Rabid
Page 8
1. What brave act made Roselle a hero dog?
a. Roselle led Navy Seals to Osama bin Laden’s hiding place.
b. Roselle fought off pirates who tried to board Kanye’s yacht off the coast of Kenya.
c. Roselle led her blind owner down 1,463 stairs to escape from the World Trade Center during September 11 attacks.
2. Dogs can predict what thirty to forty-five seconds before they happen?
a. Orgasms.
b. Earthquakes.
c. Epileptic seizures.
3. Dogs can be trained to sniff out what?
a. Pregnancy.
b. Cancer.
c. Pregnancy, cancer, and whether you’ve been sneaking chocolate chip cookies.
4. Dog fur helped how in what natural disaster?
a. It prevented Gulf of Mexico oil spill from spreading.
b. It shielded Japanese atomic plant workers from radiation following the 2011 earthquake.
c. It kept the trapped Chilean miners warm.
5. A dog survived the Asian tsunami floating for three weeks on what?
a. A humpback whale.
b. His dead owner.
c. A pile of trash.
6. Officials in Maryland and Virginia use dogs to find what hidden in state prisons?
a. Drugs.
b. Cell phones.
c. Innocent prisoners.
7. What breed of dog led police to a teenager trapped in a burning building?
a. Pit bull.
b. Saint Bernard.
c. Toy Poodle.
8. A recent study found that dogs can learn to perform simple what?
a. Household chores, such as bed making and toilet cleaning.
b. Nursing duties, such as bandage changing and bedpan emptying.
c. Math, such as addition and subtraction.
9. Missouri prison inmates taught a deaf dachshund what?
a. To act as a lookout while they dug an escape tunnel.
b. To hear.
c. Sign language.
10. British police officers had to learn what in order to communicate with their new Alsatian police dogs?
a. Sign language.
b. German.
c. To bark.
Key: 1, c; 2, c; 3, c; 4, a; 5, c; 6, b; 7, c; 8, c; 9, c; 10, b
CRAZY about your dog or just CRAZY
Attending the Blessing of the Animals at your local church or temple.
Choosing your religion based on its dog friendliness.
You believe you can communicate with your dog nonverbally.
You believe your dog knows everything you’re thinking, feeling, doing.
Hoping that if there’s a heaven
your dog gets to go there, too.
Thinking your dog has a better chance of going to heaven than your mother, your child, or your priest.
Is This Goodbye?
Or Just, See Ya Later?
It’s not only in life that we obsess about our dogs. Dead dogs breed their own brand of mania.
While the death of celebrity dogs like Miss Ellie, the Chinese crested hairless who held the title of World’s Ugliest Dog, can inspire their hometowns to name a day in their honor—as Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, did for Miss Ellie—the passing of more ordinary canines can also make their owners do extraordinary things.
Some things people do after their beloved pet has died, often to kinda pretend the dog hasn’t died:
Taxidermy: While commemorative dog portraits were common in nineteenth-century England and France, having your dog stuffed and mounted has always been considered eccentric. Famous dogs such as Owney the postal dog and Balto the sled dog were routinely stuffed for display a hundred years ago. But these days taxidermy is, you’ll pardon the expression, a dying art, and most taxidermists shy away from stuffing pets. The problem isn’t squeamishness so much as how hard it is to satisfy the bereaved. It’s difficult to bring the appropriate personality to a pet, taxidermists say, and so to make it look lifelike.
Mummification: A religious cult called Summum in Salt Lake City will mummify your dog much the same way the ancient Egyptians did, by removing its organs, immersing it in chemical preservatives for ten weeks, washing it, wrapping it in cotton gauze protected by a polyurethane membrane (okay, the Egyptians didn’t have that), and then encasing it in a custom-made sarcophagus.
Freeze-drying: If you want to preserve your pet but can’t find a taxidermist to accommodate you, Perpetual Pet offers an alternative: freeze-drying. Freeze-drying is a combination of freezing and drying: the dog is posed, ideally in a sleeping (i.e., kinda dead) position as that will look the most realistic. Then the body is frozen while at the same time moisture is extracted veeeeeeeeery sloooooooooowly. The process takes fifteen weeks for a Chihuahua, up to six months for a St. Bernard.
Sending them straight to heaven: For $110, a group called Eternal Earth-Bound Pets ensures that if the Rapture occurs within ten years of buying their policy, one dog per household will be saved rather than left behind on earth.
For Hardcore Realists . . .
Those who’ve accepted that their dogs have died can try the following:
Virtual mourning: Several websites offer support groups, chat rooms, and other resources for dealing with your dog’s passing.
Traditional funeral: Traditionalists can throw a funeral for their dog at an animal funeral home and cemetery, complete with coffin (available on Amazon), viewing, memorial service with religious readings, and burial with tombstone.
