2022

Some people recoil from the face-lick as if the canine tongue were a branding iron. But not me. I love the face-lick and if it comes with dog breath, then I love that, too.

But there's the other kind of dog breath, the kind that enters through their mouth and nose, passes through their larynx, and travels on to their lungs where life-giving oxygen is extracted into the bloodstream so they can do all the things dogs do that give us joy and enrich our lives.

Over the past four years, I've come to not only love that kind of dog breath, but I've become obsessed with it. Most of my days are consumed by dog breath. My friends and family are concerned that I've developed dog breath OCD. They tell me I should seek counseling and stop with the dog breath already.

What they don't understand is that my eyes work differently than theirs. They look at an animal and see a dog or a cat or a horse. My eyes show me an animal not as an it  but as a someone, not homo sapiens but an individual equally worthy of love. I've shared more of my life with my animal companions than any human. When my companion suffers, I suffer. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those other peoples' eyes or that either of our pair of eyes is better than the other. I'm just saying our eyes look at animals and see completely different things.

This morning, September 9th, 2022, my companion of 14 years breathed long, deep, silent breaths after being on the verge of fatal suffocation for nearly a year. That experience changed me and filled me with purpose just as if she had been a family member of the species homo sapiens. Those of you with eyes that work like mine know what I mean. We understand each other.

I stand by my love of dog breath. I'm comfortable being obsessed with it. There's an idiom — to 'die trying' — for having an unwavering commitment to a goal, to something meaningful and worthwhile. These animals, our beloved companions, are suffering needlessly and it has to stop.

So if I die trying, put me in an urn with the inscription, "For the Love of Dog Breath".