If all this added up to
certain kinds of discomfort that would have seemed somewhat peculiar to our Eastern big - city
cousins — childhood friendships, for example, that unspokenly and mysteriously evaporated in adolescence — in some respects we were also far more at ease
than they.
As a result, the definition of the companion animal breed is a breed whose members can not perform any utilitarian function for themselves or their human owners — they're simply too weak to pull their own weight anymore — and they also suffer from a much wider array of painful maladies
than their larger
cousins; painful and unnatural medical problems like the tendency of
certain joints like knees and hips to pop out of their sockets far too easily, among many others.