If you walk for your health I hope you have a dog. Generally a cat won’t make it no matter what feline lovers might say. Let me admit my prejudice: I’m a guide dog man, blind, fast, and adventurous. No cat will do for me. Take truth serum my friends—would you trust your life to a cat?
My guide walks so fast my jogger friends are often amazed. “That’s some pace you guys have,” they say. There’s no doubt we’re speedy. We have great cardio. This can be a problem when we’re out with friends—my dog and I are suddenly half a block ahead and vanishing over the urban horizon. Often we must stop and wait for our able bodied, sighted, doddering pals. We don’t mind. We understand the deficiencies of visual people.
Whether you’re sighted or blind, walking a dog has numerous benefits. Some days I can’t decide if the bigger payoff lies with endorphins or with a quasi spiritual sensation of being allied with a generous but independent creature who has decided I’m okay. I might even be more than okay—I sing for both of us, sing the silliest songs. Show me a cat who cares when you do this. My guide dog thinks its a good bit of fun.
When I was a kid I loved a song by Pete Seeger, the title of which I can’t recall, but it had the refrain: “All around the kitchen, cock-a-doodle-doodle-do”. I played the record until my phonograph needle was a nub. The song was a kind of “call and response”—Seeger would sing: “You put your right foot out, cock-a-doodle-doodle-do”; “you put your left foot out” etc. That song was irresistible! Nowadays though I’m in my late fifties and my kids are grown I still sing it. And all I can say is my dog loves me for it. She gets me, my Labrador girl. She dances right along.
Her name is “Nira” my Labrador. She’s comes from Guiding Eyes for the Blind in New York. She’s a light yellow Lab with honey colored ears and she tilts her head from side to side when I sing. She loves Pete Seeger but she’s okay with almost anything. I could sing “The Volga Boatman” and she’d think it was a good development. This isn’t because she’s naïve or smitten. Her good cheer is a function of the canine genome. Dogs are happy in the morning. They are happy in ways your spouse or your children or cats are not. They’re happy in the morning because dogs are predators. They know that because they’ve lived through another night they will have the chance to eat again. Don’t underestimate the joys of breakfast; the happiness of walking and singing about the kitchen; what I like to call “the thrill of morsel and dance”.
Yes, if you walk for your health I hope you have a dog. Here I shall conclude with a bit of canine philosophy. In ancient times when the wind spoke to men and women it also spoke to dogs. When an ancient dog heard wind he heard everything. I believe this is not customarily understood. Anthropologists say dogs came to the human realm because we were throwing out the bones. But you can’t understand a creature just by its appetites. Dogs have always understood the air is enchanted all around us. They have always understood the telegraphy of swallows crossing the sunbeams between trees. Like an arrow they came just to tell us the good news. And dogs know the darkening tunnel inside the wind. I tell you they know who lives there. That is what you hear when a dog is dreaming. I tell you, dogs pour out in choirs their dreamy souls.
And then they go for walks.
Planet of the Blind 