Dog and I

by Roy MacGregor

  I turned to the internet. On one site, a veterinarian talking about obsessive-compulsive behaviour offers the line, “Women think men have a one-track mind … that is, until they meet a border collie.” Another professional, a dog psychologist it seems, operating out of New York City, suggests Prozac as a possible cure. For the puppy or the owner? The site isn’t clear. Either way, a frightening thought.

  But not quite so alarming, perhaps, as the soggy black ball that has once again been plunked in my lap. And even if there were such a pill around here, and it was meant for the pet not the human, there is still one problem. How, I wonder, would you ever get it past a mouth that is plugged twenty-four hours a day with a tennis ball?

  The Teen Years

  Seven for every one. The rule of thumb—rule of dewclaw, if you prefer—for measuring dog years against human years is to count seven human years for every one dog year. There is a point, admittedly, where this works fairly well. A nine-year-old mutt, for example, is much the same as a sixty-three-year-old human mongrel. A fifteen-year-old pooch is very much a centenarian with teeth and bladder problems. It falls apart, however, when trying to figure out puppies.

  The current subject—the one sleeping in the corner over there with all four paws in the air—will be closing in on a year some time before Christmas. The date is inexact, as might be expected of a mutt of uncertain lineage that a mischievous daughter found in a distant Humane Society. But if we guess ten or eleven months, then this creature named Willow, by the accepted measure, should be roughly kindergarten level.

  I don’t think so. For one thing, she is too stupid. For another thing, she is too smart.

  The seven-for-one math simply does not work in the first year of a dog’s life. What human, for example, can walk at two weeks? What human can chew, and partly digest, a shoe at four weeks? What human has ever been known to run away at eight weeks? Find me the human baby who can swim across a bay at six months, let alone a beginning toddler who can chase a car halfway to work at ten months. Show me the child, please, who is house-trained at seven months—well, partly housetrained, anyway.

  Then again, we do not—at least I hope not—see a six-month-old baby insisting on hanging about the house with a dirty sock in her mouth. We do not find an infant demanding cat food instead of the food intended for her. We do not see toddlers taking apart, stitch by stitch, every toy they are ever shown to chomp down and burst the plastic squeaker inside.

  It is a difficult measure, admittedly, but I think there is a simple solution: triple the rule of thumb for the first year and, if the dog reaches fifteen, forget even trying and just start treating every extra year as an extra year. By this methodology, it is safe to conclude that the brown and white creature sighing in the corner is a … teenager. Certainly, the signs are irrefutable:

  • Gets up, eats, goes back to sleep, gets up, goes out, comes in, eats, sleeps, whines if can’t go out in evening, eats, sleeps.

  • Never picks up after herself. There are mismatched socks everywhere, including one in her mouth. There are chewed balls, destroyed squeaky toys, pull toys, animal toys strewn everywhere. If you place them neatly back in her toy box, she spends fifteen minutes hauling them out and placing them, randomly, where they are most likely to be in the way.

  • Totally, one hundred percent self-absorbed. It is all “me … me … ME!” all the time. She wants fed, wants out, wants in, wants petted, wants someone to play with her, wants on the bed, wants on the furniture, wants in the refrigerator, wants the cats’ food, wants the humans’ food, wants to roll in whatever she can find—dead squirrel, crushed groundhog, rotted bird carcass.…

  • Single-minded. If you have seen a teenage human hypnotized, transfixed, and obsessed with a video game, you will have some sense—some very small sense—of what it’s like to see a dog willing to chase a ball or stick much longer than the human arm can throw.

  • Megalomania. What does it tell you when a dog stops and looks around the field if she happens to catch a thrown ball on the first bounce? What does it tell you when a dog insists on walking through the woods with a log big enough to take down a hiker at the back of the knees? Or when the dog insists on bounding past you just as the trail becomes wide enough for one? What does it say to you when a skinny little puppy suddenly tries to puff up like an Arctic sled dog the moment any other dog comes along the trail?

