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The Authentic Eclectic
From Family Dog to Family Member — They’ve Come a Long Way
They used to sleep in the snow, and now they sleep in our bed
I’ve been blessed to have dogs in my life as a child and as an adult. Today, we have three. My husband — the family chef — cooks their food, and we sometimes have family dinner or family breakfast together. On a typical Sunday, family dinner might be a tuna casserole, ours with onions and spices, theirs unflavored with extra meat and finely chopped noodles for small teeth. After Thanksgiving, they have leftovers for days just like we do. Theirs, finely chopped dark meat with mashed potatoes; ours, everything else.
Surrounded by my furry companions, as now when two are snoring on the desk next to my computer and one is down the hall on house patrol, I rarely think about the construct of “family dog” from when I was growing up in the 1970s, but it saddens me when I do. As with many things, those were very different times. It’s not that our canine companions were mistreated exactly; they were just treated like — dogs.
I was born in Canada to Polish immigrants who’d crossed the Atlantic six months before I arrived. My first language was not English, and many of the traditions I grew up with did not fit the same mold as my peers. I…
