Merle's Door

by Ted Kerasote

  What about enforcing the law requiring that off-leash dogs be within one hundred meters of their human or within earshot? I asked. He gave a Gallic shrug of his shoulders and said, "With everything else going on in Chamonix, that's not high on my list of priorities."

  One of the veterinarians with whom I spoke, Dr. Franck Miallier, a fresh-faced man with widely set blue eyes, concurred with the chief of police's take on dog bites. "The bites I see," he said, "happen within the family. In fact, there are hardly any dog bites from the free-roaming dogs because they're so well-socialized."

  Dr. Valerie Hermann, who practices several kilometers upriver from Dr. Miallier, agreed with him. A short, commanding woman with brilliant golden hair, she used virtually the same words as Dr. Miallier: "The dogs are so well socialized to people, we don't see bites."

  Absence of injury, however, doesn't necessarily mean that people are happy about sharing their space with free-roaming dogs. Yet in a couple of days of canvassing opinion on the square, I found that people weren't troubled by the dogs. They all said much the same thing: The dogs were mannerly; they didn't beg, bark, or whine; and so what if they strolled among pedestrians? A bartender at La Potinière, an open-air restaurant on the plaza, spoke for many when she said, "It's just not a problem. No one complains."

  The only person who voiced a somewhat different sentiment was a handsome, middle-aged woman walking across the square with her husband and a small white poodle. I asked them, "Why do you keep your dog on a leash when everyone else lets theirs wander?"

  "Oh," said the woman, "we are from Dijon, and unleashed dogs would never be tolerated there." She pursed her lips and exhaled the small puff of air with which the French express their disapproval: "phoo." It sounded remarkably like the noise Merle made when he disagreed with me.

  "Mais, c'est Chamonix," the woman added. But this is Chamonix. "Chacun ici fait grand cas de la liberté." Everyone here makes a big deal about freedom.

  This notion was reiterated by Dr. Hermann, who, with a twinkle in her eye, told me, "Chamonix is the capital of skiing and alpinism. It's the free spirit. The people are running free, their children run free, the dogs run free."

  Significantly, everyone with whom I spoke ignored one of the most crucial factors in the city's toleration of free-roaming dogs: No automobiles are permitted in the very center of town; it's a pedestrian mall. In the narrow cobblestone streets that lead to the plaza, motorists can't go much above fifteen miles per hour. In this way, in the heart of a busy city, both dogs and people enjoyed what Merle and I and our neighbors enjoyed in our small village: a place devoted to people and animals instead of to cars.

  ***

  Although the special circumstances surrounding Chamonix's toleration of free-roaming dogs can't be readily duplicated in other urban centers (at least not without changing some cultural attitudes), there are important lessons to be learned from this small city in the French Alps. Foremost is the fact that thousands of pedestrians intermingle with off-leash dogs without being bitten or even bothered. The Chamonix experience thus goes against the grain of how other urban centers, as well as towns, have tried to protect pedestrians from dogs—by keeping the dogs on a very short leash. This is certainly wise legislation when it comes to streets congested with automobiles, but it is counterproductive when applied with a broad brush, making all city and suburban parks off-limits to dogs who are within voice control of their humans while enjoying some off-leash play. As Temple Grandin has noted, "[L]eash laws may be short-circuiting some core principle of animal behavior in the wild."

  I suspect that this principle has a lot to do with the fact that all of us need to meet and then get to know other members of our species in an unconstrained way. To appreciate what this means to a dog, try this thought experiment.

  Put a collar around your neck, attached to a six-foot lead. At the other end of the lead is a dog who is at least twice and perhaps four to thirty times your size. Now go to a party and try to talk with another human being while your dog pulls at you, barks at you, and, through the leash that connects the two of you, transmits its annoyance, impatience, hurry, and concern. Is it any wonder that there are so many neurotic dogs?

