My Animatronic Dog

I was looking under my dog's chin. It's funny, in a way, the way God has put animals together. You look at a stuffed animal and there are all the normal places that stitches have to be to hold together the assorted pieces making up the thing. You figure it'd be hard to put together a stuffed toy as one piece without stitches. Especially if you were trying to mass produce them. We're all impressed by those guys who carve a realistic boat inside a bottle, or the Chinese, who make boxes within boxes or carve wooden puzzles that somehow retract down into infinity as a single piece, kind of like a Slinky but whittled out.

When it comes to actual animals, though, somehow they're all of one piece, starting out small, yet being what they always will be, then growing in proportions up to their final form. They have fur, skin, bones, the usual array of intestines, a brain, their nature, their natural instincts, then on top of all that (and this seems to me where it'd get dicey) the stuff they're bred with from man's history, like what is particular to breeds, ability to hunt, to dig, to point, to rescue, etc. It's too much for my non-scientific mind.

I'm admiring my dog and always amazed at the combination of physical characteristics, psychological characteristics, instinctual characteristics, and all the things of her particular behavior, what we have taught and what has been conditioned because of our ongoing relationship. It's crazy in a way that all these things could make the dog that sits before me. It's like fiction. But it is obviously real, as real as anything else.

OK, I'm looking under the chin, where stitches might very normally be were she a stuffed animal. And there really is a kind of joining there, not stitches, but something movable and edging by nature into the upper chest. It's not totally smooth and non-distinct. So I tell her, I can see your stitches. And as to her behavior, it's animatronic.