In a sure sign of infantile imprinting, I even exhibited feline features myself for many years.  Aside from running fast and drinking the leftover milk from my cereal bowl, I was fiercely independent, often recluse, and occasionally moody—and for a solid two years sported short, spiky hair.  (It was the late eighties.)  Over the years, however, through a mysterious process of transanimalassociazation—to borrow from the president—I have strayed to the dog side of the animal lovers divide. 

 My first and only dog to date was a street puppy pulled out of the Irish rain on New Years Day.  I lived in a shared house in Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, with other vagabonds from Spain, Poland, Italy and the United States.  We named him Eamon, which in Ireland is about as suitable as calling your dog Jim or Fred or Bill in the States.  But like Eamon, his name stuck—much to our neighbor's confusion when we shouted for him down the street.  Over a period of six months, Eamon slowly evolved from pissing on the living room floor to learning how to open doors, while developing a fixation for chasing stones and learning commands in Spanish, Polish, Italian and English.

 If Eammon was an American dog and lived in the United States—or could at least get his paws on an absentee ballot—and assuming dogs had voting rights—which maybe isn't such a bad idea—he would certainly caste his vote for John Kerry in this election.

 How can I be so sure?  Well, for the past two months, I have worked on behalf of the Democratic National Committee as a grassroots canvasser.  For the uninitiated, "canvassing" is synonymous with "sales" in the political sphere—while one might sell ideas rather than products, the principles of success are similar, if not the same.  And as anyone who has worked in street sales knows, so are the threats, which is where this whole discussion of dogs comes wagging in.

 On any given afternoon, all across the county, thousands of DNC canvassers are bravely going where the party hasn't gone since the 1960's: door to door. They come in all shapes and sizes, all colors and creeds, all united by the unequivocal goal of sending George W. Bush into early—if not overdue—retirement.

 Critics of that quest—and you meet many if you work in conservative San Diego, as I do—complain that it's not valid, that we should at least unite around the candidate that we are working for instead of the incumbent we seek to dethrone.  Put simply, those people don't understand the magnitude of what Bush has done to the post-9/11 world.  And, curiously, they often own dogs—many of whom are vicious attack dogs kept to guard their domestic forts, a private sort of homeland security force, presumably fed a steady diet of brainwashing biscuits and terrorist treats. 

 Whether in the mind-numbing postmodern "community" of Scripps Ranch, the 1950's-style suburbs south of San Diego State or the ubiquitous McMansions across southern California, experienced canvassers quickly learn to tell the political affiliation of homeowners by the barks of their dogs.  Of course, some dogs don't bark at all.  Instead, they wag their tails, drag you a well-worn toy or salivate while sniffing your crotch.  These, one comes to identify, are Democratic dogs.  Friendly, social, even sensual—in a canine sort of way.  But if the bark has bite, if open jaws grate against the screen door with a snarl, well, you know where I'm going with this—in my experience at least, it's probably owned by a Republican.

 There are exceptions, of course.  I have talked to my fair share of Democrats while ignoring a yelping pup, usually a pug or a poodle—some overly compact creature simply without enough storage space for political analysis and a size complex to deal with.  This is entirely different from debating a Republican while she threatens to sic her pit bull on you.  Again, in my experience, Republican women use their pets as threats more often than Republican men.  Perhaps this stems from a frustrated desire for domination thwarted within a patriarchal marriage.  Perhaps not.  I don't know.  If we could only ask Freud's dog...  I do know, however, that these women aren't joking.  One even told me she should bite me herself.

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 Eamon lives on a farm in rural France now, and I am walking the streets of San Diego.  Although I can't watch him mature, I often think of Eamon as I knock on strange doors, listening for the bark that answers my call.  Eamon taught me many things in just six months, one of which is that dogs get confused when people speak to them in four different languages. 

 That is precisely the problem with President Bush.  In one breath, he tells the American people to be very, very, very, very afraid.  In the next, he tells them that America is safer than ever with him at the helm of a rapidly sinking ship.  He tells Americans to trust his word and believe in the nobility of preemptive war, yet his administration admits to using false evidence to justify sending poor Americans to a desert to die in order to kill poorer Iraqis.  Even Eamon could figure that one out, and he doesn't even drive an SUV or hold stock in a certain multinational corporation.  At least not the last time I saw him. 

 Democracy went to the dogs in 2000 and now it really bites.  The time has come to exercise our right to bark back and cry "Wuff!"

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Scott Boehm is a Ph.D. student of Literature at the University of California, San Diego where he works in cultural studies and plays in the ocean when he's not freelancing articles or canvassing for the Democratic National Committee.  He can be reached at .