Walking a chihuahua through a public park is not exercise. It is a press conference. Nacho trots, I hold the leash, and the general public files past with observations they are confident nobody has ever made before. I have kept a log. What follows are the standards, performed daily in parks nationwide, along with the replies I compose in my head while saying something gracious instead.
"Is that a rat?"
Delivered with the delight of a person debuting new material. No, sir, it is a dog, order Carnivora, wolf-descended, a lineage our taxonomy desk has documented beyond appeal. Nacho does not follow the exchange, which is fortunate, because his response to disrespect is documented elsewhere in this park.
"Why not get a real dog?"
This one comes from men holding retractable leashes attached to animals they cannot lift into a car. The American Kennel Club recognizes the breed and has since 1904, which makes Nacho exactly as real as a Great Dane and considerably easier to launder. What they mean is a big dog, and the honest answer is that I had precisely one lap and it is spoken for, per our velcro report.
"Does it bite?"
Asked, always, from a crouch, mid-reach, at speed, by a stranger executing the exact maneuver our socialization guide spends a chapter teaching people not to do. He has never bitten anyone. He reserves the right to narrate your approach at volume, which is a different legal category, covered in the temperament file. The bite-force statistics the internet quotes are fabricated anyway, a myth our myths desk dismantled with visible satisfaction.
"He must be so easy. He's tiny."
Tiny, yes. Easy is a word chosen by someone who has never negotiated a January bathroom trip with a dog who considers rain a personal insult, never run the sweater logistics from our wardrobe department, and never conducted the nightly blanket census. Everything is smaller except the administration.
"My friend had one and it was mean."
I believe you. Somewhere out there a chihuahua was carried everywhere, socialized never, laughed at when he growled, and then billed as evidence against forty-nine million years of dog. The prosecution rests on one under-trained witness. Meanwhile the defense submits Nacho, currently accepting a chin scratch from a toddler with the patience of a licensed professional, because somebody did the homework in our training file.
"You know they live forever, right?"
Fifteen to twenty years, per the lifespan records, stated to me as a warning, the way you would mention a balloon mortgage. Sir. I am counting on it. It is the single best line in the entire contract.
"Who's walking who?"
The park's oldest joke, told to me roughly weekly by people who have watched four pounds of dog tow a grown adult toward one specific lamppost. The honest answer is that the walk is a coalition government: I control the route, Nacho controls the itinerary, and the leash bureau holds the treaty documents. He is not walking me. He is escorting me, at his pace, past his properties, on a schedule I am permitted to believe is mine.
"Aww, he's shivering, he must be terrified."
He is not terrified. He is four pounds in October. The shaking file runs the full engineering explanation, surface area versus mass, and none of it involves fear of you personally, though the crouch-and-loom is not helping. This is why the sweater exists. The sweater you are about to comment on.
"I could never. They're so yappy."
Correct, you could never, and the dogs of the world thank you for the self-awareness. Yappy is what an under-exercised, under-trained alert breed sounds like in an apartment with a busy hallway. A walked, worked, settled chihuahua, per the exercise ledger, mostly sounds like a small dog asleep in a sunbeam, which is to say, like nothing at all.
The reply I actually give
To all of it, the rat material, the real-dog philosophy, the crouching hands, I mostly say the same thing: "He's a good dog." Because he is, and because the park is not the venue for the seminar, and because Nacho has already moved on to a hydrant that requires his full editorial attention. The commentary is the toll you pay for walking a very small lion through a world of critics. He has never once heard it. He is too busy being the entire point.
