When I was a kid, we got a dog named Buddy. Now Buddy was an older dog, a neighborhood stray.

He followed my mom home while she was jogging one morning, so I fed him a piece of baloney and he stayed with us for the last several years of his life.

Happy to make our green grassy backyard his new comfortable home.

But Buddy kind of changed the way that our backyard looked. My dad

had spent a lot of time planting grass and installing a sprinkler system to keep it as

green and lush as possible in the Arizona desert. It was a great backyard, but after a

while we started noticing trails of dead grass where Buddy would most frequently walk and

run.

And it was kind of weird because buddy had this entire backyard to explore and enjoy.

He could have gone anywhere, and sometimes he did, but there were certain pathways

that he walked more frequently, certain habits that he developed,

and that impacted the look and the shape of our yard. Now, why did he walk those particular paths?

What made him create those particular designs in the grass?

Was he carving out the most direct path

to the safety and security of his food and water bowl, maybe taking his time to study out the best

route to avoid dangers along the way, maybe leaping joyfully and somewhat recklessly

to get to that delicious food, or was he more interested in avoiding the scary side of the yard

closest to the neighboring Doberman,

feeling insecure whenever we,

his new other half of man's best friends would leave him alone, making him feel

abandoned or insecure? Or was he angrily and aggressively chasing down the mailman and

barking his impotent warnings to Jehovah's Witnesses and other

...