I was thinking about this in terms of my thread about grooming my dog. I keep calling myself a cat person, but clearly I have both. I am not wildly enthusiastic about either - to the point of fawning over my pets - but I feel more comfortable around cats. The cats feel like good company, while the dogs often seem like a whirling vortex of neediness that simply makes me cranky.
Some things about dogs that frustrate me feel like they're related to contradictory aspects of dog ownership.
One of my top pet peeves are people who walk their dogs on hiking trails off-leash. The wilderness is the wilderness. It is no place for domestic animals on the loose, and I always feel like I'm going to snap at the next person who walks by me with their dog running up to and sniffing me, and they're saying "It's OK, he's friendly!" They always seem to be bouncing along as if it's normal and OK to let their dogs have the run of the woods. (I admit I'm equally irritated and being passed by trail runners and mountain bikers. When I go for a hike it is for solitude and quiet enjoyment. Part of that quiet enjoyment in the now crowded backcountry is predicated on everyone being somewhat spaced out and moving at the same speed). The contradiction to that, however, is that I remember running around the woods near my house with my dogs when I was a boy. Granted, they were regularly taken out by rattlesnakes, but it was fun, and there was a bond in wandering around together. There are dog parks in our city, but our current two dogs were adopted during our eight years of being carfree, and one of them is dog aggressive, so they've never had the opportunity to run. That seems sad to me.
That said, I hate to walk with a dog on a leash. Our current two, because we had toddlers at the time they were adopted and so had no time for dog training, were never trained to heel properly. I bought a clicker and some treats at one point, and I was going to try to spend some time training them, but my son got the clicker and the treats every chance he got and clicked away any usefulness to it. While it may seem like a teaching opportunity to have a dog to train and a four-year-old son, the two do not really mix. We did take our older, pre-children dogs to obedience class, and they were not so bad on a leash, but I still did not enjoy walking with them. There was something nice about having a dog when I was young, that left the house in the morning, played in the woods across the street from our house all day - sometimes with me, sometimes without - and then came home at night to rest and be petted. With today's sensibilities about on-leash, in-yard lives, I just feel like the dogs don't get a chance to be dogs. I feel very sad for them, even when I am walking them regularly. Being walked on the leash is not the same as romping through a swamp, but I am absolutely opposed to dogs off-leash on hiking trails.
It seems like a silly thing for a pet owner, but I do not like that they use the bathroom in the back yard. We clean up after them, but it's still our backyard, and it just seems nasty. I used to like eating on the back porch, but now I don't even like to go out there. I'd much rather clean a litter box twice a day than scoop a yard. I also spent a fair amount of money and time getting a native grass, galleta, started in the back yard. It's supposed to be a particularly tough, drought resistant grass that is reputedly good for dog kennels and driveways. The dogs, however, managed to trample it. Our backyard is now hard-packed, bare dirt. I dream of buffalo grass, wildflowers, and an herb garden, but between the chickens and the dogs, nothing can grow back there.
I do enjoy our dog Rosie. She howls back at me when I talk to her, and she likes to wiggle around on her back and make happy sounds. Sometimes I think some breeds of dogs may be better for me than others, but I've never found which ones. Rosie is some kind of Terrier mix; my wife thinks she has some pit bull in her because of her brindle splotches, but she has a small head. My favorite dog was a Doberman that a friend found wandering the side of the highway and gave to me. I read "How to Be Your Dog's Best Friend" by the Monks of New Skete, and following their advice, I took Lucy everywhere with me. She would settle herself into the middle of the backpacking store I managed back then, and I like to think she cut down on shoplifting. She was lots of fun, but one day, when we were checking a friend's mail while he was away, she simply disappeared in the woods. I adopted a Corgi after that, because my sister, who raises, shows, and judges dogs, always insisted that a Corgi was the dog for me. The Corgi was absolutely horrible. It would not behave itself at work, so I had to leave it at home. At home, it dug holes in the lawn of my rental all day. I realized that I could not be that particular dog's best friend, so I placed an ad in the paper and gave it away to a family. That was the last dog I really whole-heartedly supported owning, and the last I owned as a single person. After that, I started feeling that I just wasn't a dog person. My wife likes Labrador Retrievers. There's something about them that I just don't like. They're too something - I don't know what. When I was little, we had a German Shepherd. I didn't like that dog. All it wanted to do was fetch. My favorite dog from my childhood was my brother's dog that was half-doberman and half-german shepherd. Maybe Dobermans are good dogs for me, but I don't want to look like I own a guard dog type dog. (When I visit the shelter, I find the pit bulls to be the sweetest dogs there, but I don't want one of those for the same reason. I don't want people to be threatened, and I don't want to be judged by my dog. I don't want a reputedly tough dog, but for some reason, they seem the sweetest to me, and they're not too whatever it is like Labs. We've also had a herding dog, and I did not particularly like her. I don't like dogs that are obsequious.
I feel more like a cat person because I like the way the cat will sit near me, and maybe rub against my hand if it wants to be petted, but it doesn't sit there and stare at me the way a dog does. The dogs make me nervous. I like a cat's purring. I like that cats will use the litterbox. I like the self-possession of cats. I myself am not a pack animal, and around the dogs, I feel like they need me to be something I'm not. Cats feel like they're on the same wavelength as I am.
[ETA: Rereading this, I think that it's not so much that dogs need me to be something I'm not but that I don't feel like a suburban life can give a dog what it needs to be a dog. Given the lack of farmland, and working opportunities, dogs just seem to atrophy to me, and it makes me terribly sad for them. They seem like animals that really need to go out and get things done, but there's really nothing for them to do in the suburbs that has any dog-meaning. My wife does not share my dog-empathy and dog-guilt and feels like we give them a fine life, so it's really hard to communicate about the dogs.]
I guess I don't have as much to say about cats. Maybe that's because I constantly agonize over dogs. The cats and I just keep each other company.
I didn't mean to make that so long. Clearly, my life has involved both cats and dogs, but I lean toward cats. Do you believe there is such a thing as a cat person or a dog person?
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... and we lived a pretty-much rural lifestyle, so dogs and cats were easy. We've had lots of cats and I've even forgotten some of their names now. And right now we have three cats, which would be perfect except they really don't like each other. DH thinks every so often that we should have a smallish dog, but he doesn't want to HAVE TO walk it, and since we live "in the city" he'd have to do that. I can't imagine a life without cats, tho, so I guess at heart I'm a cat person. DH says that if he dies before I do I'll be that old lady with 100 cats, but truly, I wouldn't. I love them dearly, but one or two or three would be just fine.
