My summer school class, an English 101, is made up of sweet people; they're motivated, they're funny, they're smart. But yesterday, two of them were distracted, whispering to each other while pointing and looking at something on the floor near my feet. I ignored them at first as I was in the middle of my famous The Value of Revision speech, but after a while, I got distracted, too. By them. So I asked them what was going on, what could be possibly be more interesting than me?

An inchworm, one of them said. There's an inchworm on the floor.

I said so what, who cares, we're in the middle of things that are more important than an inchworm, and while that was a stern enough reprimand for my students to get the hint and wise up, pay attention or at least give the appearance of paying attention, it wasn't my initial reaction. My initial reaction when they pointed out the inchworm--it was tiny and green, a baby inchworm--was to stomp on it. I pictured myself lifting my foot, then stomping, crushing the inchworm to death, then saying to my students, "Now there's no inchworm." Then I'd talk some more about The Value of Revision.

There was a time when I would have done just that but this time I didn't. It's because of The Pug. I've lived with this dog for almost nine months now, and while I've had dogs before him--I've always had a dog--this dog has changed me. I think it's because he's so dumb. Gloriously dumb. Astonishingly dumb. Sweetly and achingly rides-the-short-bus-to-school dumb.

I've never had a dumb dog before. My first husband and I had horses, so our dogs were heelers; Al and I had a border collie/German Shepard mix. These were working dogs, smart and neurotic, alpha dogs capable of devious manipulation, the kind of dogs that could outwit you. You could look into their eyes and see they were thinking, plotting, scheming, they were busy in the head. The heelers knew each horse by name, they knew which horse belonged in which stall, and they put them there. The border collie had a massive vocabulary; Al and I got to where we had to spell certain words and it didn't take long before that dog knew what S-P-A-G-H-E-T-T-I meant. But the Pug has this real vacant look in his eyes. And he's easy to trick: when I want him to go outside, I hold up the leash like I'm going to take him bye byes, and I open the back door. He gets real excited, so excited that he runs right past me out the back door, which I then close behind him. It's a mean trick, I know, especially since he falls for it every time.

I've been living with the Pug for about nine months now, and while I always liked him well enough, I wasn't in love with him right away. I held the dumbness against him. While I thought he was cute-in-a-weird-looking way--he's a little black tubbo with a watermelon-shaped body carried around by four toothpick skinny legs, he's got a curly tail, buggy eyes and floppy silken ears, there's a swathe of white fur down his chest, like he's wearing a tuxedo shirt--I also thought he was sort of dull and without much personality. He doesn't do anything, the Boy said. Which isn't entirely true. What the Pug does is sleep. A lot. He likes to go for walks but take him for long than about twenty minutes, and he flops down on the sidewalk and has to be urged back up. But he can't catch a Frisbee. He doesn't fetch. He's too funny-looking to intimidate an intruder. What the little bastard can do is cuddle. He's good at grunting and groaning, snorting and snoring and sniffling. He's also good at taking his half out of the middle. I let him sleep with me, and sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night to find the Pug has crowded me right to the edge of the bed, and when I try to shove him over, he opens one eyes, groans, and makes himself heavy, dead weight.

One day I was sitting on the couch, watching some VH1 101 Best Stars of the Internet. The Pug was sprawled across me. I petted his head, rubbed his ears, ran my hand down his back, and stopped when I got to his haunches. (He's a porky little fellow--he weighed 43 pounds when I first got him, and a winter in Minnesota got him what it gets the rest of us: winter belly. Last time I put him on a scale, he weighed 54 pounds. His belly measured 36 inches.) I grabbed his thigh, gave it a little shake and said a terrible thing: This looks like it would be juicy!

I was talking about eating my dog to my dog.

That moment alone wasn't enough for a life-changing epiphany, but it was a start. Pretty soon, I got to thinking I didn't want to eat pork chops anymore because pigs reminded me of the pug. Then came a day when I was running the vacuum while under the pug's watchful gaze, and I got to thinking I didn't want to eat any kind of meat anymore because I didn't want to eat things that can look at me. Then came the times when I hollered at him for eating out of the cat's little box; for biting the heads off the tulips; for eating an entire pan of brownies; for licking the couch, and I thought: I can't eat meat and I also can't kill things that want to be alive.

It's not like I've been soft-hearted or one of those people who romanticizes animals. My father and brothers and husband and son are hunters so I've eaten a lot of wild game. I've eaten squirrel brains and turtle that's been breaded and fried. I've eaten all manner of fowl and tongues that once were in the mouth of a cow and I've eaten snake and goat and the gizzards of a chicken whose neck I rung myself. But I can't seem to do it anymore. I think it's because of the Pug and his dumb doggy ways. The dogs of my past didn't inspire this kind of thinking, probably because if they got hungry enough, they'd eat me without thinking twice while the Pug would just groan and whine and cry like the little bitch he is.