  More and more animal-welfare organizations are trying to make this point. The San Francisco SPCA, concerned that off-leash dog privileges might be curtailed in Golden Gate National Recreation Area because of the public's fear of dogs, has been one of the most outspoken, saying in an official position paper, "Off-leash areas are essential to the well-being of dogs. Regular off-leash play makes for healthy, well-adjusted dogs. It burns off pent-up energy, builds confidence, improves a dog's social skills and helps prevent aggression. Conversely, limiting dog play results in under-socialized, under-exercised, under-stimulated dogs and often leads to behavior problems."

  On the other side of the continent, in New York City, a dog-advocacy group named FIDO has said the same thing: "FIDO believes that dogs need off-leash time to exercise and to play with other dogs in order to be healthy and well-socialized."

  This sort of talk makes more than a few non–dog owners nervous. They watch TV newscasts of gruesome dog maulings, especially of children, or read about them in the newspaper, and the reports often make reference to the increasing number of dog bites, and may even cite the most recent data available from the Centers for Disease Control, showing that 4.7 million dog bites occurred in the United States in 1994.

  At first glance, this sounds like a national disaster. Do we really need any more dogs, especially unleashed ones? Aren't organizations like the SPCA and FIDO simply looking out for the interests of their members, who want their dogs to have as much freedom as possible? Or does one of the principal contentions of these groups, that off-leash dogs are not a threat to public safety, have some merit? One person who has tried to answer these questions is the science and education writer Linda S. Shore, who has done the most comprehensive review of dog bites in North America ever compiled, using data from The Laboratory Centre for Disease Control, a branch of the Canadian national health agency, as well as from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.

  The most significant piece of information to come out of her review confirms the experience in Chamonix. The majority of dog bites (65 percent in Canada and 75 percent in the United States) do not happen to pedestrians who encounter an off-leash dog in a public place. Rather, most dog bites occur within the home to a family member who knows the dog. In fact, only 1.1 percent of all the dog bites surveyed in Canada occurred in public parks, sports, or recreation areas. (The same information was not available from the CDC.)

  Shore's research into emergency room visits also puts the danger of dog bites into perspective. Only 1.3 percent of all people admitted to an ER in the United States were treated for a dog bite. One's chances of going to the ER for having fallen down, been cut by a knife in one's own kitchen, crashed one's car or bicycle, fallen victim to overexertion, gotten burned while cooking dinner, had a foreign object fly into one's eye, or cut off a toe in the lawn mower are all far greater than having been bitten by a dog. The only accidents lower than dog bites in the national ER admission statistics are poisoning, suffocating, and walking into another pedestrian.

  This data is especially relevant when viewed alongside the recent work of animal behaviorists. Innumerable case studies have shown that the large increase in dysfunctional canine behavior, especially aggression, is a direct result of more and more dogs living solitary lives. Supervised free-roaming dogs aren't a threat to public safety; unsocialized ones are. These are the very sort of dogs who, spending their lives in solitary confinement from their own kind—often in a suburban yard—bark their heads off at passersby, make life hell for the mail carrier, and act aggressively toward other dogs and people when they meet them face to face. Such sequestered dogs may have their own dog door, but if the door leads to no more than a lawn and a fence, the dog has merely been put in a bigger crate.

  The ultimate truth of living with a dog is the
same as that of living with a person you care about: It takes time. And in this respect, many urban dogs may have more fulfilling lives than their suburban counterparts. Their humans, being urban people and not so wedded to automobiles, walk, and when they walk they take their dogs with them. If they have access to a park with hours devoted to off-leash recreation, both person and dog get what most of us need, if not every day, then close to every day: access to a reasonable amount of green space, safety from cars, exercise, and good conversation with our own kind.

  These four criteria are worth keeping in mind when one's local parks department is about to turn yet another grassy field—open to free play—into softball diamonds. Likewise, these four criteria can be used as discussion points in the ever more frequent debates over whether a last piece of farmland, adjacent to a growing suburban center, should be kept as open space or turned into a shopping mall.

  It may be no accident that as these criteria, especially space, have decreased, depression has increased in both humans and dogs. Research done on the entire adult Swedish population has demonstrated a strong correlation between the stresses of urban living and the incidence of depression and psychosis. As a society, we have elected to treat this neurochemical change in our brains with psychotropic drugs—antidepressants—a wide-ranging experiment in treating symptoms, not causes, and one whose long-term biological and social consequences can hardly be foreseen.

