One of the first things I noticed about the first Terminator movie was that dogs, specifically German Shepherds, immediately identified Terminators. Of course it was based on fact - that dogs are immediate good judges of people. I am reminded of something Bill Murray said, to the effect he distrusted people who didn't like dogs but trusted a dog who didn't like certain people.
The only dogs I keep are pugs, who are the clowns of the dog world and are pretty much stupid and friendly. But the last pug I had...
Once day I was sitting in my van with my dog in passenger seat, when some guy I had never seen before walked up to my open window and asked for a cigarette. Before I could say a word, my pug hurled himself snarling over my lap and tried to get out the window and attack this guy. I had to grab him before he launched himself out the window. He had never done anything like this before.
I thought, "My dog doesn't like this guy so neither do I." I told him, my dog doesn't like you and neither do I. And no, I will never give you a cigarette so never ask me for anything ever again.
He stumbled off without a word. Not surprisingly I later found he was a nut who harassed everyone for cigarettes and knocked on women's doors at 2 in the morning and asked if he could get in their bed with them or maybe they wanted to come to his apartment and take a shower with him.
One of the women in the apartment complex had a very friendly pit bull who wagged her tail every time she saw me. I asked her if she knew the nut and she said she did - everyone knew him. She told me her dog hated him.
Later, he was finally kicked out of the complex after serving 20 days in county. Why, I never found out.
How can dogs be such immediate accurate judges of character? Smell? Do crazy people who harass people smell different?
Dogs have a sense of smell 100,000 times better than ours of maybe a million times in the case of bloodhounds. I can't imagine a dog just looking at them and making a judgement.
I wonder if anyone has studied this phenomena? I know that dogs can smell if someone is about to have an epileptic fit or if they have cancer. So it wouldn't surprise me if they could smell if someone is unpleasant and crazy.
4 comments:
Hmmm...I've seen a lot of screwed up people with dogs that fawn over them. Like a psychotic crack head female about 14 years ago, and some less colourful types such as the homeless. Not saying all homeless are scoundrels.
Well, 'God' IS 'dog' spelled backwards...
Coincidence?
"Man's best friend" doesn't even begin to cover it.
There's a lady round the corner and down the street that I love. She has a metabolic or glandular problem and is so obese she can barely move... but every day she saddles up an adult trike with a box on the back, puts her pug in it and off they ride. She always stops to talk and rest, and the mutt is a leering fool and a shameless attention whore. It hurts her to move and that little dog gives her the incentive she needs to get the excersize.
Pugs enslave their owners.
Dogs can get angry at random stupid things, too. My cousin's dog sometimes used to start barking at me for no apparent reason. There didn't seem to be any consistency to it, either- sometimes she liked me and would beg for attention, sometimes she hated my guts.
It turned out she was violently opposed to my habit of wearing hats outside, for reasons known only to her. I made it a practice to remove my hat well before she spotted me at the door, and she completely forgot any objections she formerly had to my presence. She was a sweet and lovable dog, but dumber than a box of rocks. (She once managed to get herself sprayed by a skunk, and she also had scars all over her nose from repeatedly pestering my cousin's bad-tempered cats- she never seemed to get it through her head that they didn't want to play. Come to think of it, she probably thought the skunk wanted to play, too).
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