Humans have been living with dogs for at least 14,000 years.  That means our relationship with dogs predates agriculture, the written word, and civilization.  So you would think that by now people and dogs would have come to understand one another, and reached the necessary accommodation between species that would enable them to live together in harmony.  There are dogs in 60 million American households.  But are those 60 million harmonious households?  I’m not so sure.

Is it possible that dogs are beginning to turn on us?  Wally Conron, a dog breeder in Australia credited with breeding the first labradoodle, recently said out loud that he believes labradoodles — his own creation — are insane.  He called them “a Frankenstein monster” “plagued by mental problems.”  Our experience house sitting with labradoodles seems to confirm this conclusion.  We spent five days in a home with a labradoodle who destroyed everything of ours he could get hold of — from a newspaper to the case holding the reading glasses we use to read the newspaper — as well as a number of things belonging to the homeowners — before we got everything that would move off the kitchen counters and island and up onto high shelves leaving him to chew holes in the living room carpet.  He also did damage to the things in the yard outside the house that would fit in his mouth, and barked at us for reasons we could never figure out.  This was a dog whom we had been assured by his owner had finished first in his class at obedience school.  Ha.  For that to have been true, he had to have been the only dog in his class, or been the classmate of Cujo.

When we returned to the house after the sit to see the homeowners, they had the dog tied down in the house so that he couldn’t move.  It wasn’t just us.  Even his owners couldn’t handle this poor dog.

What was the matter there?  Didn’t the dog know that we had been friends for 14,000 years and owed each other a little more consideration than he was showing?

I don’t want to go too far with this.  In house sitting for scores of dogs over the last three plus years, nearly all of them have respected our 14,000-year friendship and been nothing but sweet and affectionate toward us.  And I don’t want to racially profile any breed of dog.  But what if Wally Conron is right?  What if labradoodles — now among us nearly everywhere — are insane?  What if other designer breeds are also insane but their breeders haven’t been as honest as Wally Conran?  And what if corgis resent us for breeding them with no tails and short legs?  We dog sat for a corgi who bit me on the hand every morning to remind me that he hasn’t forgiven us.  And there was another dog we cared for who was aggressive, and once pulled me over while I was walking him, whose owner had assured us when we agreed to sit for him that he was a “chill dog”.

This “chill dog” tried to break my leg.  The corgi was getting ready to draw blood if I even looked at him funny.  And the labradoodle set out to destroy everything we owned before turning on us if we turned our backs on him.  Are these the first signs that dogs have tired of their 14,000-year dependence on us and are getting ready to turn on us?  Are labradoodles really insane, or just diabolical?  Corgis, for sure, are the latter.

The dogs on Main Street howl

‘Cause they understand

Bruce Springsteen