  Some of the short-term ones can be. Dr. Nicholas Dodman, the pioneer of treating depressed dogs with antidepressants, advises his clients that "without environmental enrichment ... pharmacological treatment ... will be less likely to succeed." His advice cuts across the species line.

  The next time I visited Chamonix, the Newfie was gone, his office occupied by a happy-go-lucky dog of about seventy pounds, a curly-haired fellow, brown-and-black and of indeterminate ancestry. Not standing on his dignity, as had the Newfie, he bounded toward me, took in my smells, and gave me a frolicsome bow, bending low over his outstretched legs while wagging his tail with great enthusiasm. Instead of saying that he was "un chien très occupé," a very busy dog, and hurrying on, he said, "J'ai vraiment chaud," I'm really hot, and leapt into the fountain for a swim.

  Chapter 17

  The First Passing

  The golden hair on Merle's elbows steadily disappeared and was replaced by calluses. Small warts grew on his back and benign fatty tumors—lipomas—over his ribs. His warm brown eyes took on a bluish cast, an increased density in the cellular structure of the central portion of the lens, called nuclear sclerosis, which makes the eyes of older dogs reflect light differently but doesn't markedly affect their vision. And his hearing slowly waned until I could stand behind him and say his name—not in an undertone but quite loudly—and get no response. Yet if I'd clap my hands or whistle, he'd instantly turn, for he was still able to hear these particular frequencies. Distant passersby, watching me on the deck, clapping my hands and whistling, must have thought, "Well, it's happened. He's finally gone mad."

  His energy went up and down. Sometimes he could lope alongside me as I ski-skated; sometimes his back end became seized up and all he could do was walk slowly. His right rear leg began to atrophy, the paw turning inward, another result of his fall from the truck—the nerve that supplied his leg had been pinched. He could no longer stand on his hind legs and dance with me. Instead, as I two-stepped in front of him, he'd circle me arthritically and pump his paws up and down. Then he lost his voice. He was barely able to croak along to the "Hallelujah Chorus." Soon, I would return from a trip and he wouldn't chew me out with baying cries, though his lashing tail would say, "Gosh, I missed you."

  All of these geriatric changes paled when Brower's cancer returned. A bulge the size of an apricot pit began to distend the wall of his snout beneath his right eye. It grew to the size of a golf ball, a peach, and then, over the period of a year, into a cracked and monstrous bulge the size of a fist that left blood in the snow when he scraped it.

  Of course, he was still skiing with Allison. And dancing when he stopped by the house. And hiking up Snow King, where people, unable to bear the sight of him, would later confide to me, "Why doesn't Allison put that dog down?" Instead, she put him on her Christmas card, sitting next to him with her arm around his shoulder as they both smiled into the camera. The rest of his body was still that of the perfect Golden Retriever and so was his spirit, as he displayed on the first of June when, for old time's sake, he, Allison, Merle, and I climbed the Sleeping Indian, whose summit rises a mile above Kelly to 11,200 feet.

  Brower pranced along the tundra, Merle galloping behind him, stiff but game, and watching them I thought, "I hope I can move that way if I'm terminally ill or I'm eighty-three. And at this altitude, no less." It was Merle's birthday—the day I had made his birthday, not knowing what day he was actually born. He was thirteen, and it was his twelfth time up the mountain.

  We sat on the summit together, the dogs eating their traditional biscuits, we eating our traditional cookies, and all of us gazing at the mountains stretching away as far as we could see. On the way down, only a mile from the roadhead, I took a vaulting jump over a tree that had fallen across the trail. A moment later, I heard a dull thud behind me, followed by Merle's howls. He had also jumped the tree and had come crashing down to earth.

