What up, dawgs?

Congratulations Chuck & Sheryl!

For your first wedding present, we got you a dog. You have to come down here to get him though.
Dan: Fulfilling your special request, here is a photo of the dog I pass on the street every day. I’ve been calling him Slim, others call him Negrito. The children at the institute have named him Benito Black. Sorry for the bad picture, but he just doesn’t keep still for very long. In the picture he looks like he has only three legs, but I guarantee that he is a fully functional, 4-legged dog. He is a neighborhood pooch without a specific owner, yet my boss, and possibly others, feed him. He is very friendly and a little bit jumpy. He plays well with the other dogs and yesterday I saw him hanging out with a grey cat. Sometimes I see him at the end of the street, with his back to the wall, surveying his domain. Usually if he sees me coming, and I say anything, he comes running and jumping on me, sort of play-biting. One day he snapped at my hand and took my glove off and I needed to take it back from him. He seems to only hang out on this dead-end street and the people accept him as part of the neighborhood.

The dogs of Mendoza are remarkably well-behaved. Many people own dogs here, usually small ones. They walk them down the street, leashless, without problems. If they meet another dog, there might be a quick sniff but rarely a conflict. They do their dirty business wherever they want and nobody seems to care. I think folks just let their dogs out to run free. In addition to the dogs claimed by people, there are feral pooches we see in the plazas or walking down sidewalks. They aren’t at all skinny or mangy. Maybe someone takes care of them too. I think that natural selection has created a canine gene pool suited to urban living. For example, most Mendocino dogs, when they want to cross a street, wait at a street corner. When the humans cross, so do the dogs. Pretty sharp. If they don’t follow the people …well, survival of the fittest. One day we had a dog follow us for maybe a mile, as we walked home from somewhere. He waited with us to cross streets, corner after corner. He turned when we turned. Sometimes he’d run ahead, but look back from time to time to see if we were still coming. Anyone would’ve guessed he was our pet. We ditched the little guy at our door when he was running ahead to the next corner.