I sometimes feel bad when I have to yell at Cleo for going crazy about seeing another dog.
Just now, she was looking out the front window – something that she does a lot during the day – and a couple of people were walking their dogs by on the sidewalk. The problem is, she gets super-duper-crazy excited when she sees pretty much any creature with more than 2 legs, and when she does this, she turns into this hyper psycho dog that starts clamoring and scratching at the window like she was being starved for oxygen or something! 😯
My main concern, mind you, is that one of these days she’s going to break the window, which would be a problem two-fold because a) I have no idea how one goes about replacing a window, and b) no doubt broken glass and such would be somewhat bad for Cleo, too, considering that once she breaks the window she’s likely to go flying through it en route to whatever caused her to assail said window in the first place!
But physical damages aside, sometimes it also makes me wonder about her psychologically because when I inevitably have to go up and usher her away from the window, amidst all of her shaking and yelping, I can tell that she’s certainly distraught, which from my imagination falls into one of two categories:
- She’s just super-duper excited because she wants to run and play with whatever she sees outside, regardless of whether or not it would actually be interested in playing with her.
- Or what if she’s freaking the fuck out because she hardly gets to see other dogs and so when she does, it’s this incredible mindfuck of having been kept in captivity for years and just now learning that there are other creatures out there that look just like her!
I mean, think about it if the roles were reversed – if you stayed locked up in the house all day with only a window to the outdoors, and maybe occasionally you got to go out and play with other humans, but your memory was really short so you don’t always remember those times, when you saw another being that looks just like you walking past on the other side of the glass, wouldn’t you start to wonder what in the hell is going on and begin to question everything about your so-called happy life that you’ve ever known?!
Granted, maybe I need not worry about that being the case because it’s not like Cleo has ever attacked me as her captor after piecing together dogs’ place as man’s pets or even so much as licked me to death to know the truth about what lies beyond the front window in our family room. It’s just that ever since we got her a couple of years ago, I’ve always been curious about what she thinks and what she remembers and how she learns. She’s not like the fish that I’ve had for most of my life where they pretty much just bob around and be fish – she’s learned a surprising number of words, most of them relating to food and her getting to go on walks, and she reacts differently to different people that she knows.
It makes me wonder what else goes on inside that furry, little head of hers … aside from the food-related thoughts … I’m pretty much on top of those already… 😛