Milo: a liberal, not a hippie
Mr. Improbable was out of town this week, so as usual I took the opportunity to catch up with some of my girlfriends. Friday night, two friends from synagogue came over for pizza and vodka whipped cream and general silliness. We made it a slumber party because I didn’t want them driving home, and they had a class near my neighborhood in the morning anyway.
Erika and Molly are a lesbian couple who have been married for five years or so. And here’s the thing: Milo figured that out. He immediately realized that these were not two separate people, these were a PACK. If one of them told him to do something he didn’t want to do, he’d look at the other to see if she really meant it. He spent most of his time sitting in between them, and was happiest when he could be touching both of them at the same time. If they weren’t close enough to do that, he’d at least manage to be able to watch them both at the same time.
That’s not how he acts with any two people, even good friends. That’s how he acts with me and Mr. Improbable. That’s how he acts with a pack.
God knows I am not one to sentimentalize dogs or their innocence or insight or capacity for teaching moral lessons. I find that an insult to both philosophy and dogs. But Milo has no politics. He has no ideology. He only knows what his senses tell him, and what they told him is that my friends Molly and Erika are one.
My dog can recognize gay marriage. I hope the rest of the world catches up with him soon.
Milo is a good liberal who respects all treat-bearing people equally and recognizes nontraditional families. He ain’t no damn hippie, though. When Erika pulled out a guitar and started singing folk songs to him, he totally flipped a nutty. Good dog.
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Oh Milo, you’re a great dog. Smart enough to know when two humans are clearly a pair, and smart enough to get the hell out of dodge when the folk songs come out. He knows when a party has jumped the shark. :-)
Well that sure pokes a hole in that whole “it’s so unnatural!” argument.
Guitar music is so natural!
I never thought of the two of us as a pack, especially during our dogless years. What an empowering idea! Thanks, Milo.
Dogs have an amazing capacity for sniffing out the relationships between people. When we first got the Schnauzer, it took her maybe a week (she was a puppy, all of eight weeks old) to determine the pack hierarchy of our combined households. My sister and brother-in-law are the alpha male and female, and the Schnauzer is never happier than when she can cuddle between the two of them on the sofa. When they sit on separate chairs or sofas, she will ricochet from one to the other like a 20-lb furry rubber band.
My mother was amazed, and asked how the heck such a young puppy had figured out the social order of the entire combined household. I told her: scent, posture, tone of voice, the way we interact with each other. All of this gives off clues. It doesn’t surprise me at all that Milo was able to discern the two women were a couple.
Good for him, though, for running away from the folk music! Unless the music in question is really, really good, folk usually sends me running for the hills, too.
Thanks for sharing your wonderful Milo story.
Oh, and to answer a logical question that someone asked me IRL about this: my friends don’t engage in PDA in front of people. So it isn’t as though there was any more touching or affection between the two of them than there would be between any two straight women friends. That wasn’t what clued him in.
Milo is made of win. (So are you and Mr. Improbable, but that’s not what this post is about.)
I have a whole series of photos of what I shall term the “damn hippie crap” incident; I’ll FB them at some point if that’s OK.
Thank you for posting this!
P.S. Aren’t PDAs, by definition, in front of people? ;)
My mom always remarked that her dogs treat me (her only child) differently than they treat her friends, even close friends who are practically family. This includes dogs that she got long, long after I moved away. She always attributed it to the older dogs passing the information down to succeeding generations of dogs. However, your experience makes me wonder if there isn’t something else going on.
Glad you enjoy CREAM! My husband is the distributor for that in Boston. I’m sure he’d love to hook you up wtih a free can or two.