Jeanne's Favourite Picture: On Kids and Dogs and Population Control

Le Devoir columnist Josée Blanchette has a piece today about dogs and what a pain they are. Jeanne, who can not read of course, was taken by it nevertheless. The pictures of the dogs enchanted her. The one she liked the best is of the dog in a stroller, because, I presume, it included two of her favourite things.

Blanchette quotes a friend as saying that the reason she loves her dog so much is because it is her child. Well, I know that we practiced raising a dog before we started raising kids, and I also know what we learned contributed to the creation of a couple of pretty decent people. And if dogs offer a subsitute for children in North American households, perhaps that's all to the good since there's been much in the press about the resource expenditures per person in developed countries in this world of seven million people.

Jeanne, by the way, has passed the point where a dog demonstrates more intelligence than she does. Twice in the last little while she has gone and fetched something when asked, a trick which most well-reared dogs can master. Of course, having learned the trick, a dog will keep doing it forever. A child, though, at some point will stop and give you an argument. Ah the terrible twos which sometimes stretch out to the terrible twenties...