CSotD: Rough, tough Sophie

Mike Peterson Published: January 18, 2011 1 minute 2 comments

Doug
I just want to point out that I was a sucker for "Dog Eat Doug" well before I began raising a puppy. But certainly I have to admit that I'm more vulnerable now than ever.

Brian Anderson has a deft touch and is able to put funny, adult-style thoughts into Sophie's head without turning the strip into a platform for four-legged philosophy. Sophie has a rich fantasy life, but remains naive and very much a dog, while the baby, Doug, tags along with her but plays Harpo throughout. The smarter and more aware Doug becomes, the less the strip works. Anderson seems to get this and is very careful with the character. It is an approach that maintains the strip's charm and also maintains its position a few clicks above the average.

Specific to this strip, I like the implied complexity. Sophie is required by Dog Law to hate the postal carrier, but is a sweet dog and really doesn't. She's not addressing this conflict herself, but you see it in the final panel: She just can't live up to her own canine hype.

It is a classic in confrontation, and for good reason: The postman/mailman/letter carrier comes onto the property on a daily basis.

I don't suppose it matters a great deal for rural dogs, where the mailbox is out at the road, though a car stopping at the end of the driveway is still a car stopping and deserves at least an "urf" of recognition.

But the opposite end of that scale is delivery to the mail slot, where the carrier not only comes right up onto the porch but puts things into the house. You can't blame a dog for considering that an invasion, and, if someone else came up on the porch and began fooling around with the barriers between inside and outside, you'd praise the dog for running him off.

The critical point here is that it happens every day. Some dogs get used to the idea, others can't adjust.

In my case, it has been so long since I had a mail slot in the wall that my dogs had to adjust to someone coming twice a day to put things through it. And they did. They'd bark to announce that someone had come up the sidewalk, but, if it were summer and the door was open, they wouldn't try to get through the screen to protect us from the mail, and if we were outside, they greeted Kevin (for that was his name) with wagging tails.

Nobody likes undisciplined dogs, and I don't envy postal carriers having to visit homes where people insist that their dogs are "just fine" when they clearly aren't. I would not want to diminish the hazards in dealing with such households.

But there is a protocol for walking up on somebody's porch, and bad judgment works both ways. I had friends in South Bend whose German shepherd looked forward to twice-a-day visits from the nice man with the doggie cookies and would run barking to the door, tail wagging furiously, whenever he came. But he retired from the route, and the first day of the new carrier, the dog ran to the porch and was greeted with pepper spray. From that day on, they had to keep the dog confined around 10:30 in the morning and 2 in the afternoon, because he now considered postal workers to be potential assailants.

No such worries here. For one thing, I get my mail at the post office, and the puppy thinks the post office is the greatest place in town, because, if I tie him to a rail while I go in, he will have assembled a flock of puppy-admirers by the time I come back out. And, for another, the carrier on our street doesn't come to the apartment, and, whenever we encounter him anywhere on his route through the neighborhood, he's got a doggie cookie, a kind word and an affectionate tussle of the ears at the ready.

I don't think Vaska even knows he's not supposed to like the guy.

Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.

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JC Dill

The reason dogs bark at the mail carrier isn’t so much that this person is “invading” their turf. They bark because something “different” is happening, and then the “different” thing Stops Happening (the mail carrier leaves). It Works Every Time. This is incredibly reinforcing. It’s also very easy to fix, by positive reinforcement as your friends with the German Shepherd discovered (with their first mail carrier, and the doggie cookies). It’s very sad and unfortunate that their dog was pepper sprayed by the replacement carrier.
If it were me, I’d sue the post office for the cost of remedial dog training lessons (to retrain their dog that the mail carrier is a nice person, not a threat) as well as demand an apology from the mail carrier. I *totally* understand that mail carriers have to be careful, but a new carrier on a route should know how to tell a dog is friendly (wagging tail) and not just spray first, ask questions later.
(Really, the fault is higher up in the organization. They should have a process where a mail carrier identifies all the addresses with dogs on the route, and their procedure for co-existing with these dogs, so that a replacement carrier (due to sickness, vacation, or retirement) can safely and enjoyably cover the route.)

Mike

I’d agree with it all, JC — especially about the “guide to the route” cheatsheet idea — except that dogs object to different things, depending on the dog. Back in the days of full-service gas, I had a dog who objected to men sticking hoses in the back of the car and would give them holy hell throughout the process. He never objected to anyone walking past the car in a parking lot, stopping to load groceries in their car right next to ours, etc. It was touching the car that set him off. Same dog once let my roommate’s friend into the house and followed him cheerfully from room to room, until the fellow found what he had been sent for — yesterday’s workshirt with a tire gauge still in the pocket. As soon as he picked up Kevin’s shirt, the dog immediately sent him out the door with torn pants (and without the required tire gauge).
Over the years, most of my dogs adjusted to the idea that the postman comes to the house, particularly since it was the same person at more or less the same time of day. This fits your theory of “something different,” since they were bright enough to put it in the category of a routine event.
But it’s been easier for them at the houses where there was a letterbox on the outside wall rather than a slot into the house.

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CSotD: Rough, tough Sophie

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JC Dill

Mike

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