Howl

by Bark Editors

  My one comfort is that I suspect I am not alone. Oh, you know who you are. You have two, three dogs, and you volunteer at the animal shelter. You like dogs more than people. And you are no longer loath to admit it. Come on, ’fess up. And don’t be ashamed.

  There are loads of us out there. And it seems that no matter how educated you are, no matter where you stand on the corporate ladder, no matter how intelligent or savvy or well-read—if you have a dog, you are at risk of contracting this degenerative disease.

  And how do you know when you have contracted Crazy Dog Lady Syndrome? Perhaps this little quiz I devised will help. So put down your bull pizzle, pour yourself a gin and tonic, and grab a pen. The pen that says “I Cockapoos” on it. Or the one with your vet’s address.

  The following seven questions will help you determine where you stand.

  * * *

  When asked a simple question, such as “How are you?” do you:

  1) Say, “Fine, thank you, and you?”

  2) Say, “Fine, thank you,” and then tell the person who inquired how your dog is?

  3) Immediately launch into an extended monologue in which you prattle on about the consistency of your dog’s stool?

  Does the term “heavy petting” conjure up images of:

  1) Being groped in the backseat of an Impala by your first high school boyfriend?

  2) Worrisome images of the kind of thing your prepubescent son is viewing online? Right now, as you read this!

  3) Your dog?

  Where do you store your liver treats?

  1) In your pockets.

  2) In your mouth.

  3) I don’t carry treats! My dog loves me for me, not my freeze-dried animal products.

  You’ve set some money aside for your children’s college education. You:

  1) Actually send your children to college.

  2) Donate most of it to your local animal shelter.

  3) Blow it all on cosmetic dentistry for Willy the Weimaraner when he chips his incisor on a bone.

  Your children complain that you love your dog more than them. Do you:

  1) Say, “That’s not true”?

  2) Say, “That’s not true.” And then, “Come here my little Muffy Wuffy and give Mummy a kiss” (and your child is not named “Muffy”)?

  3) Say, “And your point is?”

  Your husband leans toward the nape of your neck to kiss you. Does he smell:

  1) J’adore by Christian Dior?

  2) Notes of dog breath and liver (from being licked on the ear)?

  3) Urine breath (from you-know-what)?

  And finally,

  At the movie theaters, when they get to that part where the heroine finally finds her One True Love, do you:

  1) Grab your date’s hand and thank your lucky stars?

  2) Scoff at the idea of a One True Love?

  3) Think weepily of your dog?

  * * *

  Okay, now, put down that I Cockapoos pen and tally up your scores.

  If your score is 8, you’re fine. You’re at Stage I. You can hold your head high as you walk down the neighborhood sidewalks. You will be happily admitted to the Belmont Country Club and to any dog run in the fifty states. And feel free to help yourself to another glass of gin.

  If your score ranges from 8 to 16, you are at Stage II and are what they call a High Functioning Dog Person. This is similar to the High Functioning Alcoholic, a problem drinker who still manages to keep himself together in public by performing admirably at his job and maintaining healthy relationships, et cetera.

  Before the urine-breath incident, I myself was a High Functioning Dog Lady. I prided myself on the fact that I could attend a Junior Members reception at MoMA (looking fetching in my Pucci-print blouse and custom-painted Pumas), and, at my creative writing workshops, could wax poetic on the merits of the intimate third-person point-of-view. Meanwhile, back at home, I’d be singing little ballads I had composed about my dog to my dog. No one knew of my sordid underworld, and therefore, no one was harmed.

  But then came the urine incident. And then it was time to acknowledge that I was weird. Smart, but not normal. I wondered if I had begun to look like my dog. Or if I smelled like one. Did the people at work notice? I began to wonder. The way they’d notice gin on a High Functioning Alcoholic’s breath?

  And how could I be sure the smell was real, or acute, or if it was just my own paranoia? One can become desensitized to a chronic smell, after all (just ask a Cat Lady). But just to be sure, I called upon Chip, Ted’s bluntly honest friend. We invited him over for Appletinis, and I prepared by putting out the cheese plate and lighting a scented candle from the excellent French company Diptyque. And after we had exchanged our human pleasantries and taken our first sips of drink, I asked Chip, very directly, if our apartment smelled like dog. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t even sniff the air. This meant the answer had been on his tongue for a long, long time. “Yes,” he said. “It always has.”

