dog – Dan Q

Note #25448

Compared to the children, the dog is Not So Impressed by the deep snowfall we’ve just received. To be fair, it’s basically up to get armpits!

(leg-pits? I don’t know what the right word is for a canine!)

Dan Q found GC80592 Coffee, Cache and Dash

This checkin to GC80592 Coffee, Cache and Dash reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

QEF while stopped for a confort break on a long journey North from Oxford. The dog wanted to go with the others into the services, but had to stay outdoors with me and hunt for the cache. Solid hint!

My Ball

Our beloved-but-slightly-thick dog will sometimes consent to playing fetch, but one of her favourite games to play is My Ball. Which is a bit like fetch, except that she won’t let go of the ball.

It’s not quite the same as tug-of-war, though. She doesn’t want you to pull the toy in a back-and-forth before, most-likely, giving up and letting her win¹. Nor is My Ball a solo game: she’s not interested in sitting and simply chewing the ball, like some dogs do.

A champagne-coloured French Bulldog on a black-and-white rug, indoors, stands while chewing a lime green tennis ball. — I’d like to imagine the grunts and snorts she makes at about this moment actually translate to “My ball. Myyyy… ballll. Myyyyy ball! MY BALL! My… BALL!”

No, this is absolutely a participatory game. She’ll sit and whine for your attention to get you to come to another room. Or she’ll bring the toy in question (it doesn’t have to be a ball) and place it gently on your foot to get your attention.

Your role in this game is to want the ball. So long as you’re showing that you want the ball – occasionally reaching down to take it only for her to snatch it away at the last second, verbally asking if you can have it, or just looking enviously in its general direction – you’re playing your part in the game. Your presence and participation is essential, even as your role is entirely ceremonial.

A champagne-coloured French Bulldog in a doorway, on a tiled floor, holds a braided rope; a human hand barely holds the other end. — This might look like a game of tug-of-war, but you’ll note that my grip is just barely two-fingered. She’s not pulling, because she doesn’t need to unless I try to take the toy. This is *My Rope*, she knows.

Playing it, I find myself reminded of playing with the kids when they were toddlers. The eldest in particular enjoyed spending countless hours playing make-believe games in which the roles were tightly-scripted². She’d tell me that, say, I was a talking badger or a grumpy dragon or an injured patient but immediately shoot down any effort to role-play my assigned character, telling me that I was “doing it wrong” if I didn’t act in exactly the unspoken way that she imagined my character ought to behave.

But the important thing to her was that I embodied the motivation that she assigned me. That I wanted the rabbits to stop digging too near to my burrow³ or the princess to stay in her cage⁴ or to lie down in my hospital bed and await the doctor’s eventual arrival⁵. Sometimes I didn’t need to do much, so long as I showed how I felt in the role I’d been assigned.

A toddler with long blonde hair, wearing a pink cardigan, sits on a tall stool in front of a kitchen sink, holding a long-handled scrubbing brush. — In this game, the chef was “making soup” (in the sink, apparently) and my job was to “want the soup”.

Somebody with much more acting experience and/or a deeper academic comprehension of the performing arts is going to appear in the comments and tell me why this is, probably.

But I guess what I mean to say is that playing with my dog sometimes reminds me of playing with a toddler. Which, just sometimes, I miss.

Footnotes

¹ Alternatively, tug-of-war can see the human “win” and then throw the toy, leading to a game of fetch after all.

² These games were, admittedly, much more-fun than the time she had me re-enact my father’s death with her.

³ “Grr, those pesky rabbits are stopping me sleeping.”

⁴ “I’ll just contentedly sit on my pile of treasure, I guess?”

⁵ Playing at being an injured patient was perhaps one of my favourite roles, especially after a night in which the little tyke had woken me a dozen times and yet still had some kind of tiny-human morning-zoomies. On at least one such occasion I’m pretty sure I actually fell asleep while the “doctor” finished her rounds of all the soft toys whose triage apparently put them ahead of me in the pecking order. Similarly, I always loved it when the kids’ games included a “naptime” component.

Dan Q wrote note for GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing

This checkin to GC9GTV3 Drive Slowly; Fox Crossing reflects a geocaching.com log entry. See more of Dan's cache logs.

Checked up on this cache during a dog walk nearby. All seems good, cache is ready to be found!

The Dog and The Snowman

On the way to school this morning, the 10-year-old lagged behind to build a small snowman.

On the way back, the dog saw the snowman, which wasn’t there when she’d passed earlier. She wanted to make it clear that she Did. Not. Trust. it. She stood back and growled at it for a while, and then, eventually, was persuaded to come closer.

Leaning as far as her little legs could manage, she stretched to carefully sniff it while keeping her distance. She still wasn’t entirely happy and ran most of the way to the end of the path to get away from the mysterious cold heap.

(This same dog earlier this year spent quarter of an hour barking at our wheelbarrow when, unusually, it was left in the middle of the lawn, rather than beside the shed. She doesn’t like change!)