From the last long story in Kin, “Sarajevo Dogs”:
The basic sensation of a dog, canine melancholy, the foundation of canine lyricism, is a feeling of extended abandonment. It follows the dog from the moment of birth, is repeated in an array of variations through life, and not once has a single dog ever escaped it. Even those rare ones that are loved and protected are left with it at the entrance to the supermarket when we go inside, or experience it when we go have a shower or wash our hands, when we go out to open the door for guests or shut ourselves up on our offices. This sense of abandonment is equally as horrible as that experienced by dogs on the street. Perhaps it’s even worse since it repeats every day. Dogs don’t experience time as people do. To dogs time lasts endlessly long, the canine second is a human minute, the human hour an entire canine day, a day a year, a year centuries…. Ten human years is a thousand canine ones. A dog’s life is cut through with a thousand-year sense of abandonment. In a thousand human years an entire civilization can be created, mature, and die, with its music, art, poetry, myths and folk traditions, novels and a whole history of film, and with each civilization, the consolation of people before death is born, lasts for a time, and disappears. After a thousand years, everything normally disappears. A thousand years of canine abandonment, which every happy dog lives through, is a whole human civilization.
Russell Scott Valentino 