  Which brings us to Stage III. If you scored 18 to 21 on the above quiz, you have contracted full-blown Crazy Dog Person Syndrome. But don’t worry. It’s not fatal, after all. And we’re here to help. Let us remember that life is full of milestones: birth, marriage, the day you find your first gray hair (on your pubis, no less). Dog people simply have additional milestones to contend with: puppy’s first play date, puppy’s first solid poop, the first time your adopted dog responds to his name. And perhaps the most significant milestone is the day you realize you have gone over the edge.

  Mine, of course, was the urine-breath announcement. My friend Karen knew she was a Crazy Dog Lady when she canceled her long-dreamed of trip to Hawaii to take her Lab to a doggy summer camp instead. Another friend, Lisa, a devoted wife and mother of two, wears an antique locket on a chain around her neck that contains a photo of her new Malamute, not her kids. The list is endless. You see a man at Zoomie’s dog boutique buying an amethyst and garnet collar for his Bichon while his wife complains that they can never afford to go out to eat. You see a man at an outdoor café on Second Avenue who can afford to go out to eat and brings, as his date, his giant English Bulldog, whom the waiters allow to sit across from him at the table, in a chair. There is the woman at the office who communicates with her dog through a walkie-talkie; one that she keeps on her desk, the other that is fastened, back at home, around the dog’s neck. At four o’clock every day she buzzes the dog and asks him what he wants for dinner. The dog doesn’t say much, just as that Bulldog at the café doesn’t say much, but their guardians know just what they’d like to order that night.

  So who’s to say whether these people are Stage II or Stage III? It’s all subjective, I suppose.

  But isn’t the first step in changing a problem acknowledging it? There’s a technique in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in which you wear a special string around your wrist to remind yourself that you are repeating bad habits. I have started to wear the string, to remind myself to wash my clothes once in a while, and not to use my screechy Crazy Dog Lady Voice while out on the streets. At the dog park, I try to limit my conversations to human topics, such as the unbearable heat waves, or the summer-in-the-city smell of festering garbage and molten tar. These subjects always lead to the dogs, of course—they hate the heat, they love the smells. And when it gets to that, I close my mouth and nod my head, wearing the tight, closed expression of a recovering alcoholic at a bar.

  If people ask about the string, I’ll simply say I am a member of a cult. What cult that is they need not know. All I can say is there are no Madonnas or Britneys or Ashtons as members. At least not yet. Perhaps they simply have not yet come out of the Dog Closet. It takes a strong person to admit her weaknesses.

  My name is Lee. I am a Recovering Crazy Dog Lady. And I am not ashamed.

  Confessions of an Amateur Pickup Artist

  [David Malley]

  I’M WHAT DOG people call a “flincher.” I try not to be, and I used to believe that, much in the same way I taught mysel
f to appreciate the salty goodness of an anchovy, I could also learn to cherish a warm canine tongue lapping at my face like it was the inside of an empty bucket of KFC Extra Crispy. But instead, just as soon as a fuzzy little nipper called Tulip or an adorable Akita called Sunshine starts with the licking, my head involuntarily jerks back, my palms begin to sweat, and I commence with nervous laughs designed to give off the appearance of confidence.

  For years, I had a list of about a dozen excuses I would routinely use to explain to friends the reason for my doglessness. They started with “I would, but I’m…allergic!” and ended with bad jokes like “The only time I strap a leash to anything is when it’s dressed in latex and has a gag-ball in its mouth!” In reality, the whole flinching process probably started when I was five years old, when a sneering Doberman Pinscher kept its breed-standard body nicely toned by chasing me up and down the streets of the genteel Oklahoma City neighborhood where I grew up. But, while the catalyst for my flinching is a set of snarling teeth, it all climaxes with the hind end. I’m very sensitive to foul odors, and aside from the whole Eau-de-Poo-Poo breath problem, it would be incredibly upsetting for me if I happened to, for example, acquire a dog that was routinely gassy. Really, it can all be very emasculating.

