Why do humans run away?

I was sitting at my house one day, lying on the back of my couch looking out my window when my human comes back from work.

Even though he's usually not back until after midnight, he stays awake for a while, no matter how much I try to coax him to go to bed. So I take him out for a walk, hoping it will wear him down a little.

Sometimes, I just walk him around in the vacant lot next door to us. Sometimes, I take him across the street to meet my neighbors, Coco and Oreo, who happened to live in the same apartments that I did in Pittsburg for a while.

Last night (Thursday night), my human actually came home to eat supper. He seemed stressed so I hopped up and down to get his attention and take him for a walk.

I took him down past Gene's, then around the block and back up that busy street in front of the store. Humans were getting food and filling up their dogs' cars with gas (some of the dogs must really trust their humans because I didn't see any of them around, just the humans).

As I was walking, another dog came up to us. For some reason, he was not friendly. He came over and growled at us with bared teeth. I don't know if he was looking for a human that had run away but my human and his friend talked over lunch recently about a couple of dogs who had apparently had their humans run away from home in our neighborhood.

Not only had the humans run off, they had taken everything that belonged to the dogs! I was concerned if this dog was one of the ones we had heard about. Was he looking for his humans so he could punish them? Was he confusing my human with the ones that had taken his things?

Either way, this dog was scary. I'm willing to make friends with any dog, even some hyperactive ones (and when a Rat Terrier calls another dog "hyper," trust me, the terrier is qualified to do so!). I didn't want to hang around very long, so I led my human away and back to my house.

If humans could read this, I'd give the ones who ran off from their dogs some real what-for. You can't just leave your dogs like that. Humans sometimes aren't kind to the dogs who adopt them and they end up in apartments like the one I lived in for a while.

But sometimes, the landlords of those apartments have to get rid of older tenants so they can bring in new ones. This is what those humans have left those dogs to deal with: Capture by the dog police, forced apartment living, perhaps even eviction.

I was one of the lucky ones. I found two humans who love me very much. But sometimes, circumstances force good dogs to go bad and these humans who have run away from their dogs behind should be ashamed of themselves.

Until next time, for the good humans out there, woof!