So wrote researchers in a 1991 paper in the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography in which one of the authors straight-up infiltrated a group of dog owners that hung out at his local park and took notes on their behavior as he slowly became their friend. He noticed that the dog owners were open to talking with other people in the park, and welcomed other dog owners (who weren’t part of their group) to let their dogs off the leash to play. But the conversations were pretty much entirely dog-centric, and at first the owners would even address a newcomer’s dog rather than the person.

On the author’s second visit to the park with his dog, Max, one of the women from the group came up to them. “She bent down and began petting Max,” he wrote. “She spoke to him in the tones a mother uses with her child: ‘You’re so cute! What a good boy. You’re so friendly, aren’t you? Yes, you are.’ She then directed a number of questions to me: ‘What’s his name? How old is he?’”

The term for what she’s doing is “triangling”—addressing the dog instead of the human in order to minimize the risk of talking with a stranger. The dog is a safer target; it probably won’t reject you. (I mean, it might wander away to pee or chase a squirrel.)