I met a dog the other day that made me wonder about a thing. I don’t often sit and think about stuff, mostly because it can be dangerous… you know, like getting me into more trouble that I can handle. But today this thing made me consider something that I never really saw before.
The park was full of peoples and their pups. No cats, that’s not allowed. So with all the action, it was easy enough to meet new friends. This was no problem finding a few pups to race around with and plenty of peoples ready to throw a ball.
That’s when I noticed the lady with her pup were just off playing by themselves. It wasn’t like the rest of the groups that played together, instead, they were just walking around and sort of playing here and there with a single ball. So quiet and relatively unexciting. It was odd.
But I wanted to make them my friend. What can I say, I is dog. This is what I do. So I went over to them, but they slipped away, like they knew I was coming. Sneaky, but not that fast at least. After a few extra leaps and bounds, I happened upon them and introduced myself.
While the lady was polite and patted my head and tugged my ear, her friend didn’t even want to give me a sniff. Such a picky dog? Maybe I wasn’t wagging my tail enough. So I tried a little harder, but my tail didn’t want to do the circle thing that makes the youngsters giggle.
I could tell it was going to be hard to make friends with this pup. Mostly because he was so shy. It was strange that they’d be out here at the park though, being shy and all, but maybe they just hadn’t realized how much fun it is when there’s more friends to play together.
So I grabbed the ball that his friend had tossed and squeaked it as fast as I could. It made tons of noise, and I knew I had everyone’s attention. All the eyes and ears were on me, even his friend was studying me very carefully, a little shy herself too perhaps. But not for long.
He tried to take it from me, but I wouldn’t give it up so easily. I’d let him get right close, and then snatch away at the last second. This was a tease, I know, but it made that rather shy pup open up and challenge me to a race to see who was really the fastest rascal on the block.
Eventually we became pals and chasing after the ball together made all the fears go away. So I happen to know a little trick, very useful particularly to those with a tail to chase. And as long as you’re fast enough, you can get someone to chase you, no matter how shy you might be.
