My general attitude towards dogs can be pretty much summed up with the words "a waste of perfectly good fur that could have gone into making a cat."

Oh, I know that in theory there are good dogs out there, but my experience out here has been that people move to the country, buy the biggest dog they can find and then give this dog zero training. Rotties can easily break 100 pounds, German Shepherds and various canines of the setter persuasion can run 70 pounds. If they aren't trained, then you've got a very large, very out of control creature hurling itself at strangers.

Ninety-nine times out of one hundred that stranger who has been toppled over by your slobbering rottie would be me, of course, because dogs have an unerring sense of who The Cat Person is in the crowd. I tend to avoid dogs, because of this.

But tragedy has touched the life of a friend and there's no one at her place to watch her dog. Other friends of hers are feeding the dog and putting it in the house for the night. Dogs being pack creatures and all, though, they need companionship. I promised that I would come by and take the dog for walks so that it has a little extra exercise and human contact.

Frankly, I offered because this particular dog is a very placid, elderly, somewhat chubby dog. He doesn't even wear a collar because he doesn't roam.

This looked to be a piece of cake.

Every time I show up the dog does the whole, "Arf, arf, come any closer and I'll bite your leg off" thing until I call his name. Then he races over to me, a quivering mass of tail wagging doggy joy, and I give him a few pets. Off we go on our walk down my road. I like to cover about 5K or 3 miles.

For the first little while the dog sticks close by, but then he heads out in front. I speed up to try to catch the dog. The dog hears me getting closer, the dog speeds up. Remember, this is an elderly, chubby dog. I speed up a bit more because, after all, I am Marn, Warrior Princess, Cardio Queen.

THE FRICKEN DOG, WHO WAS PROBABLY AROUND WHEN MOSES PARTED THE RED SEA, BEGINS TO RUN. Because, you see, the dog has decided that it is alpha and I'm most definitely much closer to omega and there is no way on God's green earth that this dog is going to let me be its equal on this walk.

So what I have envisioned as a nice, quiet, contemplative walk on my back road ends up being me jogging behind an elderly, overweight, very determined dog. Most embarrassing of all, I have to work to keep up with this beast.

When the dog becomes winded and I actually have a chance of catching it, it simply throws on the brakes, turns around, and heads for home.

I can't even control the direction we take.

Who's walking whom here?

I think we can all agree that it's the dog walking me.

--Marn

Mileage on the Marnometer: 443.46 miles.
Oh man. This is going to be hard
Goal for 2004: 1,000 miles - 1609 kilometers