You already know how I give my pets a downright litany of nicknames, but what you might not know is that I also give my pets a voice.
I
mean that not in the figurative sense (as do, say, the animal rights
organizations), but in the literal one: I speak aloud what my pets are
surely thinking, and each pet gets a voice tailored specifically to him
or her.
The voice development
process usually happens organically. I start out with a pretty generic
voice every time—A slightly deeper tone than my own for the boy pets, a
slightly higher and sweeter one for the girl pets. Yet somehow, over
time, every pet's voice morphs into a perfect representation of their
personality.
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| A never-before seen picture of these two clowns. Jack Jack is, as usual, more asleep than not, while Bubalou is begging, "Tummy rubs!" |
Our two dogs now have
very different voices. Jack Jack, the one whose dominant character
trait is laziness, got a low (but not too low) voice with a distinctly
whiny edge to it and a hint of a lisp. Bubalou got a high-pitched,
fast-talking squeaky voice, inspired by his boundless enthusiasm,
pervasive anxiety, and (extremely piercing) yip that he lets out when
he's especially distraught.
Once your dog has a voice, it just follows naturally that he will have a tagline or two. Here is the story of Bubalou's.
Bubalou
loves to go in the car. "We're going someplace!!" and "I'm coming with
you!!" are two of his favorite lines when he can sense that we're
getting ready to leave the house. He loves to be taken pretty much
anywhere — for a walk, just outside, to the bathroom with you — but he
really gets pumped to go in the car. After some observation, it became
obvious that his favorite thing about being in the car was smelling the
air around him. He could be perfectly calm, lying down obediently in the
back, and you could crack the window and he'd be up like a shot,
sniffing the air, clambering over everything and everyone to get his
nose closer to the window. And what does he say while he's indulging in
this little display of unbridled excitement? "SMELLS!" Loud and squeaky
and with every ounce of enthusiasm a dog could muster. Bubalou can be
quite talkative when he's excited, and much of his verbiage boils down
to his enthusiasm for smells.
Another
thing Bubalou likes to say is "I'm a bad boy!" He says this with great
pride because, while cute and puffy and completely incapable of
committing a vindictive act, Bubalou likes to think he has a wild side.
He would never overtly disobey his humans (although he's stupid enough
to misunderstand pretty much every command you give him), but he doesn't
necessarily like to come when called. So when he's out wandering in
nature, if he's far enough away from you, he'll pretend he doesn't hear
you yelling his name. He'll just keep happily sniffing the ground,
ignoring you completely. You know he can hear you, but he knows he's
just far enough away to get away with it. Likewise, whenever he's out of
sight, he takes advantage of that solitude to pee on something. Other
than cuddling, his favorite pastime might very well be depositing his
bodily waste in as many locations as he possibly can. When you come home
to his latest masterpiece, he'll come running up to you, tail wagging,
with a smile on his face, and you can just hear it in your head: "Look
what I did! I'm a bad boy!"
Jack Jack, on the other hand, seems to have a healthy fear of being a bad boy, as evidenced by his submissive cowering
when I come home to a mess (even if Bubalou made it!) so he would never
go around congratulating himself for his misbehavior. Although
personally I think his tagline should be, "I don't wanna do it," because
he never wants to do anything except lie on the bed, that is not how
things shook out. Instead Jack Jack's personal phrase is any variation
on "I love grass! And girls!"
Jack
Jack has an inordinate love for grass. If you take him outside
(provided it's not raining, in which case he'll turn in to a statue and
pout), he will shed his normally prissy demeanor and have an exuberant
roll in the grass. The other thing he really likes is girls. He loves
getting attention from any human really, but he gets so excited about
meeting "pretty girls" that he loses control of his bladder when he sees them. Can you imagine what happens when he meets several
pretty girls while he happens to be in a grassy area? Well, it has
happened on the university campus, and I've seen him get so amped up
that he's suddenly blasted out of the crowd and done a circuit around
the mall that would make a greyhound proud.
Although
Jack Jack has no chill around girls and grass, generally he thinks
pretty highly of himself, and assumes that he is a necessary part of
every activity. No matter what you are doing, he will stride right up to
you and stand in a regal posture while staring you directly in the
eyes. "I'm here," he'll say, with the unspoken part being "What are your
other two wishes?" He uses this line especially frequently when you are
eating, because he knows that it is his divine right to be fed your
human food bite by bite, until it is all gone.
If
subtlety fails, he will continue the conversation in a very courtly
way: "I'm here, Daddy. I don't know if you noticed, but you have
forgotten to feed me any of that delicious turkey you have on your
plate. I suggest that you rectify this oversight promptly. I'm right
here, waiting. I'm right here. I'm here."
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| "I can't believe you're taking all these pictures instead of feeding me." |
Well,
now, I could go on and on and on about the fictitious conversations
I've had with my dogs, but I guess I'd better wrap this up into some
kind of takeaway. And that is the following: It can be fun to have dogs.
It can be fun to talk about your dogs. But the funnest of all
is talking like you are your dogs!
