I'm not what you would call a "social person". It's not that I dislike people, lack friends or spend all my time in a unabomber shack in the woods. I've just never been somebody who thrives in... peopley places.
I'm always more inclined to spend my time with animals and my openness to this fact seems to shock and horrify the extroverts.
I was flipping channels once and there was nothing on, so I inadvertently ended up landing on "When Animals Attack". In this episode we witness a man walking up his driveway to collect the Sunday morning newspaper. On reaching the bottom of his driveway, the neighbor videotaping pans out to show a massive grizzly bear eating from this man's garbage cans, a few feet away!
The man, seemingly oblivious to the bear's existence, bends over to retrieve his newspaper and yawns. For a few seconds it seems that, now that his mission is accomplished, is going to stroll back to his house leaving the bear eating his garbage.
Until, he didn't.
The man turned and walked the few steps towards the bear, who lifted his head as the man approached. Then, with a sudden and ridiculous flail of his arm, the man whacked the bear squarely on the head with his newspaper.
For a brief, breathless second the man and the bear size each other up, the bear's expression, seems to say,
"Hey?! What the heck? You know I'm a bear right?"
Considering the show is called "When Animals Attack" I'm sure you can imagine what came next. Surprisingly, the man survived the excruciating mauling he received and they interviewed him for the show. The thing that still baffles me to this day? Nobody ever asked him why? (Or perhaps they did and his reasoning wasn't appropriate for television.)
When people ask me why I'm drawn to animals more than people, this is the best story I have to tell them. In a world where lots of people can be lots of different things, I have found one thing to be ultimately true over the years: no matter who you are, what you do, who you love etc, etc, if you are human, you are either a bear or a Newspaper Guy.
That sounds weird right? Well, let me explain.
Everybody could guess what motivated the bear. He was hangry and the Newspaper Guy tried to take his food. I'd probably react the same way under the same circumstances.
(Ahem, good possibility I have conducted Hangry induced maulings in my past... so I gotcha bear)
But Newspaper Guy? What motivated him? That was quite clearly a bear and he didn't need to be a panda for it to be more black and white than that.
People like Newspaper Guy, make me anxious and before you go telling me that not all people are Newspaper Guy, he's more common than you think...
There is no way you can tell what motivates him, he has no respect for natural order, and his judgment calls give me the impression that hanging out with him may lead to a situation where I die, in my bathrobe at the end of a driveway after getting eaten by A BEAR.
It's my theory of Bear VS Newspaper Guy that always makes me shake my head when people tell me their dog is "unpredictable". Or even worse when they tell me that my reactive
dog is unpredictable.
The truth is, the amount of effort you put into understanding any animal will dictate your intuition for predicting them.
If you are the type of person who says your dog is unpredictable with finality, he's probably just a bear trying not to eat a Newspaper Guy and I'd sooner take my chances with the bear.
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