A Word A Week Photograph Challenge = Dog

I’ve discovered this person does photo challenges on her blog so I’m jumping in on this one:

Once a week I will dip into my old English Oxford dictionary and pick a word on the page that it falls open at.  The challenge is to post a photograph, poem, story – whatever the genre you like best to describe of what that word means to you. Put a link back to my challenge page so others can take part if they wish.

A  Word a Week Challenge – Dog

This little guy was sitting in a shop doorway in Brugges. Don’t you just want to give him a hug?

Feeling low in Brugges

I don’t own dogs. I never did. I always felt they were too high maintenance whereas a cat is low maintenance, doesn’t take a lot of attention except for what it demands, of course. Cats are discerning, independent and if they ever evolve with opposable thumbs and can open their own food packets or tins, we’re all in deep trouble.

Dogs are quite useful, of course. They can be trained to do some pretty awesome things. Have you ever watched a dog herd sheep? It’s amazing. One I saw in Ireland was trained so well, he tried to herd one that was walking around inside a barn. On the other hand, I saw a full sized poodle being used as a guide dog for a blind woman and it kept walking her too close to telephone poles!

You can’t really train a cat unless it’s something it wants to do. My mother’s cat will fetch if she’s in a playful mood. Seriously. You can throw her toy down the hall, she’ll run after it and bring it back to you to throw again. She does *not* think she’s a dog. Heaven forbid.

A cat will only eat a little bit until it’s satisfied. They graze at the food bowl all day. A dog inhales the dish of food and is always ready for more should you think he’s starving because he ate so fast. Some dogs are known to eat themselves to death, or would if you put them in a room full of food.

To bring this back to travel, I’m not usually on the lookout for random dogs or cats though we did sit in a cafe in Amsterdam only to notice a cat curled up alongside us on the bench seat. Another time, in a pub in the Lake District in England, we noticed a couple of people come in out of the chill with their dogs on leashes. That’s common in the U.K. where dogs are usually welcome in the pub even though food is served there. Little lap dogs often are seen in French cafes as well, accompanying their owners.