  • Whining. Whine to get out, whine to get in. Whine to be fed, whine for more. Whine for a treat, whine for a second treat. Whine to get out, whine to get in. Whine to play, whine to play, whine to play, whine to play.…

  • Stubborn. Approximately once a week does as she is told. Other 4,587 times it’s a toss-up. Shall I “come” or shall I scoot? Shall I “sit” or shall I lunge? As for “stay”—don’t even think about it.

  • Driving. Insists on sitting in best seat. Would prefer driver’s seat if available. Wants windows down so she can hang head out.

  • Clumsy. Fine to hang your head out the car window, but not so fine, she will surely eventually realize, to place paw on automatic window and set reverse guillotine in motion.…

  Pawprinted Legacies of the Great

  I have started reading to my dog. Not stuff I have written— there is, after all, a Humane Society in this town—but self-improvement books. Her self-improvement.

  And why not read? Everyone talks to the dog. I even saw a poll somewhere that claimed one out of every three of us telephones the dog—homesick travellers calling back to have whoever answers hold out the receiver while the deranged traveller tries to coax a bark out of the poor dumbfounded thing. Reading, however, has a far more honourable purpose than the self-gratification of a business traveller feeling sorry for himself. I want this dog—this one-year-old mutt called Willow, who is just beginning to come into her own—to become something special, not just something I call home to talk to when nobody else will listen.

  The dog needs inspiration. It lay, asleep, legs in the air, the other morning while one of the many unemployed in this house watched The Ellen DeGeneres Show. A man was on talking about how, out walking one evening with his Labradors, he had fallen into a diabetic coma. The yellow Lab lay on him to keep the man warm while the black Lab—I’m not making this up; I’m not allowed to—grabbed the flashlight the man had dropped and began running about the field with it in its mouth until a policeman noticed the dancing light and came to investigate.

  Thanks to the dogs, the policeman’s CPR, and an ambulance, the man’s life was saved. When he came back from hospital, he told Ellen, the dogs began to weep.

  This dog sleeping on the floor, on the other hand, would pick up a flashlight only if someone first threw it. And then she’d want it thrown again and again and again and again until, frankly, the thrower might welcome a diabetic coma.

  Perhaps it’s the breed. A couple of months ago, while travelling in the United States, I came across an advice column for pet owners. A woman had written in to say her new dog’s constant staring had “weirded” her out to the point where she’d decided to take the little border collie back to the kennel where she got it. The advice columnist, bless his heart, gloriously ripped into her, saying the breed is supposed to stare like that. Such dogs, the expert said, are extremely bright. It wasn’t staring but rather looking for a signal to do something—like fetch, or round up the sheep—and the only thing dumb about border collies is that they think humans have enough intelligence to offer direction.

  This dog isn’t quite a border collie, but she is enough of one to stare endlessly in search of a stick or ball that might fly through the air and have to be instantly returned for the next throw. And the next. And the next …

  So, being a fairly bright human compared with the woman who took her dog back, I have decided to take that columnist’s sage advice and offer direction. Which is why I have started reading to my dog. The book we have chosen is The Pawprints of History by Stanley Coren, a professor of psychology at the University of British Colum
bia. Subtitled Dogs and the Course of Human Events, the book was a gift from a friend—and we are most grateful for its inspiration.

  I have explained to Willow that I expect great things from her, but I am not expecting the impossible. It would be unlikely, for example, that she might ever start her own church, though Stanley Coren makes an excellent case that the very existence of Protestantism is directly tied to the intervention of a greyhound called Urian.

  According to the Coren interpretation of religious history, Protestantism would never have been necessary to invent had Pope Clement VII only seen fit to grant Henry VIII the divorce he was seeking in order to marry the charming Anne Boleyn. All that was required was for the Pope to grant an annulment on whatever cocked-up and cooked-up basis would suffice. The king dispatched his main churchman, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, off to Rome to ask the favour and Wolsey, a great dog lover, insisted on taking along Urian, his rather overprotective pet.

