Man’s Best Friend
In Los Angeles, every year is the year of the dog.
You see them everywhere: big ones and small ones, fat ones and thin ones; you hear of them being held for ransom, and see them being fed with a more wholesome diet than a large percentage of the world’s human population.
I have seen dogs gamboling through the surf at Long Beach in inflatable orange lifejackets, dogs being given perms and pedicures and blueberry facials, and dogs wearing the sort of silk neckerchiefs normally reserved for pre-revolutionary French Aristocrats and tossers from Clapham who use the word ‘banter’ and wear bright red trousers. In Palm Springs, where Los Angeles goes to weekend, there are hotels that welcome dogs, but not children.
Perhaps it’s an extended apology from greater LA to all the desert coyotes that have been gradually driven away by urban sprawl, but dogs are a part of the fabric of life here. Angelenos love to talk about their ‘spirit animals’, but here everyone’s spirit animal is the same creature, and it’s really just a question of what yours says about you.
Depending on where you live in LA and who you are, a dog is a companion, a fashion accessory, a guard, a status symbol, a substitute child, a sibling, a badge of your political values, a weapon, or all of the above. They’re an extension of your personality & semiotic indicator in the same way that cars are.
I have encountered dogs that are nothing more than walking Wikipedia entries tailor-made for exclusivity: Egyptian variants that are ‘the oldest known breed of dog’, Siberian Huskies who seem as as ill-adapted to life in the Californian heat as goths are to summer, and some pooches so in-bred and cross-grafted that their names scarcely seem real at all.
Example: Shitsupoobrador
Maybe it’s just part of the wider Californian pre-occupation with all things ‘artisanal’ & organic, but here pure-breed dogs often come with certificates of provenance & origin, family trees and provable genealogies normally reserved for members of the English upper class who can trace their bloodlines back to the Norman Conquest, or the ‘long-lost’ relatives of recently-deceased multi-millionaires trying to convince juries of their claim to the remaining fortune.
These furry friends are a luxury good, a product to be traded in the American capitalist economy, and when people are done with them they go the way of other disposable goods in the USA — I’ve now received three emails at work looking for homes for dogs that have been found discarded at the roadside, left out in the street, or tossed away into a dumpster like trash.
This has led to a growing cottage industry of rehoming and rescuing. Amongst a certain type of Angeleno society, there is an inverse relationship between the ugliness of your dog and the beauty of your soul: the more horrific the canine, the purer the soul of its owner — purchasing new dogs is frowned upon, and ‘rescuing’ from the existing surplus stock is encouraged.
The truth is that this oversupply of pooches exist for a reason: Los Angeles, beneath the friendliness and sunshine and Californian Happiness Prerogative, can be a lonely city: unlike New York or London, its sprawl & layout leaves few opportunities for communal gathering & street-life, many of its most interesting events happen behind closed doors, and its population can spend their time moving around in wheeled steel capsules from one air-conditioned strip-mall to another without brushing up against one another. It’s a city with an enormous number of people who spend large amounts of time without the sort of consistent company that even the dullest of office desk jobs will offer.
In a city like this, a dog is a crutch against loneliness, and often the only company that some people in this town have for days on end.
Here, weed might be a readily-dispensed solution for the anxieties of Californian life (which, to a Syrian, I’m sure would look pretty rosy), but dogs are an alternative, cuddly stress-release: you can legally classify yours as a ‘therapy dog’, a creature whose sole purpose it to give psychological comfort and relieve the stress of humans.
(No, this is not a joke).
As part of my ongoing attempt to become a massive Californian cliche, my wife and I adopted a dog — a tricolour Beagle mix called Boggle.
He spent the first three months we owned him shitting with such alarming regularity that we should have named him Bog Roll.
What’s perhaps most frightening about all of this is how attached it’s possible to become to a small creature who likes you mainly because you feed him regularly. My lock screen on my phone is a picture of my wife; my wife’s is a picture of our dog.
Much like everyone else in this city, it’s hard not to fall into the trap of treating him as an extension of my personality — like a new parent, I take pride in telling anyone who will listen how gentle, how affectionate, how clever he is, whilst failing to mention how stubborn he is, how fat he is becoming because he eats like a pig given any opportunity, and how regularly and violently he breaks wind.
Even so, there occurs at least once a day a moment when I take him for a late-night stroll, and somewhere after going out the front door and him fouling my neighbour’s front lawn, the streets are suddenly empty of cars and pin-drop quiet and we’re alone together as just a human and his dog — in that moment, foolish & imaginary as it might be, I’m able to enjoy a sense of pure animal companionship, the same promise that must have driven my distant ancestors all those hundreds of years ago to slip a leash on a wild dog and go walking with them at night.
