Dog's Life

The dogs can be utterly gentle and patient with one another like when the puppies are stealing the food off the grown dogs or biting their tails or jumping onto their backs. You’d think that the grown dogs would never put up with it, but surprisingly they do. On the other hand they accept no disobedience from other dogs that are below them in the strict and unmerciful hierarchy.

The dogs are put together in pairs and each pair inevitably consists of a boss and an underdog. The boss eats first, drinks first, talks to the owners first and generally controls every situation, whereas the underdog has to accustom to the moods and whims of the boss. The boss only has to grind his teeth and the underdog will start to smack his lips and whine and roll over in submission. They are very hard on each other, the dogs, and occasionally I wonder if groups of people are that different from them. I think that perhaps we aren’t, only we have more subtle ways of asserting ourselves.