I used to be a dog girl as a kid. I still love dogs now, but I am rather a cat person now as you know. My life style matches cats better. Yet I love dogs and can't help smiling at them or if possible photographing and hugging them. I love large kinds, dogs that carry wolf features in size and looks. I kind of hesitate and feel afraid to touch or hug small dogs like chihuahua. They look too fragile, changed that much by human beings.
Anyway, I don' live with a dog, but the letter D makes me think above all of dogs.
When I was a kindergartner, a family (maybe rich family;) had a beautiful large collie dog and my top pleasure was touching and talking to the dog on my way home form kindergarten. It was through a fence; I never get into the site, I was on the path and the dog was in the garden. But I enjoyed it a lot. I loved the dog. And that contact made me love dogs, I can say, making me read almost all the books I found about dogs.
My parents never allowed me to have a dog but I was always playing with dogs in the neighborhood. Happily they never scared me so I believe "dogs are a human's best friends." Well, I mean they are one of the best friends:))
The photo is one of those I took at the Parthenon in Athens, Greece. I found many dogs stroll around there. It's so different from Japan where you rarely see stray dogs, because they are caught and ... I don't want to say what they end up with. I hear lately why there are so many stray dogs in Athens. The authority does catch the dogs but they don't kill them: The dogs caught get fixed and then just released:) They say the dogs won't be caught to be killed because people don't complain about them. They have the right to live free. I feel a bit unlucky to see more dogs and less cats than I had expected, but now I love Greece the more after I hear the story:))
a cool guard : CONTAX Aria + Planar 50/f1.4 ; the Parthenon, Athens, Greece; 18 March, 2009