I want to talk to you about Oscar – it’s cheaper than visiting the pet psychologist.
Oscar’s a dog…we think. When your computer freezes after being tasked to find a file, and you’re left looking at “Working on it” for the rest of eternity, there’s something there that neither you or your computer will ever find. It’s like that with Oscar.
What is a dog? Good question – ask it before you get one. A dog is expectation: it will be domestic, wag a tail, know its name and look like a dog. Oscar looks like a dog, but detecting which breeds is an exercise in “Where’s Wally?”. It’s a waste of time anyway for the breeds which might be thought to reside in his history are irrelevant: his behaviour approximates no known dog.
So what is Oscar? It is not inconceivable to think that a higher purpose is being served by his existence among us, backed up by the fact that he is a rescue dog, off the streets, origin unknown. The name we gave him seemed a spur of the moment thing, but suspicion is growing that a Hand from Above put that name into our minds as, perhaps, a clue to his identity. Oscar may be a dog impersonator, an actor from some other plane of the universe who has perfected the art of looking like a dog but not behaving like one. No dog known to man could be so un-doglike.
A few reasons for this conclusion: Oscar knows no name. Everything is identified by a name so that it can be differentiated from other things; in the case of a dog, so that it will respond to its name when called. But Oscar has no response: were he to ignore or defy his name, this would indicate awareness that he is meant to be Oscar, but he is a no-name brand, oblivious to whatever comes to his ears. He does not want to go on walks, neither harnessed, on a lead, not on a lead, carried in arms or dropped in the middle of the road. In the case of this final attempt, the desperate idea was that an approaching car might kickstart him into walking, but this was defeated when he turned his consider-ably small head with ears that stand out like the shells of the Sydney Opera House and stared at the car. It came to a cautious halt, then reversed. Though he seems up to take on a car, he avoids cats and is totally unexcited by the sound of cats fighting and yowling mere metres away.
If you’ve read this far, you may agree that his behaviour is most un-doglike, but you would rather not comment on the theory that he might serve a higher purpose. But as stated earlier, you are serving the need for a dog psychologist and to make the most of the opportunity I shall explain why this could be so.
Humans expect dogs to fit their particular world: a companion, a protector, a running partner, a toy, a look-alike, a therapist, a punchbag, an income source, a comforter, killer, navigator, playmate and so on. When a dog does not behave as the human thinks it should, it’s the former which gets the blame. But putting requirements or expectations on another form of life is unfair: it has its own space and being. Oscar cannot be expected to do anything and nor should he be. The human being whose world would fit Oscar’s has not yet been born.
