“It’s Spring again. And birds on the wing again start to sing again that old melody.” Sounds pleasant enough, doesn’t it? But where I live you can really tell Spring has arrived not by the birdsong but because of the Arf song. The dog people are out in force. I suppose they were walking their dogs all winter, but in chilly haste, out of necessity, not pleasure. Now they are out in droves or gaggles or perhaps doggles, engaging in the weird rituals of their sect.

I speak, I suppose you can tell, as a lifelong non-dog person. My dog-raising uncle (cockers, springers, pekes) tried to convert me to his tribe by giving me a cocker spaniel when I was four or five years old. It repulsed me, and I had it sent back forthwith. From my parents there was no complaint ,but a sigh of relief, and dogs never again darkened our door.

I had a couple cats and my mother had one late in life that she liked better than me, but they died and that was too sorrowful to want to repeat. At least, however, they went their own way with a minimum of fuss and behaved like adults — independent and willing to earn their keep by cheerfully exterminating mice, shrews and birds.

Dogs may serve a purpose on a farm, hunting or herding, but in city or suburb they are a dead loss. The argument that they are a burglar alarm is undercut by their inability to distinguish between predators, the mailman, Jehovahs Witnesses or small children. Anything can set them off.

And their character is that of small children at best, frat boys at worst. They are needy for affection, panting for approval, noisy, boisterous , attention-seeking, bumptious. Some appear to suffer from ADHD. In short, they are like immature humans who cannot be left to their own devices with any confidence.

If you let a cat out to do its business, it will do so in a relatively private, decorous fashion. En route, It may try to kill rodents, but that’s its job. Other than that, and sleeping in the sun, its unlikely to cause trouble unless chasing a specimen of the opposite sex.

Dogs by contrast aren’t to be trusted anymore than young males of the human species. There’s no end to the mischief they are apt to get up to, loudly and destructively. In our neighborhood, one fool’s dog was in the habit of jumping on strangers and biting them. The police admonished the owner, but dogs are a sentimentally protected species who rarely suffer the consequences of their actions. If a teenager ran into the street biting passers-by, he’d be locked up. Unless he was black. Then he’d be shot.

The law does demand that owners keep their mutts on a leash, so the daily ritual requires dog people to stroll the streets towed hither and thither by their beasts — some as God made them, others coiffed elaborately, sometimes it seems to match their owners. Perhaps at the same salon. By now it should be obvious that dog people aren’t those that own dogs, but those that are owned by their dogs.

The ruder owners allow their creatures to pee and poop in the yards of innocent by-standers who may find this behavior less than charming, on their sidewalks or in the street creating hazards to navigation for dogless walkers.

More responsible owners may be seen following their mastiff and stooping to pick up its steaming deposits in plastic bags which they carry home with them. Polite, perhaps, but — considered objectively — grotesque behavior for a species that styles itself homo sapiens. Emptying a litter box is one thing, and not a pretty one, but following a dog around and collecting its spoor bit by bit to bring home is a bridge too far.

You’d be unlikely to do this for a spouse or parent no matter how feeble or senile, but the dog people think nothing of it. Would they perform the same function for a pet pig, a pet cow, a pet elephant? I don’t think so. Probably because no other animal is so pantingly anxious to be liked, despite its bad habits. Except perhaps children of our own species. Their diapers we are willing to change, but there is a promise in that case that, by and by, the nipper will be toilet-trained and the repulsive service will never tagain have ot be repeated. But dog poop, like diamonds,is forever

So here they comes again, leash in one hand, poop bag in the other promenading up and down the street. Now and then they stop to talk to other dog people similarly encumbered.And while they exchange pleasantries, their creatures are attacking passers-by, twining their leashes around the legs of their apparently oblivious keepers, lunging with teeth bared at small children and at tottering elder persons who recoil in horror, their lives passing before their eyes. The dog people smile indulgently at how clever their beasts are to turn a walk in the mild spring sun into a dangerous gantlet for others.

Periodically, the dog of one person will smell the hinder parts of another person’s mutt with the greatest interest and attention, as a wine connoisseur might study the bouquet of a fine Bordeaux. And the other dog will return the favor. Then they will want to kiss their masters. Who could resist?

On other occasions the chatting dog people will have to grasp their leashes tightly as their suddenly psycho dogs bay and snarl and strain and leap in an attempt to reach and tear the throats out of each other. The owners seem hardly to notice, chat on, eventually move on, blithely unaware that they have just staged something akin to a bear baiting or gang warfare.

The rest of us give all these peculiar rites a wide berth. They may be worthy of the attention of an anthropologist or expert in abnormal psychology, but we just hope to get home without puncture wounds from fangs, without stepping in a stray deposit or being splashed, licked or humped. The only sensible reaction to having a good walk ruined in this way is the immortal words of Lucy Van Pelt — “Euuw! Dog germs!”