History records that dogs were invented long before clocks. Cave paintings in Spain show stick people and somewhat doglike creatures chasing after animals, but no cave painting has been discovered that depicts one of the stick people buying a fake Rolex from a street vendor. No doubt the doglike creatures chased animals because cars hadn’t yet been invented.
No one really knows what happened to the mysterious culture of the stick people. One theory holds that they died of starvation, since two-legged animals are almost always slower and more stupid than four-legged animals. If only the stick people had chosen less fleet-footed prey, such as broccoli, they might have had a remote chance of survival, though clearly not as artists. It may be that a few stick people did survive, and have blended into modern culture as runway models, but that is pure speculation.
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We have two dogs at our house, a chocolate Lab and a 35-pound rescue dog that can only be classified as “part something.” They both know that feeding times are around 7 a.m., except on weekends, and are precisely at 5:30 p.m. daily. At about 5 they start to remind us that the time is nigh, and by 5:25 p.m. they are wiggling with excitement, as if they hadn’t eaten since the prior Tuesday. This is especially true for the chocolate Lab, a member of a proud breed in which the biological dinner bell has been set permanently to “NOW.”
Chocolate Labs will find and inhale any food that is carelessly left at a height that they can reach by stretching their necks or jumping five times their normal stature. This trait is hard-wired in the breed — it cannot be corrected through training, medication or Scientology. Yet, their food thievery instinct does not interrupt their need for exactly timed meals. Even if the chocolate Lab finds a morsel of food, say, an entire ribeye steak, at 5:15 p.m. and consumes it in one prodigious gulp, her internal clock will tell her when 5:30 arrives, and she will be vibrating like a tuning fork to remind us that The Time Has Come.
The switch to and from daylight-saving time throws the household into chaos. What was 5:30 is now 4:30 according to the clock on the microwave, but dogs pay little attention to such human contrivances. They know that it is really 5:30, and they wonder why we are mistreating them so by making them wait a whole extra hour. Their eyes say, “Why do you despise us so? What have we done to offend?”
After a week or two, things settle down and the dogs’ clocks make the same unnatural adjustment that is forced upon humanoids twice a year by a megalomaniacal government and the makers of microwave ovens. Why do they despise us so?
louie@hmbreview.com doesn’t know the current time, but is reasonably sure of the current weather.
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