THE DOG HOUSE

What a night! Jet (my foster mom) had popcorn; I had doggie treats. We power-lounged on the couch and watched hockey. It was sort of a pre-season warm up game. You ain’t kidding. It’s 101 degrees outside.

The true nature of the game evades me but I loved the fact that humans will fetch balls (or… pucks) with as much verve (word of the day) as dogs.

Everything is fast and the guys are all rascally. A striped-like human yells a lot during the game and he kicked one of the players off the ice and in to a penalty box. I was a bit confused about this directive. Jet says it’s like when a little kid does something bad and they have to sit in the corner for a time out or when a guy is in the doghouse.

This was even more confusing to me. I LIKE my doghouse and what does a kid’s timeout have to do with grown hockey players? Jet turned my way to explain further.

“When kids do something bad, they usually have to stop playing and then quietly sit in a corner for at least five minutes. Humans call this a ‘time out’. It’s kind of like when you do something bad (who me?) and I scold you and make you go to the backyard awhile when you’d rather be in the air conditioned house. When hockey players, who are basically large kids, do something bad to another player then he is forced to leave the fun and sit in a box. When human men do stupid bad things to upset a human woman, we say ‘he’ in the doghouse’.

I wondered, if bad humans are in the doghouse then why is it then when I’m in trouble I have to go outside rather than stay in the nice human house?

So, here’s my lesson of the day… Human or dog, we all do dumb stuff sometimes that will upset the ones we love. Punishment can be a time in a box or a suit in a doghouse. What I like about being a dog though is that humans forgive you quickly and it’s like nothing happened. Humans should consider being the same way to one another and forgive their bad stuff like nothing happened. I think they’d have more fun.

Okay, here’s the question of the day from Quaker who asked: Why do other humans call our mom and dad, Stacy and Bud?


Dear Quaker:
Humans are so special that they have labels AND they have names. The labels describe their roles (mom and dad or IT technician and builder); their name is what you call them if they aren’t your parents: Bud and Stacy. Hope I didn’t confuse you. What’s important is that you have a mom and dad.


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