the puppy park

I've been taking the dog to "the puppy park" to get her puppy energy out so that she can be social and have some fun while I get to observe both the comedie humaine and the comedie canine at the same time.

All of these people seem to know each other, so I end up telling them I'm babysitting the little jungle puppy who looks like Anubis come to life as she wrestles with the other scrappy dogs her size and gets angry when others don't want to play the way she does.

Maybe it's having read Children of Men (I haven't seen the film (which is very different from what I've heard) but the book is fantastic and becoming prescient in the way that 1984 and Brave New World are), where the human race, unable to continue bearing children, begin to treat their cats and dogs as such. I feel like almost every playground I drive by is deserted and yet there are lots of people and their pets here in this enclosure of fence with some water dishes and trees.

It's somewhat easy to match the owners with their pets, and make inferences, and the pets, while loyal and cuddly with their owners, somehow enter this more primal state of mind when they have some degree of freedom to let their natures out free of anthropomorphism, and then it turns into Jack London in the Suburbs, with the gang of huskies running as a pack, and the dogfight drawing blood and the subsequent crowd, the smaller and more sensitive dogs getting bullied by the bigger, the crazy dog banging the water dish around and growling at it, the other ones that just want to run around mind their own business. It's a crazy world with its own subculture and to observe for this week is fascination.