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Honolulu Lite Charles Memminger |
Purebreds look like
their owners, but poi
dogs save faceWE'VE always known that a lot of dogs look like their owners, which is one of the dirty tricks nature plays on unsuspecting canines.
Now there is a study to support something I've always suspected: that only purebred dogs look like their owners. Poi dogs have too much self-respect to play those kind of games.
Researchers at the University of California, with a laudable disregard for things that many busybodies think need to be researched -- global warming, the rain forest, the ozone hole, the ozone quadrangle, the ozone trapezoid, etc. -- set about trying to figure out if it's true that dogs look like their owners and, if so, why; and, most importantly, would California taxpayers realize they were squandering public money on such an enterprise.
To the absolute surprise of no one who has ever bought or adopted a pooch, the reason that some dogs look like their owners is because it is the owners who pick out the dogs. Very rarely does a dog wander into a Human Humane Society and walk down rows of cages filled with pathetic-looking people until finally saying, "I'll take the geeky-looking dude with the red hair. Make sure he has all of his shots."
The researchers found that when people pick a dog, they look for one that, at some level, bears some resemblance to themselves, a wire report reportedly reported. But that applies mainly to people picking out purebred dogs. People who adopt poi dogs -- or, to use the scientific name, mutts -- apparently do not have the same "me, myself, my dog" psychosis as those who buy purebred dogs.
UNIVERSITY PSYCHOLOGY students examined dogs and their owners at various dog parks and found that while purebreds and their owners looked like the product of some bizarre breeding experiment, it seemed like the mutts and their owners arrived on separate buses. The students could not match up the mutts with their owners because many of the mutts wore sunglasses so as not to be recognized by their friends while being forced to hang out with human beings.
"Honolulu Lite" researchers actually proved this in 1997 when we held the First Real Poi Dog Contest at the Hawaiian Humane Society, a contest that has not been held annually ever since. We staged a number of competitions -- sit, shake, roll over, naked Barbie fetch, quote the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, etc. -- to find a real poi dog.
The competition was tough. If a dog ran and fetched the naked Barbie, he'd lose points. If he started to chase the Barbie but thought better of it, he'd lose fewer points. If he looked at the thrown Barbie with disdain and then lay down and began to groom himself in scandalous places, he won big points. If you said "shake" and the dog shook, he lost. If he sat on command, he lost. If he looked vaguely interested in what we were saying, points were deducted.
In the end, the winning Real Poi Dog was a nondescript mongrel who slept through the entire affair, rising only to surreptitiously relieve himself on the naked Barbie when the judges were tallying the points.
We never got that dog's name. Or found out who had brought him. He resembled no human other than Jack Nicholson, and that was only because of the sunglasses.
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Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com