We have this picture of dogs as frolicking creatures, leaping about in an open area, splashing happily in water, and never seeming to tire of playing games of fetch. While those pictures are real, they’re misleading, they’re occasional, because as anybody who owns dogs can tell you, they are basically lazy. Unless another dog comes on the scene, or strolls by, your dog will essentially spend entire days just flopped down on the terrazzo (in a hot climate like Guyana, they love that) often falling completely to sleep.
Even when strangers come to your house, your dog will go into watchman mode and bark furiously, and threaten, and seem ready to kill, but once he susses out that there’s no threat he often becomes just another wimp to the stranger, even cuddling up for a head scratch from the same guy he wanted to decimate ten minutes earlier, and before you know it Rover is prostrate in some corner taking another one of his frequent fives.
Now, there are exceptions. For reasons known only to dogs, dogs will not take to certain people no matter how often they
