My husband and I feel strongly about the rights of all people to be heard.
We support the rights of the disenfranchised to have a seat at the table, and for all those in minority status—whether religious, gender-based, cultural, or ethnic—to be treated with dignity and equality.
We believe that all people deserve a voice.
Strangely enough, our dog Pugsley has suddenly taken our philosophy to heart after all these years.
This is apparently why our formerly voiceless rescue dog has suddenly taken to shouting. All night. Every night. For every single night he’s been kenneled for the last two weeks.
I really can’t get into details, but my husband may or may not have engaged in a little reply-barking of his own at an ungodly-early hour in the morning.
(I am just saying it’s possible, that’s all. He admits to nothing.)
Perhaps a little background is in order here. It recently came to our attention that our dog Pugsley decided being housebroken is ONLY applicable when we’re in the room with him, and when we’re not, he’s free to lift a leg wherever he pleases. Of course, this immediately led to a howling, complaining, desperately shouting, piteously groaning, hyperventilating Pugsley being re-introduced to his kennel for training reasons. And at the very moment the kennel door shuts, a Superman-style transformation in the phone booth occurs: peace-loving, sleepy, lazy, politically-indifferent Pugsley instantly transforms into a growling, spitting, drooling, aggressively-anxious, floor-reverberating freedom fighter.
After four nights of the kenneled shouting because an outraged Pugsley still wanted to sleep on the bedroom floor with his special pillow-bed and blanket, I understood why sleep-deprived parents give in to their tantrum-ing child and let them have whatever it is that they want.
Because sometimes you just want the shouting to stop.
So this is why my husband and I have been seriously re-thinking our former liberality of thought in order to dis-include four-footed, hairy, in-the-minority mammals from this freedom-and-dignity-for-all equation. You know, especially the ones who suddenly discover—after approximately 9 years on this planet—that they actually know how to BARK! after all. That they have a VOICE! in the world! That they have a SEAT! at the table and a SPOT IN THE CORNER OF THE MASTER BED!
Such inconvenient nonsense.
But our new conclusions on this matter have not yet had a trickle-down effect on the minority member of the household, namely Pugsley.
So we find ourselves in the unenviable position of scheming to make Pugsley forget he has a voice again.
Yes, we KNOW this is horribly un-PC of us. But we say to you: try sleeping in the same house with a shouting animal night after night, and you, too, may find yourself believing and doing things you never would have imagined yourself capable of just mere days prior.
But that’s just the trouble with freedom: once tasted, it’s not easily forgotten. And as for all that dog-obedience-theory about how dogs don’t really have memory?
So. Not. True. At. All.
Pugsley remembers the taste of nighttime freedom screamingly well (literally).
Oops—one moment please—I should probably go check that the newly-given-to-hyperventilation Pugsley is still breathing.
If you’d have any interest in participating in the abrupt, uncalled-for stripping of rights from a defenseless minority member of society, do let us know and we’ll immediately arrange for you to come dogsit Pugsley.
While my husband and I fall exhausted unto the very nearest horizontal surface in order to catch a few winks of (blessedly quiet) shut-eye.
In the meantime, I am rethinking my religious and political views in order to eradicate freedom from all those who might inconvenience me.
It is apparently quite a long list, and it’s going to be a l-o-n-g project.
I hope it’s worth it.