Cremation: As with humans, an increasing number of dogs are cremated today. Of course cremains can be buried or kept in an urn. But there may be more creative options.
Nothing kills a dog’s jubilant spirit, not even death.
Ten Things to Do with Your Dog’s Ashes
(Besides Bury Them in the Backyard)
Jane Fonda mistook her dear departed dog’s ashes for bath salts, only realizing her mistake when she found pieces of bone floating in her nice hot tub. So what did she do? She went ahead with the bath, enjoying the sensation of being one with her dog.
Which is kind of horrifying, until you consider the alternatives. Go at the tub with a thousand tiny strainers, hoping to salvage the cremains? Just let the ashes go down the drain?
Accidentally bathing in your dog’s ashes is better than accidentally snorting them, which two burglars in Florida did upon encountering an urn full of enticing white powder. Or smoking them, which more than one misguided dog lover on the Internet has been stupid enough to contemplate (and then stupid enough to talk about).
The following are all possible uses for your dog’s ashes:
1. Hang them around your neck. Your pet’s ashes can be cast into a gold, dog-shaped ring or necklace to make an item of what the manufacturer calls “wearable grief.”
2. Wear them in your ears. Your dog’s ashes can be turned into not-quite-real diamonds, which can then be turned into jewelry.
3. Paint with them. Use paint mixed with ashes to create a portrait of your dog.
4. Get inked with them. Ashes can be mixed with tattoo ink.
5. Stick some flowers in them. A perfume bottle, vase, or walking stick top can be made from art glass mixed with your dog’s ashes.
6. Play tennis with them. You can have an art tennis ball made from your dog’s favorite slobbery old tennis ball, your dog’s ashes, and, uh, glass.
7. Dance to them. Press your dog’s ashes into a vinyl record, maybe of his favorite songs?
8. Hug them. You can have your pet’s ashes sewn into a pillow to make a “huggable urn.”
9. Shoot them off as fireworks. The cremains are loaded into fireworks and shot off from a yacht at sea. Yacht extra.
10. Launch them into space. For $1,000 and up, Celes
tis Memorial Spaceflights will send your pet’s cremains to the moon, and even back.
CRAZY? Sorry, God, But That’s a Twisted Plan
Hundreds of people around the country rushed to adopt Daniel, a Beagle mix who survived the gas chamber at an Alabama shelter. On how Daniel managed to become only the third dog ever to cheat death at the Florence, Alabama, facility, a city spokesman posited, “Maybe God just had a better plan for this one.” Next step in the divine plan: fly to Nutley, New Jersey, where Daniel is adopted into a home perhaps chosen by God himself.
How to Clone Your Dog . . .
in Ten Easy Steps (or Less!)
Peter Onruang spent more than $300,000 to clone his own dogs and wants to help you clone yours too. His site My Friend Again—myfriendagain.com—offers step-by-step instructions, which inspired this guide.
1. Think ahead! While the dog you want to have cloned is still alive, have your vet extract tissue and cells via a $1,500 biopsy kit from the firm ViaGen.
2. You didn’t think ahead, did you? You waited until your dog died, didn’t you? And now you’re sitting there crying and missing her and wishing you could have her back. Wishing you’d spent the fifteen hundred bucks and gotten those cells so that you could now make yourself a new dog exactly like the dog you just lost. Well, it may not be too late! If your dog has been dead less than five days, you may still be able to extract clone-worthy biomatter. Go back to Step 1 and try again.
3. If your dog has been dead more than five days? Read Stephen King’s Pet Sematary.
4. Get $100,000. No, I can’t tell you how or where.
5. Send $100,000 and the cells from the dog you want cloned to RNL Bio in Seoul, South Korea. RNL Bio, affiliated with both Seoul National University and the South Korean government, has had dog-cloning successes and is the only company currently offering commercial pet cloning. Or, if that makes you too nervous, just send it all to me and I’ll take care of everything. I swear I will.
6. Get an egg from a donor dog. Easier said than done; in fact, this—not the money, not the actual cloning part—can be the most difficult step in the process, given that dogs go into estrus only twice a year and produce a mere eight or so eggs at a time. The egg issue is why cloning is done most easily in Korea, where dog farms can supply both eggs and, you know, stew meat.
7. Replace the nucleus of the donor egg with the nucleus of the cell from your dog. Or at least have faith that someone else is doing this, along with zapping the cells with 3 to 7 volts of electricity and implanting them in a surrogate dog mother. Yeah, this is the part that makes it not just high-tech dog reproduction but actual cloning.
8. Wait six months to a year. This is for all the steps to be successful and your actual clone puppy to be born.
9. Wait two more months. Now you’re waiting for the dog to get old enough to travel. Or maybe for those people who took your hundred grand to find a puppy who looks enough like your old dog to fool you.
