Is your observant dog better than a pregnancy test?
Nope, I'm still never asking a woman if she's pregnant
For a year straight, my dog didn’t like this lady who lives around the corner from me. She would squeal and say “hello.” She would wave. She would poke her lip out and say, “Why don’t you like me?” And my dog would do everything but roll her eyes. There was pretty much nothing she could do to get Junee, my Hound mix, to like her, which I found to be strange because Junee is usually cool around women.
During her puppy year, I was fairly adamant about bringing Junee around a variety of people so she wouldn’t be one of those man-hating dogs nor racist dogs. But I couldn’t quite figure out what it was about this woman that she didn’t like because that neighbor seemed cool to me. The only thing I could come up with was the woman was a stockier build, and my dog tended to stiffen up around muscular or taller people (read: men). It felt like she was sizing them up to let them know to not get too, as my grandfather would say, “big for your britches.”
After a few attempts, I admitted defeat and would just keep my distance when I saw this lady on the sidewalk, her porch or walking down the street. I knew the barking and tensing up would start. And you can’t force dogs to like a person. Usually, I assume that if my dog doesn’t like a person, that means there’s something up with them. Still, the lady gave me all positive vibes. When I saw her running streamers down her front stairwell, I lifted my shades and yelled out “Happy Birthday.” Junee was still unimpressed.
But earlier this year, clear out of nowhere, Junee froze on the sidewalk and looked at this same lady. I’d grown used to crossing the street to avoid the confrontation, but my dog just looked at her — longingly.
I looked from my dog to the woman and shrugged. My dog started pulling me to get closer to her, and I asked her if it was OK. She nodded and agreed. Just like that, Junee wanted to be petted by her. She wanted to sit between this lady’s legs or run around. Every morning, she’d almost pull me around the corner to see if that lady was sitting on the porch. (No clue where she goes. Maybe work. Maybe school. Sometimes she’d be with a roommate or two. They were all dressed somewhere between casual and business casual.) If I happened to walk on the other side of the street, Junee would yelp and try to force me to go across the street so she could greet this lady.
In early October, the lady disappeared. Junee still wanted to go to that same front porch and sniff it. She’d look around and peek through the glass door to see if the lady was coming downstairs. Finally, I’d pull her along.
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By mid-October, the lady was right back on that front porch and Junee pulled so hard to get close to her that I had to double wrap the leash.
“Guess what?” the lady said, smiling. “I had my babies. I had twins!”
She pulled out her phone to show me two newborns. My jaw dropped.
Before I could catch myself, I said, “I didn’t know you were pregnant.”
I started counting backwards from the time Junee suddenly started being nice to a woman she had zero interest in being around for 365 straight days before then — and the monthly math was mathin’. I started wondering, “Can dogs sense when a woman is pregnant? Maybe Tia Mowry was right after all.”