1

On Dogs

Ariane Jaccarini

You find you can’t stop thinking about the dog in Ferlinghetti’s poem:

“The dog trots freely in the street

and the things he smells

smell something like himself”

You think you are the exact opposite of Ferlinghetti’s dog. Sometimes, you feel so disconnected from your surroundings you’re scared you’re entering perpetual derealisation, a psychotic episode, like that guy who took 14 tabs of acid and thought he was a glass of orange juice for the rest of his life, held forever captive and upright by the fear of sloshing over. Or like that show in which for whatever reason everyone sees a dog and Elijah Wood sees a man in a dog suit.

They tell you to smell your own skin between whisky tastings, or when you’re out purchasing a new candle. Sniffing an elbow may reset the nose. If you can’t discern your own scent – and don’t be so egotistical to presume you don’t have one, stinker – how to regain a sense of balance and familiarity???  Our brains crave patterns. The tripartite structure offered by the Rule of Three / Three strikes the perfect balance/ 3,, the smallest number capable of forming a pattern/the 3-3-3 rule when adopting a dog is: the first three days should be used for adjusting to its new surroundings, the next three weeks for training and bonding, and the first three months for continued socialization and training.

r/dogs

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2 yr. ago

manningmayhem

My dog hates the number 3. What gives?

[Behavior]

My wife and I noticed that our dog hates the number three when spoken out loud. When you say “three” he turns his head sideways, looks concerned, or even sometimes he’ll get up and walk away. We have no idea why. The best I can come up with is that before we adopted him from the shelter at 6 months old, maybe some staff used to count to three before disciplining him or something. Other numbers have absolutely no effect on him. For context, he seems to be a lab/ pit mix of some kind.

Any thoughts?

Astarkraven

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2y ago

Owned by Greyhound

It’s funny to me, because my dog LOVES three, specifically because I play the 123 game with him. He gets so stoked for me to count and get to the number 3.

You could try reconditioning three to have a positive association, by playing this game? Get some extra amazing treats out and say three and feed, three and feed. Then two, three, feed. Then one, two, three, feed. With enough repetition, they get VERY EXCITED for you to finish counting to three. Dogs love pattern games.

I am grounded, calm, and centred I am grounded, calm, and centred I am grounded, calm, and centred

You want to become a dog. Why not a rat? Or a tundra swan?

Leash reactive

Long-headed, a skull like a corridor

A Malinois carrying a big stick

Reigning dock-diving champion, or a Seeing Eye dog, or a lapdog

You want to become a dog, and maybe it’s to roam the world carelessly with your little dog brain, to smell yourself in everything you smell, live out a pure and unencumbered existence for close to a decade, or more if you’re lucky. Maybe, it’s for the obtention of  secret dog knowledge, though we can’t be at all certain that this exists, seeing as dogs are in general so hairy and inscrutable.

You want to become a dog, but you were born A human, and you will learn to cook and drive cars, to love and to argue with words, and sometimes you will hit yourself to emotionally self-regulate, but never too hard, and a dog has only to be a dog.

2

The Love of the Brute

Ariane Jaccarini

Everything here is damp. Wet soil darkened to a rich, loamy abyss. Hot and clouded.  Patches of fat, that bloated, dogged hoove of synthetic excess, pinched and stretched like an overzealous deep-plane,  erupting like stubborn toadstools from the buttery sludge. A bloom of oily slickness. A brackish discharge. All plaster dust and used-up, all scruff-in-maw.

It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, just your common garden foot wart. Gumboils and no-see-ums, wet snapping at unseen dream-phantoms. The diet of worms. The air is a dense, moist stew. A fecund sea-broil. Greasy boulderstones pock the tump, an acromial bas-relief, whelks on pig meat. An aggressive peel. Like soggy, funk-soaked scarfskin. An old settee. A handbag.

Thick steam spews from a catch in the woodrot. A syncopated exhaust of cloying dog’s breath. A slow, endless march toward something foul and inevitable. Breathtaking, exhausted, panting slack-jawed. Spittle collecting  in the serrated flesh-corners, a froth of curdling glee. Crustaceous stench will lick at the nostrils. A snick that gulps, pink and hungry, like an ulcer inside-out.

The jutting limb that pulls a shadow. The hand is open, but no one is reaching for anything. A dial sans gnomon. Like a dunce cap on a rockpile. A gilled clod of wet cement, skin slick and sticky, whiskers like barbs. Built from lime and spit, instead of lime and stone. Excuse my nose, accept my leg. The splintery glob in the floor of a pot; the moiling glue that shoots through vessels to contort a face.

They spill toward us across the gutted plain, toothy, threnodic, splitting wetly as they move.