Category Archives: The Daily Growl

For almost as long as I can remember the humans and I have gone to the park every morning. It’s this place not far from our house where my pals and I can run around, chase and chew on each other, hunt for squirrels and generally have a good time for maybe an hour before breakfast. It’s great. The humans seem to enjoy it, too. Then one day, all of a sudden, we stopped going.

I was confused. Instead of driving to the park, or walking sometimes when someone, not me, decided he needed some exercise, we started taking actual walks. Every day. On a leash! Sometimes around the Canyon where we live, sometimes up to this other park that overlooks the ocean, where there are about a million squirrels that I can’t chase because of the stupid leash, sometimes, well, you get the picture. But never to the park.
Continue reading →

“She’s starting to smell a little ‘doggy’.”

It’s hard to describe what goes through my mind whenever I hear one or the other of my humans utter that word. ‘Doggy’. There is a tone with which this proclamation is made that suggests, no, screams, disdain. It’s as though I’ve been caught red-pawed in the commission of some sort of olfactory felony. I smell ‘doggy’. Imagine that.

Would it be better if I smelled a little ‘catty’? Or maybe ‘ratty’, or ‘squirrelly’? How about ‘fishy’? “Gee, Hon, Kaya’s starting to smell like a flounder.” Perfect.
Continue reading →

I received an angry letter the other day from someone calling himself Rocket J. Squirrel demanding to know why we, meaning dogs, I guess, are so committed to the persecution of him and the others of his species. Why, he asks, do we feel the need to chase, bark at, and, in the occasional but tragic instance, to catch and kill us? What, he wants to know, have squirrels ever done to harm dogs?

Reading this I was taken aback. I mean, everyone knows squirrels can’t read, let alone write. Still, the issue is an interesting one and whoever this person is, he deserves an answer.
Continue reading →

I got a note from Phoebe that has me more than a little upset.  She’s about five years old, a Border Collie mix, and was thrilled to hear her family was moving to New Zealand.  She wasn’t sure why, something about this country going to the dogs, which hardly seems like a good reason for any of my guys to want to leave, but hey, she’s got those Border Collie genes and New Zealand must look like heaven what with all the sheep down there.
Continue reading →

‘Work like a dog’.  ‘Dog tired’.  ‘In the dog house’.  ‘A dog-eat-dog world’. Common expressions I hear all the time to describe what must be an almost unbearable existence, a life of toil, fear, and retribution.  A life unlike that of any of my pals.

At some other time or in some other place I suppose those descriptors might be, or have been, accurate.  But in my neighborhood nothing could be farther from the truth.  My pals and I are chronically unemployed, we get tired chasing one another around the park and squirrels around our back yards, our house is the same as our owner’s house, with certain accommodations to ensure maximum comfort and convenience, like the doggy door, and we get two square meals a day, neither of which contains even trace amounts of dog—though I understand that sort of thing is popular in Asia, (remind me not to go there.)

Continue reading →