With all of these heart breaking and life wrenching floods occurring around Queensland many alarmists are speculating on the meaning of this natural disaster, on a spectrum from end times and Armageddon to the cause and effect of climate change due to our raping and pillaging of the environment. I personally can’t see past the self centred fact that rainy weekends with the kids make me feel like Jack from Stephen King’s “The Shining”.
But I think my dog might be onto something. When the first storm hit, the kids and I were away on holidays and the week before Christmas she somehow got out, went missing for three days and was thankfully and prayerfully returned to us through the RSPCA but injured from a car hit. She is terrified of storms but felt the instinct to escape (maybe in some misguided way tried to find us to protect us). The whole episode cost us $2300 on a femoral hip ostectomy three days before Christmas (along with all the other stress and expenses!)
Now, I know that trying to psychoanalyse a dog is a bit far- fetched , but I can’t help seeing correlations. I mean maybe animals know something and she was trying to get out to get on the ark. I mean if she wasn’t confused by domesticity her instinct would have sensed the storms and floods and got the hell out to higher ground , but instead due to loyalty she left it too late, got lost finding us and was stopped short by a car that violently changed her course.
It occurred to me, if I wasn’t confused by my domestic role in life and not absolutely torn by loyalty, would I have hightailed it out of my life to find safer higher ground on a blissful self centred plateau?
Maybe the dog not driven by logic, science and rationality knows something we don’t – is it the second coming? Has our free will bastardised the earth to such a point that we are no longer environmentally sustainable and everything is dramatically winding down and degradation is seeping out of the pores of the earth?
Maybe the dog is having a mid life crisis and is my alter ego. I mean they say that pets tune into our emotional state and her behaviour has been peculiar in direct alignment with me recommencing therapy. The dog is suddenly having an identity crisis just like me. She is also mid life in dog years. This breed grooms themselves like a cat, are aloof, don’t bark, don’t smell as they have hair, not fur. They are not demanding and would never impose on someone else but are completely loyal (much like I used to be).
Now she barks, digs holes, wakes me at three in the morning demanding to go outside and then stays there (she has always slept inside loyally by one of the children’s bed in protective mode), she does a handstand to pee because she can’t be totally male by cocking her leg and will not squat in the conformist and feminine way so she compromises. When she is not escaping to run away or sleeping outside, she hides under our bed or takes up residence for days on end in my wardrobe cowering (incidentally, she has also started to smell from licking herself obsessively and my wardrobe and clothes are starting to smell like dog!)
Does this really mean in alter ego terms that if she is actually tuned into my neurosis and is in fact mimicking my behaviour , that I secretly want to abusively bark at everyone; would like to reinstate the nightlife I had in my single days and go digging in the soil of my youth; I am conflicted between the masculine business woman I castrated to become a home maker but that I am not totally comfortable in this role so I am still trying to work out how to “mark my territory”; I can’t decide if I want to run back to the workforce or hide at home because I’ve lost all my instincts and confidence ; and ultimately I need a season in life to lick my wounds and smell offensive so everyone backs off and leaves me alone while I repair.
As I said, trying to psychoanalyse the dog using my own mental framework is a futile exercise as she doesn’t speak but t is an interesting exercise to speculate......
