweaters. Men leave hair in sinks, or sticking to the sides of bathtubs. Dogs also have fleas, while men don`t, and are generally much cleaner, having only the occasional cigar. Dogs would rather have fleas than smoke cigars. Men can be trained not to smoke cigars, though it takes patience and firmness.
Dogs embarrass you in public, knock over plants, trip old ladies, sniff people`s crotches, hump people`s legs or lick themselves. Men sometimes try to inconspicuously realign their undershorts in public. We also wear plaid pants on golf courses, walk around with little pieces of toilet paper forgetfully stuck to our faces and drink so much that we tell bad jokes in loud voices.
Dogs are not as bright as men. They managed to beat men into orbit in the late `50s, but have since fallen far behind in the space race and are not expected to land a dog on the moon in the foreseeable future. You can fool them easily by spelling things, like, ”Whose turn is it to take S-P-O-T for a W-A-L-K?” If a woman at a dinner party says, in front of her husband, ”Oh, by the way, Louise, did I tell you, I`m having an A-F-F-A-I-R with B-O-B?”
her husband may well catch on. If he doesn`t, she`s probably doing the right thing.
Dogs bite when threatened. In some urban areas, human bites now outnumber dog bites, though the statistics never say which sex is doing what percentage of the biting. Dogs will bark, while men resort to biting sarcasm and, in general, are more vicious than dogs. Dogs only bite the moment it occurs to them to do so, and then forget about it. Men have been known to lay elaborate long-range revenge plots that continue long after the offense has passed. Men also wage war and build nuclear bombs. Dogs lack the funding to build bombs, but my guess is, give a dog all the money in the world and he`ll invent new rubber toys, not new weapons.
But there are similarities. Dogs are elated when you feed them, and so are men. Dogs can`t prepare their own food and come to you with big puppy dog eyes. Men could prepare our own food, but we`d still rather come to you with big puppy dog eyes. Dogs show their gratitude better than men do: They push their faces right into the bowl, tails wagging, until they`re covered with food and the room is a mess.
Dogs will keep you warm in bed. Sometimes my dog Stella will lick the salt from my hand as I fall asleep, until I start to drift off, dream a little, feel some weird warm wet sensation on my hand and wake up all of a sudden, thinking, ”Oh my God–what is that?” Men will keep women warm in bed, though there are probably times when women wake up suddenly, look at the hairy face on the pillow next to them in shock and say, ”Oh my God–what is that?”
The dog`s second greatest virtue is that he will take on anything to protect you, race headlong into a pitch-black basement to fend off burglars, alien invaders, giant silverfish–he doesn`t care. Men share this virtue and will do pretty much whatever we can to protect the ones we love.
The dog`s chief virtue is his faithfulness. If you should die and no one comes to your house for weeks, a dog would rather starve to death than eat your body, unlike, say, cats.
Even though some dogs will, like some men, run away, as a rule men are less faithful than dogs. Dogs are emotionally short-sighted and don`t think to look beyond the love at hand, the one that feeds them and scratches them on the head. A dog capable of jumping five feet in the air can be kept inside a three-foot fence, as long as he doesn`t know he can vault a five-foot one.
There also are dogs fully aware of how high they can jump who choose not to.
”Not all men are dogs,” I told Elizabeth, ”but a few good ones are.”
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Peter Nelson writes the ”His” column in Mademoiselle magazine and lives with his dog, Stella.
