“Lassie,” the 1950s television show starred a Collie that had to be the smartest dog in the world, seemingly smarter than any of the humans with whom she interacted (actually, the dog playing Lassie was a male – info for your next trivia night at the bar).  Lassie had to be the smart one, because the humans were always asking her questions like “Where’s Timmy? (usually lying at the bottom of an abandoned mine shaft or some such).

Dogs and television – a winning proposition:

This is all to say…Lewis has discovered television.  It took him a while, but he finally noticed the moving pictures on the screen.  He stops dead in his tracks, holds his head up and just stares.  Not for very long mind you.  Lewis is what you might call in human terms ADD.  He has the attention span of half a gnat.  That trait is admirable in a guard dog, always perusing the area for the next intruder.  But it doesn’t translate very well to the art of television watching.  After all, a few seconds doesn’t even allow the big fellow the chance to discern the finer elements of plot development or character dialogue.  He has learned one very important lesson about TV watching, however.  Eating popcorn.  Good Lord that boy can snarf down the popcorn.  Before you contact the ASPCA, we don’t feed him that much popcorn, but he sure does like it, which is sort of redundant in Lewis’ case, since he likes everything.

Everything except the animals on TV.  Animals on the television send Lewis to somewhere near the seventh level of dog mania.  Lewis “no likey” four-legged TV characters in his house, at which point he takes a left turn from reality.  The television we watch hangs on the den wall that borders the outside.  When Lewis sees an animal on TV, he bolts for the door and into the backyard, looking for the bad animals.  He thinks they exist somewhere behind the screen, so he runs back and forth between the yard and the den looking for those four-legged rascals.

What sends Lewis over the edge, however, is a knee-high table with a 55-inch flat panel on the porch (it’s a football thing). Getting ready for football Saturday, I turned the porch TV on while the big fellow looked on.  Unfortunately for Lewis, Marty Smith from ESPN jumped to life on the screen in all his craziness:

Lewis was having none of that.  The fur on his back stood up, and he backed up like he was facing the 300 Spartans.  Then, slowly, he approached the screen….and looked behind it.

So, Lewis doesn’t quite have the television thing down yet…but Good Lord that boy can snarf down the popcorn!