Dog Movies are the Best Movies

I am on a flight from San Francisco to New Jersey and I’m actually tearing up. I am not a victim of airline food, or extreme leg pain that accompanies most coach flights. Rather I am watching the in flight movie, Marley and me.
This is a story about an average American family that chronicles their life from marriage thru their third child, yet centers around the family dog, Marley. The dog is a yellow Labrador, and is one of those rambunctious dogs that constantly acts out all the anti-social things some hyperactive dogs do. Yellow labs are the poster pups for friendly canines, so no one in his family or in the audience can feel anything but fondness for the star of the show.
I am not much of a movie aficionado either. I try to avoid chick flicks but catch a lot of them on flights I take to and fro. To show my typical sensitivity to maudlin plots, I groaned constantly in “He’s not that into you”, which I agreed to see without thinking or research. However, my favorite “feel good movie of the year” is “Taken” where bad guys are really bad, desperately need killing and get slaughtered by the good guy, in droves throughout this delightful romp. I can’t wait for Taken to be turned into a Broadway play.
That being said, Marley and me is a movie that touched this viewer emotionally. I thought, why would a silly movie cause this reaction?
It is definitely because I am a dog person. My wife on the other hand is a cat person, and my daughters are hybrids, meaning they are totally engrossed with dogs and cats. This domestic animal craze that envelops our home is a bit hard to explain to non pet people. I insist letting our giant schnauzer Cleopatra sleep on the family room couch, even though she occupies 2 ½ peoples worth of couch space. My wife has a set routine with the big male cat where he has to be petted in bed for 15 minutes at 11 pm every night before he can go to sleep. We think he has “feline rain man syndrome” as he also insists on watching Judge Wapner at 7 pm. My daughters dote so much on the female kitty that she has developed a “princess condition”. The female cat rules the upstairs, and the male cat the downstairs.
This un-disciplined approach to pets means we are very vulnerable to our pets reaching end of life. Even other people’s pets, in movies cause sympathetic pain. The movie takes the lives of the family and the family dog through ups and downs, certainty and doubt, rich and poor. The dog eventually grows old and after two stomach torsions is put down and buried in the yard.
I am absorbed into the movie recalling my own dog’s two big health scares. One was where she ate some rubber chunk in the yard and the damage only surfaced on a Sunday at 4 pm. This is where I discovered that Emergency veterinarians are on a whole different pay scale than normal Vets.
The second such event, also on the Sabbath day was stomach torsion that brought her to deaths door. The Vet was able to do surgery, flip the stomach back to its normal position and stitch it to my dog’s ribs, thus securing it against other flips. I had to explain to my daughters that 4 years of college were now going to have to be done in 3 years.
My sister who lives in Texas is also a hopeless animal lover. She has three little dogs and I love hearing about their lives as part of my sister’s family tales. She took in a rescue dog that had seizures and no one wanted. She was devastated when that dog passed away, but I can say with absolute certainty, that dog had the best 6 months of his life with my sister. She has another little dog named Shorty that always seems to be smiling in every picture.
My parents were no better either. They both came from farms in the Midwest so should have had a normal view of domestic animal life, but no. They too were animal people that adored everything about our childhood pets.
Why do we form such deep attachments to our pets? I cannot explain it logically, as it is a mixture of emotions and some mixture of spirituality that forms this bond. All I know is it is a liability when I see dog movies on planes. I sure hope I never have to watch Old Yeller in public...