8 Signs You’re A Dog Person

1. The public scorns you. Not you personally, but rather your existence. You are living proof of science gone too far, they say. Scientists were playing God, and on the eighth day, they created you. They shouldn’t have.

2. Everyone has questions about you. Why are you here? What were they thinking? Why didn’t they stop for even a moment to consider the ethics of their actions? There’s no reason for you to be alive right now. Some people don’t even think that you are alive. You’re a monster to them, a lab experiment without a consciousness. It’s kind of funny to you that they see the world in black-and-white. You can’t see color, which makes the gray areas all the more apparent.

3. Sometimes you think about it. Color. You wish that the scientists would have given you that gift, at least. It’s taken on a magical quality to you. Sometimes you spend hours trying to will your imagination into creating blue or red or yellow. Rainbows must be rapture-inducing.

4. You really like your tail. It’s probably your favorite thing about yourself. You hate to be so cliché, but when you’re overwhelmed by the attention or the camera flashes or the name-calling, you like to chase it. You turn around and around and the world blurs and sometimes the wind lifts a tear out of your eye. That’s how you know you’re going really fast. You realize intellectually that you could reach for it and just grab your tail with your hand, but you shut off that human instinct and focus on an unbridled doggy joy.

5. You were created in a lab. It sounds clean and clinical, which is misleading. There were failures before you. Messy failures. You think about them sometimes. Were they alive? Did they think? Did they die? They feel somehow like a part of you, but you can’t figure out how exactly they fit. Are they like your parents, or are they like distant, caveman-like ancestors? Your evolutionary history is smudged with the fingerprints of scientists and botched experiments. There is nothing clean about you. You were patched together. You are not seamless. You find yourself absentmindedly feeling under your fur for sloppy needlework, even though you were sewn on a microscopic scale.

6. Depending on how whimsical you’re feeling, you think of yourself as the product of either imagination or a power trip.

7. Sometimes you feel sorry for everyone else. You are wholly new to the world, and every breath feels like a discovery. Regular people probably get trapped in routines and think in ruts. You could spend hours discovering shades of emotion that you didn’t know you were capable of, or feeling the softness of your ears. But your sense of superiority lasts only as long as you’re alone.

8. Any time you step out in public, you hear the whispers. They follow you. That’s how you know. Someone inevitably says it, and the knowledge confronts you, demands to be reckoned with. You will never be able to forget: You are tragically, eternally, a dog person.