I woke up late and missed the I Want To Touch A Dog event on the 19th of October 2014 at Central Park, Bandar Utama. However, seeing all their pictures and testimonies inspired me, a non-Muslim, to touch a dog!

I grew up at my grandparents’ house, where my aunt had a dog. She, the dog, was always chained to the fence, and would always bark at me. While I wasn’t exactly afraid of her, I wasn’t in the habit of touching her – she was always in that “dog zone” and was not allowed to go indoors to the “human zone”. At most that would just mean that I would not walk a straight path to enter the house as I avoided her while she barked at me as if I was an unfriendly stranger (which I won’t deny, because I was an unfriendly stranger to her.)

The second dog my aunt had, had a case of ticks, so I was much more avoiding of her. We’d spot ticks on the porch, alert my mom, who would scoop it up in a used envelope and burn it.

Whenever I went to my friends’ houses, they would usually sense I wasn’t friendly with dogs, so they’d lock them up first.

However, after seeing all these posts, I had a change of heart. I took the oppurtunity to test this when I went to a house and was greeted by a dog who leapt onto me, who was super curious as to who this new human with a new smell was. It was as if I was a crumbly, messy cookie eater. I tried to tell her that I didn’t have any drugs on me. I was even hesistant to take off my socks in case she would eat them (so I tucked my socks deep in my shoes…)

I should not have had to worry about her eating my socks, because she proceeded to continue trying to glomp me as I went in. She was a very licky dog and while I’d pet her, I also tried to keep her from licking my face. That was something that was beyond my comfort zone at that time. She didn’t, and I didn’t have to tell her off.

After quite a while I took out my camera and she suddenly became very afraid of me. She cowered in fear of this shiny glass eye. So this picture is not any indication how happy she was to touch a human!

*My initial draft referred to all animals in the story as “it” but I Googled and found this:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/language/askaboutenglish/2009/01/090120_aae_paula.shtml