  I’m not squeamish about everything. In fact, when I sit and contemplate things scatological, I find that it’s mostly things that come out the rear exit that make my stomach turn. I’m mostly okay with vomit. I don’t even wince while exchanging spit during a French kiss, which I do often. I’d say I have a very reasonable, probably even healthy, aversion to snot, boogers, and loogies. No, I don’t often mull over such grotesqueries, but now as I watch my youthful early thirties recede like Count Chocula’s hairline and my wife starts to drop those not-so-subtle hints about maybe bringing some little ones of our own into the world, I feel it’s time to start confronting my paralyzing fear of poo.

  I think babies are bundles of bliss as long as they’re cooing and cackling at my jokes. And not dirtying their diapers. Yes, I know, baby poop smells of sweet yams and figgy pudding…until they start eating real food…which they will do. That’s when the yams get rotten and the pile starts looking and smelling no different from something John Goodman might eject after a night of nachos and daiquiris. And just when you’ve finished your full-time job of opening little white packages of stink, you find yourself hunching over toilets, making blind swipes at an ungrateful toddler’s stinking anus.

  Try taking care of a dog before you go making babies. It’s not an original idea, just an old good one. The ol’ training wheel puppy. I take comfort in this plan. If we crash and burn with the dog, I know a couple of good dog-loving people who’d save me in the end (I call them Mom and Dad), but there’s no nice way to do that with a baby. Besides, every parent I’ve ever known, including my own mother and father, says that crying, drooling, crapping kids aren’t that bad when they’re your own. I imagine the same goes with a dog.

  The Scoop

  Of course my first real experience looking after a dog involved excrement and misery. Six years ago, I spent ten days dog-sitting a handsome mixed-breed named Skye in New York City, and discovered that I was firmly on my way to becoming poop phobic. From our first “shake,” Skye had my number, and that number was 2. Every half hour or so, the whining would start (first him, then me), and I would find myself being led around a frigid downtown block near where I was living. The Humane Society says that the average canine needs a constitutional walk about fourteen times a week, but Skye seemed to need about fourteen a day.

  On our first trip onto Manhattan’s streets, I hadn’t prepared for the not-so-little package Skye proudly left for me at the corner of Broadway and Broome. I panicked.

  Thankfully, there was an empty cereal box (Cheerios, I think) in the nearby garbage can, and as I tried to ignore the bewildered looks of passing pedestrians, I held my breath, flinched, and scooped. Then I scooped again. And again. And then some poo touched my finger.

  So, sure, this story isn’t so crazy. It’s nothing a real dog owner hasn’t gone through at least a few times. It goes with the territory. And I suppose that’s really my point. Dog owning is a territory, a faraway, war-torn territory that’s riddled with land mines. And now here I am, the pacifist, lined up alongside the trigger-happy loonbird dog people, plastic produce bag over my fist, awaiting my four-legged, stink-dropping mission.

  How Do You Doo?

  First, if I’m going to be responsible for any kind of animal, I need to do some risk assessment. And I’ve still got some time.

  After a few clicks on the Internet, I fear it’s just as bad as I always thought it was: “Ebola Virus: From Wildlife to Dogs.” The article comes from a French science journal—L’institut de recherche pour le développement—and explains that humans get Ebola from “infected carcasses of chimpanzees, gorillas and certain forest antelopes” and further, it goes on to point out, in heavy, barely understandable scientific terms, that it is entirely possible that I could have gotten Ebola from my old pal Skye’s excretions. Of course, he would have to have dined on infected gorilla carrion, which is probably pretty hard to find in Manhattan, but still…

  As I absorb this helpful information, National Public Radio’s Eleanor Beardsley is bellowing out of my computer. I pause to listen because she’s talking about the benefits of being a trash collector in Paris, and I know, after spending some very romantic evenings dodging sidewalk bombs, Paris is a perfect example of why this world doesn’t need more dog owners. According to the book Sixty Million Frenchmen Can’t Be Wrong: Why We Love France but Not the French there are around 200,000 dogs in Paris. Those dogs leave ten tons of dog waste behind every day (that’s 4.38 million pounds each year or about the same weight as a fully fueled space shuttle!), and each year, over 500 people break bones slipping on unseen doggy slicks.

