Lars bought a German Shepherd for protection. It is brown and black with an oversized head. The thing loves me. Not that I present much of a threat.
I ruffed the dog’s neck and patted her head. Leaning a bit too close I received a big, sloppy kiss.
“I guess she’s my buddy,” I said, wiping my face.
Lars frowned. “That’s the problem. She’s everyone’s buddy.”
We sat on a bench in Powderhorn Park. Men in hoodies, some wearing work boots, were playing basketball. Powderhorn is a tough, inner-city park. The hoops are hung with chains. These chime musically with each shot.
“So she likes people. That’s a problem?”
“Very much so. She’s trained to dislike Republicans.”
He was joking, of course. Then I realized he wasn’t. “You trained her to dislike Republicans?”
“Or at least growl at them. It didn’t take.”
I asked how you train a dog to be Progressive.
“Easy. You use the reward system. She gets treats for responding positively to Democrats. No treats for Republicans. She’s not even allowed to play with Republicans.” In Lars’s SW Minneapolis neighborhood, sprinkled with big homes and Mercedes SUV’s, this is indeed easy. It’s a district that overwhelmingly re-elected Ilhan Omar, even after she paid her husband million-dollar consulting fees. It’s their money, I suppose. And Omar is their beloved, far left hero. Nancy Pelosi, not so much. She is far too conservative.
We watch as a teenager makes a no-look pass to a man wearing a gold necklace. He deftly dunks, ringing the chains. Lars likes to visit these inner-city parks, to get a feel for the other half. You can see the fear in his eyes, however. That’s why he brings his Republican-sniffing dog. Until you meet her, she is intimidating.
“So what went wrong with training?” I ask.
Lars groaned. “We went to Cancun for two weeks and left her with my brother-in-law. I didn’t know it at the time, but he voted for Trump!”
“That’s rough.”
“It sure is. Now my dog loves everyone, even Sean Hannity.”
I tried to be as encouraging as possible. I stroked the shepherd’s silky, upright ears. It wasn’t her fault dogs don’t care about politics. Maybe they are smarter than we think. As the novelist and outdoor writer Robert Ruark once said:
“The trouble with dogs is people.”
Richard Donnelly lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Classic flyover land. Which makes us feel just a little… superior. He publishes a weekly column of essays on the writing life at richarddonnelly.substack.com