I took my sister’s dog, Bailey, for a walk today. Both myself and my sister have been crashing with our parents right now, because we are highly functional and successful adults.
Anyways, I’ve walked the dog a handful of times since being back. It has been mostly an unpleasant experience. Bailey is an overall well behaved dog with a good temperament, but she can be a little unruly on a walk. She will often stray off the path and force me to wait for her while she does whatever it is she feels she must do. She doesn’t like being on a lead, and I don’t want to be uncool by being the only one who walks her with a lead. I’ll confess, though, sometimes I feel the urge to drag her onwards rather than wait out her latest detour.
Today, though, I was in a reasonably chipper mood having done no exercise whatsoever. I was prepared to indulge her today. In fact, I thought maybe I would take her on a little adventure.
There is a creek that runs close by to my parents house. Bailey can expect with a high degree of confidence that she will be walked the paved path the lines the creek. It’s definitely where I normally take her. The path that lines the creek is probably more scenic than your average dog walking path, but I remembered when I was a kid I used to adventure with friends by the actual water itself. I haven’t done this since I was 13 years old or so, but I have such incredibly fond memories of it. The water is down in a bit of a valley from the raised path. Even though it is slightly difficult terrain, if you follow it you will see a lot of cool and beautiful things that are completely obscured from view if only walking by the path.
Today, after starting on the path for the first kilometre or so, I guided Bailey into the bush towards the water. I showed her a waterfall I felt confident she never would have seen, one that I myself hadn’t seen in years. I looked into Bailey’s eyes with a smile, but her eyes greeted me only with uncertainty. I started walking down towards the bottom of the waterfall, where you could still walk on the rocks even if you had to scramble a bit to get there. Bailey followed, hopping over fallen trees here and there. I figured that looked fun to her, I felt I was nailing this adventure.
We kept walking along by the creek bed. Personally, I was kind of enjoying that it was a bit less straight forward, that you had to forge a path through the trees and stones. There was one point where I had to hop down from a rock to continue, perhaps a jump of a half a metre. Bailey is a Kelpie, she most certainly could manage if she so wished. She just looked at me from that rock, her face telling me that she was unprepared to jump.
I gave her a pat and vaulted back up to where she was. As I did she turned, and with an unmistakably spring in her step, started lunging back the way we came. It seemed obvious to me then that this was not her idea of adventure. At least not an enjoyable one.
I got us back on the path, and once we did I started watching her a little more closely. Trying to discern, I suppose, what it is that she gets out of going for a walk.
That’s when I noticed that whenever she went off the path, she always had her nose to the earth. She would sniff for something, and once she found a certain spot – she would ceremoniously piss on top of it. I was paying more attention to her than I guess I normally would, so I noticed she did this over a dozen times. She would never empty her tank, so to speak. I presume she just wanted to piss over where other dogs had pissed. Always keeping enough urine in the tank so she could do it however many times she needed.
She also went off at one point to roll around in some dirt covered in literal bat shit, and and one point she found a small bone in a pile of garbage.
My takeaway is this – my sister’s dog is a dirty little trash creature, and you shouldn’t expect to impress a dirty little trash creature with something that you think is beautiful. Next time I’ll just take her to the tip, I imagine she’ll like that.
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