Showing posts with label dog behavior. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dog behavior. Show all posts

Saturday, January 5, 2019

At the End of an Old Year in Pacifica

    (New Year's Eve, 2018, Pacifica)

As the people
in the loud house
toast something
or other, a dog
stands among them,
eager to find
actionable meaning
in a human sound
or gesture. The
people know what
many words and gestures
mean, and this creates
a burden the dog
will never know.
All gathered are
mammals on the edge of
a coast. In its way
that is something to toast.


hans ostrom 2019

Monday, April 18, 2011

Sympathy: A Rant

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Sympathy: A Rant

So there's this video out there of a dog
in Chile that gets hit by a car on a freeway
and is lying on the asphalt, traffic coming on, tons
of rolling steel, and another dog on the
other side of the freeway sees what's going
on, makes its way across traffic to the median,
gets over that, and with its teeth and paws,
pulls to safety the other dog, which survives.

So where we are now in this stupid muddy
pit of greed, the U.S., is that we can't even agree
to maintain social serves that are so basic--
are forms of prudent, active sympathy--
that at least one dog in South America can
instinctively master the concept and act accordingly
better than we can.  Pooling resources so that

everyone's all right--fed, clothed, sheltered, doctored--
is not conservative, socialist, or liberal: it is really
so basic it is canine. A question is can the citizens
of the wealthiest large nation (and their so-called
representatives) be at least as smart,
sympathetic, and effective as a Chilean dog?
If the answer is yes, then get this American house
in order. If the answer is no, then the nation
is lying on a freeway, tons of steel onrushing.
So ends the sympathetic rant. Bowww-wowwww.

Copyright 2011