  Custom demanded that supplicants approach the papal throne and kiss the Pope’s toe. Wolsey, a good Catholic and a Cardinal, naturally had no difficulty with this, but poor Urian misunderstood the bare foot swinging out toward his master’s lips, leapt over his master, and smartly bit Pope Clement VII on the leg. The Pope blew a fuse, threw the Cardinal out, and refused to grant Henry his wish—thereby leading to the creation of the Church of England.

  I do not expect a church; I just pray that she one day amounts to something.

  I have read aloud to Willow the story of Bounce, the dog who saved Alexander Pope from a knife-wielding valet, and of Cap, the sheepdog who inspired Florence Nightingale to take up nursing. I have read to her the remarkable tale of Biche, Frederick the Great’s beloved Italian greyhound, who was so valued in battle that, when Biche was captured during the Battle of Soor in 1745, Frederick called it “the kidnapping of a member of the royal family” and arranged a “prisoner exchange” to get the dog back.

  I have read to her—sometimes while she sleeps, legs straight up—the story of Peps, who so inspired Wagner when he was at the piano that the great composer once actually claimed that Peps was co-author of Tannhauser. (Whether Peps would want such credit is open to speculation.) She has also heard, both while sleeping and awake, the story of Tuck, the Scottish greyhound who stood, and died bravely, fighting with General George Armstrong Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn.

  I have read aloud to her so that she will appreciate the deep connection between great dogs and great men— and if I can still aspire, in my advancing years, to be one of these two, then she should aspire to be the other.

  I have told her about the Skye terrier that Alexander Graham Bell taught to say “How are you, Grandmama?” while the little dog growled and Bell manipulated its lips, and I have explained to her how all this led, eventually, to the invention of the machine I sometimes call her on from out of town in the hopes that she will recognize my voice and remember me. I have told her the story of Sigmund Freud and how he would hold birthday parties for his various inspirational dogs, great man and dogs sitting around the table wearing silly paper hats, Freud writing special poems for each dog that he would read aloud with great drama while the dogs checked the meter and rhyme schemes.

  We have read together the story of Pat, who some claim was the true prime minister of Canada in the days of William Lyon Mackenzie King. The way things have been going around here lately, I have told Willow, it is not entirely out of the question for her to dream of one day holding higher office.

  And, as well, we have read together the stories from Mr. Coren’s delightful book on the incredible number of dogs—he estimates 230—who have lived at the White House. She has heard all about Skip, the famous mutt Teddy Roosevelt called “a little dog—by that I mean a little of this, and a little of that.” She has listened to the stories of Fala, FDR’s little dog who was made a private in the U.S. Army. And, of course, she has heard all about Millie, Barbara Bush’s springer spaniel whose major literary effort, Millie’s Book, actually outsold the president’s memoirs.

  You would think all this would sink in. But no, I read and she sleeps, and when I stop reading she goes and pokes about under and in the furniture until she finds one of those balls that have been thrown and retrieved so often it looks as though the last time it was thrown was up. She drops it on the open book, sitting back and staring, staring, staring….

  Lost Dog at Twenty Below

  The call came late on the shortest day of the year. It was the youngest, on a cellphone, his voice breathless and thin as if coming from somewhere deep back in the bush—which, in fact, it was.

  “Willow’s gone!”

  He and a pal had taken their dogs—the pal’s dog a true border collie, ours a borderline collie with borderline intelligence—off to an area park known on local maps as the Bruce Pit. In local circles, however, it is known as the Dog Convention Centre, a place where mostly purebreds and a few mutts run wild in gangs, a designated sanctuary with not a single sign threatening the dogs with fines if they don’t keep their owners on a short leash.

