The yellow dog Mabel celebrated her seventh birthday recently. Friends indulge me each year, and Mabel’s birthday has become a glorious, riotous porch tradition.

Everyone but Mabel eats too much cake, stays up too late and talks about politics and matters of consequence, using the dog as an excuse for a party. She seems above it all, bemused but apart, wondering why humans carry on so.

If she were a child, Mabel would be in second grade, struggling with subtraction and bullies on the playground. She’d be hiding her leafy greens in her napkin and begging for plastic thin...

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