K. and I took her pug P. to a "dog park" over the weekend. Since P. is too simple-minded to be mean, humans love him, but dogs seem to find his heavy breathing, slobbering enthusiasm, and squashed-up face quite unnerving. They register him from a distance as a dog and walk up to exchange butt-sniffs, but when they get near enough for their feeble monochrome vision to reveal what kind of dog he is, they veer away and pretend to have been doing something else.

Fortunately, because they are dogs, "What? Oh, no, I just wanted to closely examine this bug on the ground here" is a perfectly reasonable excuse, and so P. remains blissfully oblivious to the snub. He just wags his tail and watches them walk away, like a man drunk enough to completely believe a woman who says she "just has to go find her friend" and vanishes onto the dance floor immediately after he vomits on himself a little.

In the end, it seems that the only dogs willing to associate with pugs are other pugs, and some of the French bulldogs.

The most disturbing feature of the day was a visit to the Freshness Burger next to the park, which -- like most of the shops in that area -- is 100% dog-friendly. It being a sunny day, the glass front was wide open. People were smoking, dogs were shedding, children were weeping and soiling themselves. It was like a gateway into an alternate history in which Louis Pasteur had gone into woodworking, and the germ theory of disease had never been discovered. I could hardly believe that the health department would allow such a place of business to even be described in principle, let alone exist. The owner must have signed a release form giving them permission to nuke the site from orbit if things got out of hand.