  He lay on his side, wailing and appearing paralyzed. It was the first vocalization I'd heard from him in months. Talking to him softly—"Hang in there, Merlster, hang in there"—I felt him all over. Nothing seemed broken, and I helped him to his feet. Incredibly stiff, he managed to hobble to the trailhead, where I had to lift him into the car. By the time we got home, I had to carry him inside.

  The next day an X-ray showed a lumbosacral subluxation. In layman's terms, he'd thrown out his back, which, in fact, was what he had been baying, "My back, my back, oh, my back!" Painkillers and muscle relaxants got him mobile, and more chiropractic work from Jim Davis put him on the mend. But as he was recuperating over the next two weeks, a man with six dogs—Rhodesian Ridge-backs, Golden Retrievers, and mixed breeds—moved in across the field from us. One day, as Merle was hobbling outside for a call of nature, they rushed him. He wagged his tail—"Good to meet you, welcome to the neighborhood"—and I'll always remember the expression on his face as they swarmed over him. It wasn't fear or anger, it was "This is uncalled for." One of the pack, a nervous, mean-spirited dog, bit Merle twice on the shoulder. Within days, the bites swelled into infected hematomas, and Merle had a high fever. The vet put him on antibiotics and again he slowly improved, resuming his mayoral duties only to have the local deer herd chase him across the field, the bucks with their antlers down. Only the quick intervention of one of our neighbors saved him from being gored.

  I kept him inside and began to walk with him, slowly building up his strength. A week after his fever subsided, I helped him into the car and we drove to the Hoback River, where I left him on the grassy bank as I waded across the channel, casting upstream. Occasionally, I looked back to see him resting contentedly and snapping at flies. The next time I glanced up, he was swimming across the river, the current sweeping him downstream toward some rapids. His eyes expressed not the slightest dismay, only a steady intent on the bank beyond me, which he reached handily. Emerging from the water, he shook himself off and sent me the smuggest of expressions: "You see. I'm feeling better."

  "Merle, you gave me a heart attack."

  "Ha-ha-ha," he replied. "No big deal."

  He walked along the bank, watching me fish and examining the trout I caught with an analytical expression: "Well, I guess this is important to you."

  We meandered about a half mile upstream and when it was time to go back across, I said, "You think you can make it?"

  Eyes half closed, he swished his tail—"of course"—and followed me into the water, swimming through the swift current by my side. On the other side, he bounded out and shook himself exuberantly, giving the tip of his tail a smart little tap in the air. My aging
dog was back.

  Three weeks later, as I was writing at my desk, I heard him sit up from the floor of the great room. He took several steps toward the dog door, setting off on his third tour of the village, when he fell down and began to thrash. I sprinted from my office and found him flopping on his side, his right leg collapsing beneath him each time he tried to struggle to his feet. Each time he fell, he slammed his head onto the floor. Grabbing him, I put my arms around him and held him close to me. His eyes were wild and afraid, as if something terrible had happened to him. "Easy, easy," I said. "I'm right here." He was breathing hard and fast.

  When I steadied him, he could barely walk and kept falling to his right side. When he tried to shake his head, he fell over. The vet who had been taking care of him along with Marybeth Minter, a lanky young man named Theo Schuff, examined him an hour later, his blue eyes behind his gold-rimmed spectacles concerned and tender as he said, "You've been through it the last few months, haven't you, partner?"

  "Ha-ha," Merle panted tiredly, "tell me about it."

  "Well, we're going to get you fixed up," Theo replied, helping him swallow another round of painkillers and muscle relaxants. Rubbing the back of his neck, Theo told me that Merle might have vestibular disease, a condition that affects the inner ear and throws off a dog's perception of its body's position relative to the earth. It could be caused by an infection in the middle ear or by lesions in the brain, but its prognosis was good—a full recovery in a week or two. Merle should have complete rest and, if I wanted the expert's opinion, I should take him back to Colorado to see the neurologist Paul Cuddon.

  I made the trip, and Paul's diagnosis was that Merle might actually have had a stroke. He had lost his proprioception in his right rear leg; the blink reflex of his right eye was blown; and when he'd reach for a biscuit, he'd miss it by two inches. An MRI would tell for sure.