Berkeley is laid out on a grid. Most streets run parallel and perpendicular to each other, with a couple exceptions like Telegraph, which runs north and south at a slant.
We walk the dogs twice daily and tend to stay within the space east of Shattuck and west of Hillegass, south of Blake and north of Ashby, or about 48 rectangular blocks, the east-west streets running “long blocks” about 528 feet in length and the north-south streets running about 290 feet (very rough estimates by somebody really piss-poor at math). If you use the square block I live on as typical (it may not be), Fulton to Ellsworth, west to east, and Ward to Stuart, north to south, there are about 28 households, assuming they are all single-family dwellings (which they are not – some are more)*. But using those figures as minimums, that means in the 48 blocks within which we walk there are approximately 1344 households. I’m going to assume that at least 40% of these households have dogs, judging from the numbers of dogs and dog walkers we encounter on any given day. That would mean over 537 dogs. Not all dogs get regular walks, but most do. We meet only a fraction of these putative 537 dogs, but regardless of who walks them at what hours, we can assume most of them are outside relieving themselves sometime during each day.
Taku takes the girls out twice a day. I go with them for one of those walks, late in the day because the medication I take makes me allergic to direct sun (I know, I know – hat and arm coverings, I know!) but I’ve come to realize I cannot consider those Schnüffelgangs, I call them, (German for “(take a) walk” is Spazier-gang, i.e., "promenade + go"; Schnüffel = “sniff”) proper exercise, because the dogs seem to want to stop and sniff every blade of grass between here and France.
But since they are my darling daughters, I tend to see everything they do in the best possible light. I’m given to understand that this is their main intellectual activity, identifying all the 500+ dogs of the neighborhood by the scent they leave on the grass and bushes and flowers alongside the sidewalk. The rest of the time they sleep, mostly. So these walks are very important, not just for exercise, but for intellectual stimulation.
When I get into bed at night, Bounce has usually climbed on ahead of me. (Miki sleeps with Taku on another floor. They don’t snore. Bounce and I do.) I have to move her enough to be able to get my legs in, and she always looks confused as hell, trying to figure out what I’m doing. “Dumb dog,” I mutter, at times. “How many hundreds of times have we done this and you still can’t figure out you have to move and let me in?”
But then I remember that we are working from different sets of brain cells. She can’t speak, like I can. Can’t remember she has to move her ass when I want to get in the bed.
But then I cannot identify the scent of more than 500 of my neighbors, either. And I marvel at what brilliant kids Taku and I have raised, her and her sister both.
*Just took a walk around the block. I grossly underestimated: there are 41 houses facing the street on my block, and no fewer than six or eight of them are duplexes, making it more like 48, even 50 households. No matter, the number of doggie households is in the 500 range, plus or minus, unless I've got the 40% figure wrong and there are far fewer dogs. I could check with Miki and Bounce, but they are clearly creatures who value quality, and almost never fuss over quantity.
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