Here’s the thing: there is a certain percentage of humanity who, upon seeing a dog, mentally exclaim, “YAY! A dog! I love dogs! I want to pet them!” Maybe it’s the 51% of people who prefer dogs to cats.
Here’s what I’ve learned at doggie daycare: there is a certain percentage of dogs who, upon seeing a human, mentally exclaim, “YAY! A human! I love humans! I need to kiss them!” And, if possible, they run to the human to do just that.
As much as we love dogs, dogs love us. I think that’s wonderful!
But an enthusiastic dog running toward you, possibly leaping at your face, isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time. I remember when I used to be afraid of dogs.
My brother adopted an enormous black lab/pit bull mix. Chloe was the first dog I had a relationship with. I used to visit my brother every year from Christmas Eve till a day or two after New Years. I loved these visits. And suddenly he had a terrifying dog.
When I first got to his house the year he adopted Chloe, I entered the house along with the family, so she didn’t bark at me much. (She had a gigantic voice - way deeper and gruffer than you would expect from someone her size). The next morning, my entire family went to church, leaving me alone with the dog.
The moment their car left the driveway, Chloe stalked over to where I was reading a book, planted herself directly in front of me, and began barking in the most menacing way imaginable. I was terrified. I tried talking to her. I tried ignoring her. She held her ground, barking. She inched closer to me.
I had no option. She clearly was ready to kill me for occupying space in her house, so I had to go outside. I grabbed my book and ran out the nearest door - not looking back - slamming the door behind me. Whew! I had forgotten my coat, my phone, my coffee. But, I had escaped with my life. I read, sitting on their cold front porch, until everyone returned an hour and a half later.
After that, my brother had me feed Chloe at each meal until I left. Gradually I began to get to know her. Eventually, she became my cherished walking buddy.
My point is that dogs can be terrifying when you don’t know what they’re trying to tell you.
In my job at the doggie daycare I am always impressed with how careful they are with their mouths - they often put their mouths on the humans (although we work on training them not to) and they certainly play with the other dogs with their mouths.
I know that before I knew much about dogs, when a dog put their mouth on me I was sure I was about to lose a hand. And that’s the thing. People who don’t have the opportunity to get acquainted with a dog see those enormous teeth, and think, “Why wouldn’t that dog just rip my throat out?”
But most dogs think humans are the best thing in the world. Most dogs you can absolutely trust.
Meanwhile, I wanted to write a quick update on the Marshall Fire. Officials are still trying to figure out what sparked that fire, but the most recent theory is that the remains of turn-of-the-last-century coal mines are to blame.
There are 1,736 known abandoned mines in the State of Colorado, and according to a 2018 report, 38 of them are on fire. I found this shocking, but I have since learned that there are 68 abandoned mines on fire in one tiny region of India, many thousand in Indonesia, and in China, ten percent of their coal is rendered unreachable by coal fires.
There was an article in 2010 in Discover Magazine about all of the coal fires. According to Discover: "Coal fires are as ancient and as widely distributed as coal itself. People have reported fires in coal beds close to the earth’s surface for thousands of years—in fact, Australia’s Burning Mountain, once thought to be a volcano, sits atop a coal seam that has been on fire for some six millennia. But ever since the Industrial Revolution, the number of coal fires has grown dramatically. There are now thousands of such fires around the world, in every country—from France to South Africa to Borneo to China—where mining exposes coal deposits."
Louisville, one of the two towns that burned in the Marshall Fire, was an old mining town. The fires in abandoned coal mines are notorious for always working their way to the surface.
According to a 2008 article in Wildfire Today, “an 8-year-old boy . . . suffered burns on his foot when he walked into an area of Golden Hills park in Colorado Springs, Colorado that was covered in coal dust. Left over from coal mining operations about 80 years earlier, the dust was on fire, smoldering, and it melted the boy’s plastic shoe and gave him second degree burns. If the boy had not ‘discovered’ the fire, it would have spread into nearby vegetation.”
So, why aren’t these fires put out? Apparently that's a difficult project. Generally, firefighters try to cut off the oxygen supply to the fires. They inject water into the seam, or they try to encase the burning seam in clay. Often the clay cracks and the fires live on. Excavating the entire area to put out the fire is prohibitively expensive and destructive of the environment.
Officials aren’t ready to say definitively that this was the cause of the fire, but it’s plausible.
And in our last bit of news for this week, my nieces and I have finally decided to adopt a dog. Sadly, we all have very different taste in dogs. They love pit bulls:
I love terriers.
They love big dogs, I love little dogs. But we're going to the shelter this weekend to see if there's anyone we all connect with.
Stay tuned. And please keep your fingers crossed for us.
