A Northern Boy's Tales of the Deep South, part 2

Arachnophobic Angel


I grew up thinking that animals, though capable of great intelligence, some even more so than we believe them capable, hit a ceiling where reason and sensibility are beyond them. They live at the level of instinct and the drive to eat. Thus, as my thinking goes, they don’t get the creeps over silly phobias, such as needles or the sight of blood or a scalpel slicing open an infected, pus-oozing limb.

Little did I know.

Angel had been playing outside somewhere on "my" 32 acres in Bumph Huck, Georgia, one particularly lovely summer day, but she had grown tired of it, or had become curious about what might be going on indoors (read: what I might have been eating that she could possibly benefit from if some fell on the floor), so she pawed at the door, begging to come in.

I opened the door and she looked up at me. As I looked down at her I noticed a familiar shape on the floor just beyond the threshold from me, practically between Angel’s front paws: a large spider. If memory serves me, its size, including leg span, would have covered most of my palm…had I the balls to let it be there! Say, roughly, 2-1/2 to three inches in diameter – not monstrously huge, but larger than your average live-in-a-hole-catching-flies-in-a-web spider. It definitely was not a "Daddy Long-Legs."

I’m not particularly afraid of or creeped out by spiders – though a story about that is coming later – so I simply shifted my focus from Angel to the spider and marveled mildly at it. Though an intelligent dog, Angel never had the smarts to look in the direction I was pointing, but instead looked at the hand I was pointing with, as that’s usually what held the object of her interest. Imagine my surprise, then, when she looked to where I was looking. She bent her head down and found the spider idling there between her paws.

And Angel S P A Z Z E D !! She frantically lifted one paw, then the other, in an effort to keep her feet away from the spider, resulting in a hilarious little dance that lasted about one second, and then she literally leapt backwards! The spider, on the other hand, never moved.

I burst out laughing at my hapless dog! She was actually FREAKED OUT by the spider just being there. Her little freaked doggie dance was every bit as pathetically hilarious as my snake-induced quivering full-body shudder(s). But I wasn’t laughing at her as much as I was at the realization that she, a dog, displayed an aversion to spiders! Of course, the freaked doggie dance was all hers; pure Angel!

I don’t know if a dog can understand laughter, what it means is going on inside the head and body of a human. They can understand anger, particularly if it’s directed at them, but laughter, I don’t know. She did seem a little embarrassed for a few minutes afterward. Certainly I accept any skepticism at my use of that word, as it ascribes a human emotion to a lowly beast. But she did walk around sheepishly for a little while after the incident.

**sigh** I sure miss that goofy girl.