She seemed friendly enough, so I figured I’d start rubbing her face to see what happened.
“She,” by the way, was a Labrador retriever.
That
made the whole scenario a lot less awkward. Actually, it was rather
pleasant – a hard dose of puppy love to inject some innocent warmth into
the workday. I was at the dog park in Biddeford, seeking some fun photo
opportunities for the front page, and within five minutes I had a stash
of adorable pictures of the year-old lab, bounding across the grass and
leaping for soggy tennis balls. I’ll call the lab “Sasha,” not to
protect her identity so much as to conceal my terrible memory for names.
I call my dad “Dad” for the same reason. I think his real name starts
with a “G.”
In
Sasha’s little doggy brain, I was a Brand-New Human, so it was
inevitable that she would come over to check me out, sniffing at various
sensitive areas. I already had permission from the owner to grab her
picture, so the next logical step was to indulge the panting lab and
give her some good scratchin’ around the muzzle and ears. That’s my way
of communicating to other species, “Your mug is so dang cute I could eat
it up with a side of cabbage.”
That’s
something you can get away with when it comes to K-9s. Try rubbing a
random human’s face and you’ll probably get socked in the kisser, and
deserve it. You’ll be trading teeth for a fun anecdote. It’s all about
priorities, I guess.
There’s
a different social protocol for every species we interact with. None of
the rules for a friendly greeting are ever quite the same. For humans,
the process goes something like this: Say, “Hi, good to see you,” or
some variant thereof. If it’s a man, shake his hand – firm grip, single
pump. If it’s a woman, a light hug may be appropriate, with two light
finger-taps on her back, and an appropriate space left between torsos;
no prolonged contact, lest you be thought a creeper or affection-starved
hermit. These are the unspoken rules that govern society, and prevent
family reunions from disintegrating into all-out war, with salad tongs
and spatulas employed as short-range melee weapons.
While
these practices greatly reduce incidents of gut-punching and noogies,
social rules change drastically when you meet, for example, a cat.
Hypothetical: You’ve been invited to a friend’s house-warming party, and
she announces it’ll be a pot luck, a veritable melange of salads and
casseroles that taste vaguely like Tupperware. Not wanting to be
outdone, you whip out your grandmother’s time-honored recipe for
banana-nut-raisin-jalapeno-
How
do you greet Poop Deck? Do you reach out a hand, shake his paw, and
tell him how lovely his home is? Does he hand you a glass of wine and
make small talk about his scuba-diving expedition off the coast of
Thailand? No. He sticks his butt out, and you scratch it. He purrs. Then
he turns around and forcibly inserts his head into the hand-space once
occupied by said butt. You start getting into it, working him under the
neck and belly. Then he walks away and you never interact with him again
in your life.
Now try scratching a random human’s butt and see where that gets you.
Guinea
pigs, gerbils and other squirming mammals require perhaps the least
social maintenance, whereby a greeting merely consists of acknowledging
its existence. You simply point at it and say, “Hey, nice pet,” and then
politely turn down a request to hold it because you don’t feel like
playing pants-goalie to keep it from wriggling into your trousers.
Splinter the Rat is just some strange presence in a plastic cage tucked
into a corner of the living room, one’s constant awareness of him due
mainly to a faint fur-and-wood-chips smell reminiscent of a poop-covered
tree trunk.
If,
instead of a rat, Splinter were a juice-sipping toddler, this just
would not fly. You’d make small talk, tell him you like his Spider-Man
pajamas, and not comment on the fact that there’s a booger shaped like
Slovenia dangling from his nostril. You might still have to keep him out
of your pants, though. Finally, some overlap.
We
homo sapiens have an odd relationship with the various critters of the
animal kingdom. We cuddle the cute ones, eat the tasty ones, harness the
strong ones and kill the annoying ones. We breed and feed and hunt and
swat. The lines seem largely arbitrary. Who’s to say we couldn’t keep a
cow as an outdoor pet rather than razing it for milk and beef? Who’s to
say a pig, usually a meat source for sandwiches and Easter dinners,
wouldn’t be equally enjoyable as a couch companion while we watch
“Family Guy” with a tub of ice cream? The mere thought inspires me to
start picking out names. Like Petey the Pig and Dairy Harry the Hulking
Heifer. Jeez Louise, I need a damn hobby.
But
when it comes to saying “hi,” nothing beats the staples. Cats may be
distant and standoffish, but they offer us fuzzy butts, a handful of
which can obliterate the blues with a pillow-soft injection of
interspecies companionship. Plus when they purr it feels like a
miniature vibrating recliner. That’s too weird to not be cool.
Dogs,
well, they’re the masters of friendly greetings. When I was finished
rubbing Sasha’s face, she leaned in close, suddenly curious to know more
about this strange person showering her with affection. After a few
sniffs around my cheek and chin, she tentatively stuck a tongue out and
licked me once just below my right ear, as if to say, “Hello to you too,
human! I like you. Let’s be friends.”
It wasn’t quite a bro-hug and complimentary beer, but I’ll take it.
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