"We have a new dog, which means we're going through this phase where we spend a lot of time crouching and stroking and going ""Yessss! That's a GOOD girl!"" and otherwise practically awarding a Nobel Prize to her for achievements such as not pooping on the rug.

Her name is Earnest, which I realize is not a traditional girl's name, but it describes her very well. Most dogs are earnest, which is why most people like them. You can say any fool thing to a dog, and the dog will give you this look that says, ""My God, you’re RIGHT! I NEVER would have thought of that!""

We are not sure yet whether Earnest has a working brain. You can't tell, early on, with dogs. When we got our previous dog, Shawna, we thought she was smart as a whip, because she was a purebred German shepherd who had this extremely alert look. At first we took this to mean that she was absorbing every tiny detail of her environment with her keen senses and analyzing it with computerlike speed, but it turned out to be her way of expressing the concept: ""What?""

Shawna would be sitting in our yard, looking very sharp, and a squirrel would scurry right past her, a squirrel whose presence was instantly detected by normal, neighborhood dogs hundreds of yards away, causing them to bark rigorously, and also by us humans, causing us to yell helpfully: ""Look! Shawna! A squirrel!"" After a few seconds of delay, during which her nervous system would send the message via parcel post from her ears to her brain that something was going on, Shawna would turn in the exact opposite direction from whichever way the squirrel was, adopt a pose of great canine readiness and go: ""What?""

I don’t know yet about Earnest. One day soon I will give her the dog intelligence test, where you show her the ball, and then you put the ball under a blanket, and then you see if she can find the ball. Shawna never could find the ball. I’m hoping Earnest does better, but I'm not counting my chickens. I am also not looking forward to receiving a lot of violent letters from you dog lovers out there, the ones with the ""I (heart) my (breed of dog)"" bumper stickers, asking how dare I say dogs are stupid when your dog can add, subtract, land the space shuttle, etc.

So please note, dog lovers: I never said your dog is stupid. I said my dog might be stupid. I know for a fact that she can’t be too intelligent, because here I’ve written a fairly insulting column about her species, and despite the fact that she’s lying right at my feet, it hasn’t occurred to her to pull the plug on my computer."