  There are, increasingly, such places to be found in Canadian cities. Male dogs arrive convinced that the Supreme Court of Domesticated Animals has declared the entire park a swingers’ club; females, as a result, spend much of their time sitting on cold snow and snapping angrily at pestering males; and owners sip coffee—Starbucks snobs in one corner, people with taste in another—and talk about such pressing matters as the best place to find designer pet clothes and debate the benefits of modern crate-training over traditional house-training.

  It is hard to believe how the politicians have missed all this. In this country they think there are votes to be had for something as minor as daycare spaces for preschoolers, little realizing that any political party offering to subsidize agility classes for puppies would sweep the country.

  The idea in coming to Bruce Pit this bitterly cold day was to “socialize” the dog. She is one year old this month, frighteningly friendly to humans but skittish around other dogs, especially those with loud barks and untoward intentions.

  The idea was to let her run with the older, more secure border collie. The two of them could snake about the park in that odd you-can’t-see-me slouch of the herding collie, perhaps meet a few regular dogs, and maybe even realize how lucky they are that their owners haven’t turned them into fake-fur-and-bootie-wearing Barbie doll dogs.

  It worked fine for a while—right up until they happened to run smack into an evolving dog fight over some imagined slight. The little dog bolted immediately. Straight under the dark skirts of the nearest spruce, off back into the deep, deep woods—and gone.

  “Bring warm clothes!” the youngest shouted into the phone, teeth chattering in the background. “It’s freezing!”

  It was twelve below when we got there. The boy, having headed out in nothing but a fleece, looked like he needed medical attention, not help looking for the lost dog. He put on the ski clothes we had brought along, pulled on thick mittens and a toque, and all of us, some carrying flashlights, headed off deep into the pit.

  Darkness fell and the moon, fortunately, rose. It was a bright, clear night, but the advantage given to the eyes came with a disadvantage to the rest of the system: the temperature was now twenty below and heading lower. Up and down the trails we searched, calling her name and, so long as it was still possible to purse lips in such cold, whistling for her. But nothing.

  “She won’t last more than a couple of hours in this,” someone said. No one argued, though no one knew for certain.

  The hope that she’d gone elsewhere was really no hope at all. The only exit from the pit parking area was out onto a busy road, the traffic heavy and fast at this time of day, late rush hour, and impossible for a small, frightened dog to get across to where she might find a friendly back door to whine at and scratch on.

  After several hours, there was no choice but to give up. No dog and too cold for humans. We arrived home in a stunned, depressed state. A little dog
that doesn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain was out now in sub-zero temperature, thick bush in one direction, heavy traffic in the other.

  Inside the house there was, for once, nothing wiggling and wagging with a shoe in her mouth. There was, however, something. The telephone was flashing red with a message.

  A man had been driving home late from work. Traffic on the busy road had come to a halt as a small, skittish dog darted out and then back. He had opened his door, called, and she leapt in—trusting completely in strangers, just as she had been taught.

  His wife had tracked us down through Willow’s tags. “We have your dog,” the message said. She left their number, and then a giggle. “No need to hurry,” she added. “She’s down in the basement, playing with the children.”

  But we hurried anyway.

  Merchandising Madness

  Here, by the front counter, we have a tray of mailman’s fingers—a dollar each. Cheaper, surely, by the gross. And there, behind the party hats and tutus and faux fur coats, we find the stack of penises. Bull penises. Bullies. Pizzle sticks. Whatever you’re more comfortable with …

  On the other hand, perhaps it is not so much this pile of stiff, dried-out bull penises—“an excellent chew to remove plaque and tarter buildup”—that is causing the peculiar itching, sweaty feeling that is rippling up and down your spine as you walk around this high-end store in the trendiest section of town. Perhaps it is the whole idea.

  This store is hardly unique, though it is unusual. It is part of a small chain of dog “boutiques” that go under the Bark & Fitz banner and are amusing stops for the curious as well as treasured stops for the domesticated. There is a bowl of treats at the front entrance and a seemingly endless supply of treats from the small bakery at the back—so long as you come in on all fours with your tail wagging. Dogs, the woman running the shop says, have become “the new children.”