Thursday, December 17, 2009

Walk into an animal shelter with the scent of chicken on your clothing–not just any chicken, mind you, but chicken marinated in savory chipotle pepper adobo–and you will command an attentive canine audience. That’s what I learned from my last trip to the pound, which happened to be adjacent to my weekly visit to Chipotle, and I’m still trying to understand the implications of smelling delicious to dogs.

There were a lot more jumpers during the visit, for starters, along with a higher frequency of frenzied barking. “They’re in jail,” explained the staffer, and accordingly kennel manners shouldn’t be regarded as an accurate representation of true behavior. I wasn’t so sure, though, because a dog that leaps two or three feet into the air, kennel or no kennel, certainly has the capacity to do likewise in your home. Eau de Burrito may actually be far more than an offshoot of lunch, then, and I plan on cloaking myself in it when I continue my dog hunt this weekend.

And while part of me wishes the same hounds I saw two weeks ago are still there, another part of me hopes for a new batch, perhaps one with the right mutt for me. There are really two main breeds, the staff member told me as he made an imaginary fork with his hands: those who hunt, and those who are domesticated. He then listed the attributes of each, to which I replied that neither sounded interesting. I wanted something in the middle. “A social dog,” he concluded. A social dog. Imagine that.