When your dog may as well be a cat
Tough talk for your ego: Not every dog will greet you at the door
“Don’t you worry about a dog biting your face off?” the receptionist asked me as I leaned my elbow on the fitness studio’s front desk.
“Wow, you must go to weddings and ask about divorce lawyers, huh?” I responded, laughing.
He had a good reason for asking me this though. As a small child, he’d been bitten by his next door neighbor’s Chow Chow, and the dog really did bite his jaw. He ended up with several stitches and became scared of dogs. I could still see the mark on his chiseled jaw line, but it was faint.
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A small part of me wished he’d never told me this story, especially considering a Chow Chow owner kept popping up in my dog walking app alerts that same week. I ignored every single alert from that point forward. I looked up the dog breed later on, and the adjective “aloof” just kept coming up. He compared a Chow Chow to a cat, and that sounded about right from pet websites.
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In all fairness though, although cats are stereotyped as aloof, I’ve run into felines who are oddly clingy and liked me immediately — even if I didn’t like them. There are dogs who are “cat-like” and cats that are “dog-like,” and it’s entertaining to see. More importantly, if the owner chose this Chow Chow, somebody had to like this dog. While Chow Chows are ranked number 75 out of 197 breeds, that still leaves 122 other dogs they beat out.
Recommended Read: “When a dog lover understands cat lovers ~ Cat ladies aren’t crazy, according to UCLA study”
Generally speaking, I can count less than a handful of dogs who genuinely just didn’t like me — even before March 2019 when I became a dog caregiver. Dogs usually like me (and vice versa) the way babies are magnets for baby people. About 75% of the dogs I meet act like my entire existence is to pet them 24/7. However, that still leaves another 25% who could take me or leave me. It doesn’t take me long to recognize which group has their paws in front of me.