Identity crisis
What am I?
The Humans refer to me as a dog, but I don't bark. I don't sniff Humans' crotches or hump their legs or barf on their floors or shit on their footpaths. I don't chase sticks or balls, or in fact do pretty much anything that Humans tell me to, and so I'm obviously not a dog. Plus I'm too pretty.
Nor, despite the occasional uneducated questions of passersby, am I a wolf. I'm beautiful enough to be a wolf, and I like to think I'm self-possessed and independent enough. (As draugvorn points out, I am perfectly suited to survival in the wilderness: I'd promptly find the nearest human and yowl at them until they fed me.) But I'm far better organised than any wolf. Regular meals, ad-lib sleeping, an absolute minimum of stress... no wolf has their life as well organised as I.
By similar reasoning, I am not a mutt, a cur, a tyke, a mongrel, a hound, a terrier, a leash-mop, a yapper, a lapdog, a stray or a pi-dog. I am not a coyote, a tod, a hybrid, a culpeo, a fox-on-stilts, a dingo, a fennec, a bush-dog, a dhole or even, despite some similarities, a New Guinea Singing Dog. None of these informal names describe me.
Clearly I'm special and distinguished enough to be one of these marginal subspecies, represented only in some dusty cranny of the scientific literature by an abstruse designation in italicised Latin-ish. But then what? How should I be classified? Where, in the Byzantine ramifications of the nested clades of biological taxonomy, may I find that infinitesimal niche that is home to myself and all my kind? What am I?
Am I Canis iorquiterria horribilis, the rabid warrior in the service of my blue-haired harridan queen?
Am I Canis simensis sativa, so beloved of a quarter of the world's population?
Am I Canis gigans microcephalus salivator, the Great Dane?
Search as I may, nothing applies. I am a part of a new generation; I explore new reaches of the canid gene pool. (Or at least I paddle where it's not too deep and I don't have to get my fur wet.) So what am I?
By this am I distinguished: I make a magnificent variety of noises which, in my family's colloquial German, are generically described as hupen. I delight to wag my tail: wedeln. And by appeal and by appetite, I am of and for all things Wurst. Thus I am:
I am Canis hupus wedelwurstii.
The Humans refer to me as a dog, but I don't bark. I don't sniff Humans' crotches or hump their legs or barf on their floors or shit on their footpaths. I don't chase sticks or balls, or in fact do pretty much anything that Humans tell me to, and so I'm obviously not a dog. Plus I'm too pretty.
Nor, despite the occasional uneducated questions of passersby, am I a wolf. I'm beautiful enough to be a wolf, and I like to think I'm self-possessed and independent enough. (As draugvorn points out, I am perfectly suited to survival in the wilderness: I'd promptly find the nearest human and yowl at them until they fed me.) But I'm far better organised than any wolf. Regular meals, ad-lib sleeping, an absolute minimum of stress... no wolf has their life as well organised as I.
By similar reasoning, I am not a mutt, a cur, a tyke, a mongrel, a hound, a terrier, a leash-mop, a yapper, a lapdog, a stray or a pi-dog. I am not a coyote, a tod, a hybrid, a culpeo, a fox-on-stilts, a dingo, a fennec, a bush-dog, a dhole or even, despite some similarities, a New Guinea Singing Dog. None of these informal names describe me.
Clearly I'm special and distinguished enough to be one of these marginal subspecies, represented only in some dusty cranny of the scientific literature by an abstruse designation in italicised Latin-ish. But then what? How should I be classified? Where, in the Byzantine ramifications of the nested clades of biological taxonomy, may I find that infinitesimal niche that is home to myself and all my kind? What am I?
Am I Canis iorquiterria horribilis, the rabid warrior in the service of my blue-haired harridan queen?
Am I Canis simensis sativa, so beloved of a quarter of the world's population?
Am I Canis gigans microcephalus salivator, the Great Dane?
Search as I may, nothing applies. I am a part of a new generation; I explore new reaches of the canid gene pool. (Or at least I paddle where it's not too deep and I don't have to get my fur wet.) So what am I?
By this am I distinguished: I make a magnificent variety of noises which, in my family's colloquial German, are generically described as hupen. I delight to wag my tail: wedeln. And by appeal and by appetite, I am of and for all things Wurst. Thus I am:
I am Canis hupus wedelwurstii.