Dog, the Great Teacher

I believe dog is the perfect creature. The original subtitle for my novella The Sixth Day was “The day God should have quit,” my conviction being that God should have stopped creating after he made the dog. Moving forward, I altered the marketing phrase to “The day God almost quit,” the thought being that the Great Mover knew he had created something special with the dog but pressed on anyway and made man. Oh well …

Unconditional Love

Despite growing up next to Doc Dapson’s veterinary clinic in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, I was never allowed to have a dog. My mother had all the wrong reasons. Mrs. tVM and I have been married 43 years, and dogs have been a part of our family for 34 of them. Dogs have taught me much. The most valuable lesson? Unconditional love. Unconditional love is the greatest lesson Jesus teaches, and his great lesson is exemplified no better than by the dog.

The dog teaches many other valuable things like trust, loyalty, sacrifice … among all of God’s creatures, his nobility is unmatched and far exceeds that of the human being. This website is subtitled “In Search of Kalos Kagathos.” To me, Kalos Kagathos is the ancient Greek expression for ‘the whole man,” he who is sound of mind, spirit and body. The woman who is, is noble.

Yesterday morning on my weekly foray through the antique and curio shops in River Falls, I came upon a sign I could not walk away from. It now hangs on the wall in our entryway, so that every time I enter my home and my dogs greet me with tails wagging, even in old age, I will know and remember that they have set the moral standard for me to achieve.

Mitakuye Oyasin