TWO THINGS OCCURRED to me, recently. One is that dogs don’t like Monday mornings any more than humans do. I’d never even considered that the great equalizer among all life was a universal distaste for the beginning of the week. From dogs to cats, lizards to leopards, aardvarks to zebras, sunflowers to mushrooms, no living thing wants to deal with the chores of survival. It doesn’t matter whether it’s chasing a Himalayan blue sheep down the side of a mountain, making a bunch of chlorophyll, or having to sit through a marketing presentation with Jim, the guy who never quite gets to the point. Mondays bring with them the annoying reality of tasks and expectation, and nobody looks forward to that. 

The other thing that occurred to me is that most people lie about their weight.

I stopped by my veterinarian’s office. My pug needed her oil changed, so to speak, and some meds for the new year. Usually the vet’s clinic is a quiet place, so I was surprised to stumble into a scene out of Orwell’s Animal Farm, specifically the part when the whole barn goes to war. Dogs on one side of the room were shouting at the dogs on the other side, who shouted back louder. All it would take is one loose canine and the place would be a blood bath, I thought. The noise was almost unbearable. I shouted my intentions to the desk worker, and took a seat amid the rabble.

My pug wanted no part of it. The pug, in my estimation, is one of the more philosophical of dog breeds. It’s the eyes, probably. The bulbous convexity seems to suggest that the dog sees the total scope of any situation, and as such realizes the futility of posturing, and the pointlessness of noise for the sake of noise. The grander realities are obvious within her expanded field of vision, and with a bemused cock of her head she will let everyone know how ridiculous all of the sound and fury is. She also has the belly of a Buddha, an indication that the puppy has achieved a level of serenity largely unknown to the leaner breeds.

“Can you weigh her?” said the desk worker, after things had quieted down, and all the psychotic mongrels had been removed to the recesses of the building. The pug is not ashamed of her weight. Happily, she jumped on the scale, and I watched the numbers flick back and forth to settle on 21.6 lbs.

“21.2,” I said, studying the desk clerk for any sign that the weight was unacceptable, or that she knew I was lying. The woman said nothing, just nodded and recorded it into the computer. I sat back down. It would be an interesting experiment, I thought, for the desk worker to have her own scale monitor hidden behind her desk where she could see how many times the dog’s actual weight did not correspond with the number shouted out by the owner. Lying for no reason is what separates us from the animals, after all.

In short order a woman was called to the scale to weigh her dog. She was wearing a jumpsuit and a workout headband, all limbered up and ready for the week. That’s a smart way to approach a Monday, geared up for physical exertion. As it turned out, she was perfectly dressed for what was about to happen.

Her dog was a skinny retriever, barely into adolescence, with legs and feet that he was still getting used to. Everything seemed to be going fine until the dog, for whatever reason, was hit with a sudden mortal dread of the scale. He braced with his awkward legs, almost melting down into the floor, while she dragged him like a sack of potatoes toward the object of his fear. Not wanting to appear cruel, she offered encouraging words to him in falsetto baby talk while she yanked him by the neck across the tiles. The dog’s ability to withstand her tugging was a marvel of resistance. He collapsed in a lump of dead weight and would not budge. My pug cocked her head, and so did I. The woman was growing anxious. Sweat appeared on her temples above her workout headband. The dog was intransigent. No way would he be getting on the scale, no matter what.

“I’ve got it,” she said, and now everyone in the waiting room was riveted to see who would win this battle of wills. She stooped down, hoisted her dog up, and placed him on the scale, only to have him slide like water back onto the floor. She looked around, snapped her fingers, and nodded. “Now I’ve really got it.” She picked up her dog again, and this time stepped on the scale with him, and recorded their combined poundage while holding him around the belly in a kind of Heimlich maneuver position, while the poor pup stared at me with such a look of shame that I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them both. She then stepped off and, subtracting her own weight, shouted out the dog’s final result.

“Your dog lost three pounds from last time,” said the desk worker, staring into her computer. “That’s alarming, unless, of course, you know…”

Yes, we all knew. The woman, in shaving off a few of her own pounds, had made it seem like her dog was suffering from some terminal disease. Better that than admit to her own weight. The desk worker suggested weighing the dog again, but the woman refused, insisting that her calculations were correct.

“I take fitness very seriously,” she said, pointing toward her headband. “I’m well aware of my own weight.”

And that was that. Tough luck there, Rex, to have an owner that would throw you under the bus with such abandon. The fictions we feed ourselves seem to require a bigger serving at the beginning of the week. I was sure that if it were Friday the woman would’ve been a little less uptight about her self-image. But on this dreariest of Mondays she needed all the positive reinforcement she could get, even if it meant people thinking her dog was diseased and had eight weeks to live.

Next up, a trundling bulldog marched to the scale, climbed upon it, sniffed around for a minute, then scrunched himself up and dropped a huge turd right in the middle of the platform. The owner gasped and lunged for it, then thought better of it at the last minute. The bulldog looked around and, satisfied that he’d communicated his attitude toward Monday, jumped off the scale and headed back from whence he came.

“So sorry!” gasped the mortified owner.

“It’s a Monday,” sighed the desk worker.

I looked over at the scale and noted the weight of the bulldog’s impressive bowel movement.

“.32 pounds,” I called out.

And that’s no lie.