10. Fly to Korea to pick up your new/old dog. And no, that is not included in the $100,000. And while your new dog should look pretty much like the one she was cloned from, scientists caution that she won’t necessarily act like the original. It all goes back to nature vs. nurture: identical genes explain only part of the personality puzzle.
CRAZY about your dog or just CRAZY
Feeling broken up when your dog dies.
Feeling so broken up that you have his face tattooed on your chest.
Scattering your dog’s ashes in his favorite park.
Having your dog stuffed and mounted.
Wanting to get another dog just like the one you lost.
Dog cloning.
Are You Crazy about Your Dog—
or Just Crazy?
Sure, you love your mutt. But how much puppy love is too much? Is your dog your best friend—or something disturbingly more?
Take this simple quiz to find out whether you’re crazy about your dog—or just crazy.
1. You love your dog more than:
a. Your goldfish.
b. Your friends.
c. Your husband and kids.
d. Yourself.
2. What do you feed your dog?
a. The best dog food you can afford.
b. Burger, served in a specially monogrammed dish.
c. Filet mignon, which you feed him using a silver fork.
d. It depends on what restaurant the two of you are going to that night.
3. Top reason you like owning a dog:
a. Gives you someone to play catch with.
b. Gives you someone to talk to.
c. Gives you someone to sleep with.
d. Gives you someone to leave all your money to.
4. Wait, wait, wait—back to that “sleep with” part. When you say you sleep with your dog, what do you mean?
a. You sleep in the same room, the dog in his bed, you in yours.
b. The dog sleeps at the foot of your bed.
c. The dog sleeps in your bed, under the covers, his head on one pillow, yours on the other.
d. Yes, okay, it means what everybody thinks it means!!
5. Okay! So, when do you think being crazy about your dog crosses the line into craziness?
a. Carrying your dog with you everywhere you go, like Paris Hilton—that’s crazy.
b. Dressing your dog in a raincoat and rubber booties when it’s wet outside—that’s crazy.
c. Marrying your dog like that guy in India did—that’s crazy.
d. Crazy? Preferring people to dogs—that’s crazy.
Key:
If you answered mostly a’s, you’re just a run-of-the-mill dog nut. Not any crazier than the rest of us.
If you answered mostly b’s, you’re one of those people who talk about your dog at parties and create a Facebook page for him. Kinda crazy.
If you answered mostly c’s, I hate to tell you, but your house reeks of dog and you stopped noticing last Halloween. Yeah, you’re pretty much out of your mind.
If you answered mostly d’s, what’s your location, exactly? Because I’m sending some people in little white coats to pick you up.
Acknowledgments
My first thanks have to go to my son Joe Satran, whose idea this book may have been, and whose idea its title definitely was. Thanks, Joe, for letting me feast on the crumbs of your brilliance.
It has been my great pleasure to have written not one but two books with the wonderful editor Nancy Miller, friend of my youth and colleague of my—well, we’ll call this later youth. Nancy and I had so much fun working together on How Not to Act Old that we had to come up with another joint project, and it was thrilling that she loved Rabid as much as I did.
Nancy’s assistant, Lea Beresford, was another old acquaintance happily rediscovered on this project; thanks, Lea, for pulling everything together and making this book even more fun to work on than it had a right to be.
Thank you to my agent, Melissa Flashman, at Trident Media for so expertly making sure the project came together, and for laughing in all the encouraging places.
I had help researching everything from dog spa treatments to canine cloning from my insightful and hardworking research assistants Gianna Palmer, Jonah Comstock, Sonia Tsuruoka, Sara Kornhauser, and Joe Satran.
It was such a delight and a revelation to discover so many wonderful photographers and artists who contributed their work to making this book come alive. I would like to extend special thanks to Holly Wilmeth, who introduced me to Dan Borris, whose amazing Yoga Dogz not only set a high standard but made me believe I could meet it. And to the inspired artist John Fleenor, who recreated his hilarious and beautiful horoscope dogs in living color expressly for Rabid.
Thanks and love as always to friends and family who encouraged, analyzed, applauded, and simply were interest
ed in this book: Rita DiMatteo, Alice Elliott Dark, Louise DeSalvo, Liza Dawson, Christina Baker Kline, Laurie Albanese, Linda Rosenkrantz Finch, Hugh Hunter, Rory Satran, Nathaniel Kilcer, Owen Satran, and Dick Satran.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Pamela Redmond Satran is the author of the New York Times bestselling humor book How Not to Act Old, optioned by Amblin Entertainment. She is also the author of seven novels, most recently The Possibility of You, and a creator of the website Nameberry. A columnist for Glamour, Satran contributes frequently to such publications as the Daily Beast, the Huffington Post, and More magazine. Visit her website at pamelaredmondsatran.com.
Copyright © 2012 by Pamela Redmond Satran
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved. You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published in 2012
This electronic edition published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc in the U.S. October 2012 and in the UK December 2012