Loving dogs.

It may be safe to say that Americans who have dogs are divided into people who love their dogs too much and people who treat their dogs like garbage. There seems to be precious little middle ground, at least at the cultural level. I don't even want to talk about places where they treat them like dinner.

My wife and I are, of course, squarely in the "love too much" camp. I had to sleep on the sofa the other night when Tralfaz was having one of his freak-outs because it was so windy. I would have laughed at people like me before we got this dog. Ha, ha. Then he made me fall in love with him, damn it.

My wife's no better. She doesn't go around calling herself a pet mom or a furbaby mother, but I think she thinks that way sometimes.

Other people never take their dogs to vets, leave them chained up, or in hot cars, let them run around near busy streets, ignore them, starve them, use them for convenience, make them fight. There's nothing wrong with having working dogs; that's what most of them love best, is to have a job. But they ought to be treated well. Police dogs are treated like partners; Army dogs are non-commissioned officers who outrank their handlers. Junkyard dogs famously rank with the junk they protect.

Then there are people like this:

In The Hounds of Heaven, Stephen Bodio describes his quest to Kazakhstan to procure "the ancient saluki-like tazis of Central Asia." These are no ordinary dogs, as he reminds constantly in the book, but essentially the Mongol warriors of dogs -- sleek, mighty, tireless, proud, ferocious, fearless, intimidating, blah blah blah. I don't want to poke Bodio too hard on this, as he will send his vicious beasts after me, but it's clear that he regards all normal pet dogs, which is virtually every non-tazi dog on earth, as a pansy little hairball. If a dog can't run 500 miles and then take down a caribou solo, it's just a useless toy.

Well, I don't know. Maybe if I lived in Nowheresville, Non-County, New Mexico, as he does, I'd find a use for wild canines. Here in civilization we like our dogs to be useful, but affectionate; spirited, but trainable.

I've always said that people are weirdest about money and sex, but if there's a next tier down I might add pets. Well, pets and food (what with vegans, pescatarians, fruitarians...). Pets, food, and politics. And religion. Ah, the hell with it -- people are weird. If our dogs are weird, it's because they've been hanging around with us too much.

Dogs have a strange history with us, of course. They don't do well in Middle Eastern cultures, currently or historically or biblically. And then there's the man-bites-dog cultures of whom it is racist to speak. Still, I think Frederick the Great was right in calling dogs Man's Best Friend. We eat a lot of the same things and enjoy a lot of the same activities together, from hunting to playing ball to loafing on the couch. How many other animals would even want to apply for the job?