  But Eleanor Beardsley assures me that’s all changing. “Garbage collectors show up with a Dr. Seuss–like arsenal of cleaning machines,” she says, and that includes “pooper-scoopers” and “side-walk scrubbers.” It turns out that today’s most effective mechanism for keeping Parisian streets clean is “the $200 fine for dog owners caught leaving canine ejection on the sidewalk,” and after I work out just exactly what Ms. Beardsley means by canine-ejection, I begin to realize that if even the French government has mandated that Parisians need to pick up after their pets, there must be a good, disgusting reason for that mandate, and I have a feeling it has nothing to do with dead gorillas.

  It turns out that aside from spreading Ebola with their excrement, dogs have bacteria in their stomachs that can be transmitted through their feces to potentially turn your human gut into oatmeal—gruesome things like E. coli and salmonella and giardia. So what? Disregarded doggy dirt biodegrades into local watersheds, and because of the icky bacteria I mention above, that’s a bad thing. I finally understand why Parisians have been so keen on bottled mineral water for so many years before we tap-water-swilling Americans. What’s worse is, according to USA Today, 40 percent of American dog owners don’t bother to scoop poop. And if you’re one of the people not picking up, keep this in mind: Back in the 1990s, a well-intentioned biochemist at the University of Leicester introduced a way to collect DNA from derelict dung to help coppers trace negligent nuggets back to offending owners, and it’s an idea that big cities around the world are taking seriously. A 2005 New York Times article even suggested that each of the more than one million dogs in New York City should submit a DNA-rich saliva sample upon being licensed so that delinquent owners could be tracked down and fined. The result would be twofold: cleaner streets and increased revenue from the fines. Frankly, there’s only one thing that makes me more nervous than effluence, and that’s the fuzz. If I get a dog, I’ll pick up. I promise. Same goes if I have a kid.

  A Call for Help

  In the vulgar mulling over this subject, I decide to pick the brain of my good friend Ian Tyndall. Ian is a landscape architect and has been what he calls
a PCG (Principal Care Giver for his “doggies”) for forty years. He has two Welsh Corgis named Rose and Rocky whom he’s constantly taking on walks through Washington, D.C.’s parks, and since he is, in part, responsible for planning and designing D.C.’s parks, I know for a fact he’s an avid picker-upper.

  “I am a big fan of the New York Times delivery bag,” he says, when I ask him about his methods. “It’s free, it comes regularly, and it is sturdy. By carefully taking advantage of the long narrow shape it is easy to pick up a second, and even a third, poop, if things come out that way. Of course, its disadvantage is that it only comes once a day.”

  Ian says that when he doesn’t have a spare newspaper sack, he’s like lots of dog owners and grabs a bag from his local supermarket. He prefers the ones from his local Safeway because they don’t use double bags unless it’s absolutely necessary. Of course, the drawback to this Earth-friendly plan is that single bags often get punctured—what I imagine to be a near-tragedy for dog owners who don’t notice the perforations until it’s too late.

  After Ian tells me this, I’ve decided that the riskiness in using grocery bags just doesn’t seem worth it to me. So, as I find myself researching strength and permeability of plastics, I discover a Web site run by an Englishman named Paul Mundy, who, in his free time, collects and exhibits exotic examples from “the magical world of airsickness bags.” Somehow his fascination in the bags found on airplanes tucked between the in-flight magazine and the aircraft safety card naturally led him to the world of “doggy bags”—bags especially made for collecting doggy-dung. On his Web site, Mundy displays more than sixty different doggy bags from around the world; many of them come complete with explicit “how to pick up” instructions. In Mundy’s collection, the bag that particularly interests me is the Mutt Mitt. It isn’t the most colorful bag. That would be the “Fido Bag” from China. Nor is it the most innovative. That would be the “Gassi” from Austria, which is a combination of a box and a bag. But there’s a subtle sophistication about the Mutt Mitt, and I can actually imagine wrapping one of them around my hand.