The Adventures of Rasta Bowwow - Episode 3140 - 05 13 2022

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The Adventures of Rasta Bowwow - Episode 3140 - 05 13 2022
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May 16
2022
Every day Maya gets to go to Loose Park, a beautiful park not far from her home in Kansas City, Missouri. Most days I record her there. I began doing so soon after her 4th birthday. Before that, starting from when she was just shy of 2 months old, Maya had been going to Loose Park every day unrecorded. Maya was born March 30, 2009, on a farm outside Seward, Nebraska. Her parents were recent arrivals to America from their native country, Spain. They were born on a ranch in the Andalusian province of Malaga. Andalusia is the heartland of the Spanish Water Dog (SWD). There, on the farms and pastures of the region, the ancestors of the SWD, including Maya's own ancestors, had for centuries aided their owners mainly in managing livestock, herding being their specialty. The SWD of today is the direct descendant of the most common form of sheep dog long found in Spain, going back to the Middle Ages.

Now, what prompted me to begin recording Maya at Loose Park was the nature of the interactions she and I were having with the people we were encountering there. Before moving to Kansas City, I had lived for 20 years in Santa Monica. There people tend to grant each other a considerable degree of personal privacy, especially in public places. Not so in Kansas City. Kansas Citians of all extractions are, if I may generalize, shockingly outgoing and friendly with strangers, even out in public. Add to that the fact that by 4 years of age Maya's coat had become strikingly unusual. The SWD is one of just a handful of breeds whose hair naturally dreads up as it grows out. At 4 Maya looked a lot like a canine version of Bob Marley. This combination of Maya's rasta-like appearance and the uninhibited friendliness of Kansas Citians gave rise to a number of memorable encounters at the park. Though not an anthropologist by training, I came to believe that these experiences were of sufficient anthropological interest, in what they showed about the human capacity for sociability, that they deserved to be documented and preserved somehow. With that motivation in mind, I found a hands-free camera and started recording.