Doggie dates
Pets these days just can’t get any luckier.
If they manage to land doting owners who treat them like fluffy little people, they can have gourmet food (barring the recent pet food scare), posh beds and cute little designer sweaters. What else could they possibly be lacking?
Oh yes. A date on Friday night. While your poodle might look cute strutting her stuff in that pink sweater, she’s secretly wishing she had a suave male dog to strut it for, or at least a group of girlfriends to ask her where she bought it.
Thanks to 17-year-old Aaron Rodrigues of Auckland, New Zealand, animals now have other options. They are empowered.
All Fido has to do now is post a profile online, and he can have a wild night on the town with an opinionated but charming Chihuahua. Or a warm, fun-loving golden retriever, if he prefers.
Rodrigues set up a pet dating service last week to help pet owners locate same-species companions for their furry friends. While Rodrigues himself is a dog owner, he made the site available to all types of animals. He also sees potential for the site to expand into a forum for pet owners to share training tips and pet health information.
While posting an online profile might be easier than chasing the Dalmatian next door only to be shooed away by her angry owner, there still are potential problems.
First, we have the obvious issue of most non-primate creatures not being properly designed to operate a computer keyboard.
Even if we could get past that issue and teach animals to type, most of them don’t have the attention span necessary to think up a good profile (which would say something like, 2 years old, white with brown spots, loves long walks on the beach and barking at lawn mowers and fireworks), sit online and figure out which lawn mower-chasing quadruped looks the most interesting and the least likely to cheat and then call them up to set a date.
Not a chance. Most dogs would sniff the screen, decide there was nothing interesting about the computer, and go chase a car.
Cats would decide they were too cool for online dating and go back to expecting you to treat them like miniature deities.
Also, new technology would have to be developed before the pets could have any say in the dating site, namely, the Internet would have to develop a way of transmitting scents.
Let’s face it. Dogs just aren’t visually oriented. My golden retriever back at home never reacted any differently to me when I got a haircut or wore a killer outfit. Neither did any of the other dogs that were part of my life.
They did notice when I came home with the scent of another dog on me. If they can’t smell their potential dates, they just won’t be interested.
The Internet is not going to add a smell feature anytime soon, the obvious reason being the humans who use the Web wouldn’t like it.
After all, you just want to talk about that nasty backed up sewage pipe in your cousin’s house, not actually smell it. Since humans are the primary marketing target of the Web, no one is going to take the time to make it more dog, cat, monkey, or goldfish friendly.
The site may not provide companionship for our favorite pooches, at least not without our help, but it does have its place in the universe. At least now that lady at church who gabs nonstop about her dachshund can find somewhere else to take it.
Columnists' opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of The Spectrum