Published: March 21, 2007 10:50 am            

Getting carried away by dogs

I like dogs. (I may have mentioned this once or twice.)

Some of my first memories are of my first dog, a mutt (excuse me — mixed breed) that I had when I was five or six years old. Her name was Shadow, and I thought she was the best dog in the whole world, the smartest, bravest, etc. Not the best-behaved, because she tended to go roll in the mud and then roll around on the couch or stick her head through the screen part of the screen door when barking at an Egregious Cat, but a good dog nonetheless.

I’ve had other dogs; all have been distinctive. There was the psychotic dachshund who bit my sister’s nose, the super-genius mutt who figured out how to unbolt the gate, the crazed wild dog who liked to escape the yard and tear up and down the street. I liked all of them. All of them were good in various ways, even when they weren’t actually being good.

I always figured that you could tell who the good people were by whether or not they liked dogs, and that the more a person liked dogs, the better that person was.

I may have been wrong.

It turns out it’s possible to like dogs too much, or at least that’s what I’ve gathered by looking at the Internet. If you’ve ever wondered what the seriously dog-obsessed people are doing, I can now tell you: they’re on Dogster creating a website for their dog.

Dogster, at , is a site for people who like dogs, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It begins to get a bit worrying when you see the opening text: “Welcome to Dogster, where every dog has a webpage!” The site is a bit like a MySpace, but for dogs — because modern dogs are all about the social networking through the Internet; smelling other dogs’ butts is completely out of style.

Parts of the website, even parts of the community on the website are actually useful to dog owners, dealing with health issues and so on, but it’s still overrun with the somewhat obsessive. One of the site memes is a tendency to write forum posts as though the dog were writing them: “Yo! Wazzup, dawgs? … Here’s a pawty for all the dawgs out there …” and so on.

And that’s not as bad as when they start describing their health issues: “I am scooting on my mom’s light carpet and had diarrhea the past 2 days. we think its my anal sacs …”

This is just wrong. Or something.

It’s not a bad site, and it does have some useful stuff, but I just had trouble getting into it. Perhaps you’ll enjoy it more. Perhaps you’ve been looking for a place where you can write about your dog’s anal sacs — as your dog! If so, then waste no more time reading this. Head right over to Dogster.

Something I also enjoy is working in amateur theater. I’ve directed a few plays, acted in a few and teched a bunch, and it’s always been fun. What I’ve never done (I can’t believe how many personal deficiencies I’ve discovered this week) is decide that I should direct a play with dogs in it.

This is why I have no involvement with the site Dogdrama, which you may peruse at your leisure by going to .

Frighteningly, it turns out that this is not something new, but that it was popular with the Victorians. If you’ll take a look at the “History of Dog Drama” link on the front page, you can learn far more than you wanted to know about plays with dogs in them and why they should be avoided. (Fleas, mostly, although there’s always the possibility of an accident right at an important moment.)

I should point out that some of these plays apparently involve the dog playing a dog, but many of them appear to put the dog into a starring role.

Anyway, check out the website, and if you’re really enthused, then go and see the play, although it’s in Virginia, so you’ve got a bit of a drive ahead of you.

Me? I’m going to go back to wishing I had a dog so that I could avoid putting him in any plays, and so that I could never ever ever pretend to be him and write about his anal sacs on the Web.

Scott Wilson can be e-mailed via .

        

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