The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs

by The New Yorker Magazine

  “I found a trainer for Buster,” I said to my mother.

  “Who? Clyde Beatty?”

  Trim and neat, straightforward and calm, Virginia had a soothing effect on me. Perhaps she would on Buster, too. I had already considered another dog trainer who lived on the block. He had written several books and had a Catskill-comedian spiel that I found very engaging. His fee was so high that I tried one of his books first and discovered that his system required throwing things at your dog, to which approach Buster responded by attacking the suggested keys or wallet or paperback book that was launched at him, and then cowering in confusion. Another dog trainer I once ran into on the East Side told me she knew just what to do: lift Buster by the back legs and whack him across the jaw hard enough so it rattled. Then she gave me her card and walked on. I gratefully turned to Virginia, with her soft, firm voice and endless sympathy. She came three or four times a week.

  Janet was in L.A. a lot then, and my day was centered on the dog. I approached him with a glove attached to a wooden spoon, rewarding him when he didn’t bite it. I used toys as a reward instead of food. I let him carry his toys in his mouth when we went outside, on the theory that he would be hard-pressed to bite with his mouth full. He learned the commands “touch” and “leave it.” I taught him to go to his bed, to stay, to heel, to jump through a yellow hula hoop. Clyde Beatty, indeed. All of this training had a goal—to give the dog something better to think about than his own fear. To give him confidence. To give him a better sense of his own deformed body. And to give us authority and control. I learned how to break up each task into tiny parts. We tried to get him used to wearing a muzzle, which he hated and would trigger one of his fits, by leaving it on for seconds at a time and rewarding him with a squirt of Cheese Whiz. I wished I had employed Virginia to help in child rearing. For, in addition to training, she taught me not simply to impose or demand but to observe. Virginia suggested that I keep a journal, noting the frequency and intensity of Buster’s fits: the details of his misery. Which side of himself did he attack? What might have provoked it? A noise? A touch? A smell? I timed the violent fits. I noted the weather, the time of the day, his position. How long since he’d eaten? Drunk? And then I made him come to me, or stay sitting as I walked away, or jump through a hoop. Buster was a wonderful pupil, smart and willing and obedient. He was an exceptionally well-trained mad dog.

  I couldn’t wait until Virginia arrived for a lesson. When she walked through the door, my real day began. She brought me articles from veterinary behavioral journals. She relayed relevant anecdotes from friends and colleagues. I loved meeting Buster’s big, alert dark eyes and recognizing a quick, happy understanding. Buster bit Virginia on the first visit. I had my Buster kit of butterfly bandages and Neosporin handy. Though he seemed to sense that here was someone sent to help him, he could never tolerate more than about twenty minutes of work. So the rest of the time we went over the behavior charts like sailors checking the stars.

  Janet and I began going out only to places where we could take Buster with us, eating at outdoor cafés in the rain and the bitter wind. But then Buster bit the waiter at Señor Swanky’s, and we stopped. We resorted to placing a large plastic collar shaped like an ice-cream cone around his neck when we left him alone. Used by vets to keep dogs from licking their wounds, the plastic cone worked more like blinkers for Buster: he was unable to see, much less bite, his hindquarters. One night, when I had brought Buster to my mother’s house in Connecticut (tolerated out of motherly pity and because it was the only way she would get to see me), I put him in his collar and went to visit an old friend. Ten minutes later, my cell phone rang.

  “I’m locked in my room with the door closed,” my mother said. “Your dog is in the living room having a fit.” She sounded terrified.

  When I got home, the dog was a blur of foam and fur. I ended up wrapping him in a blanket, the only way I could get near him without being bitten, and holding him on my chest in bed for four hours, trying to soothe him while he panted and trembled. I held him and I cried.

  We could no longer leave Buster in his Elizabethan collar. He had another episode that required the blanket wrapped around him, the hours of trembling and rolling eyes. Virginia pointed me to an experiment that had been done with autistic children, in which they were wrapped tightly to help them regain awareness of their own bodies. She found an unlikely product called Anxiety Wrap, a suit for dogs, which worked on the same principle. She said that really the next step would be contacting a research veterinary school and handing Buster over for brain scans and further study. “Would you be doing that for his sake?” she asked. “Or your own? That’s always the hard question.”

  It was a good question. Buster had become an intellectual puzzle, a challenge I could not let go of. He was my companion, certainly. The intensity of his need made the bond between us urgent and powerful. And I felt a responsibility, it was true. You cannot throw away an animal because he is sick. But there was also a little pool of vanity involved, and that insistent, stubborn optimism, a cultural trait, I suppose, that demands constant improvement. I would save this dog because, in a just world, I ought to be able to save him. It was a kind of humanitarian hubris. My dog was miserable. I insisted he get better.

  We euthanized Buster eighteen months after we’d got him. We petted him as he stood on the vet’s stainless-steel examining table. He wagged his tail and licked our hands. After giving him an IV dose of Valium, Dr. Raclyn added sodium pentobarbitol. Buster turned on him with one last snarl, looked back at us, wagged his tail again, crumpled into our arms, and was gone.

  It took six months before we had either the heart or the courage to do it, but we decided to get another dog, a puppy this time. We searched Internet rescue sites and visited the A.S.P. C.A., the city pound, and the North Shore Animal League. There were enormous, sad-eyed shepherd mixes and venerable poodle mixes and hopeful bull-terrier mixes. Lab mixes leaped and whippet mixes shivered. We should have taken them all. We should have taken every puppy, too, although their fat, gigantic paws foretold their gigantic futures. What we couldn’t find was a puppy who would stay small enough for our bicoastal commute. Sometimes we took Virginia with us to guide us, to protect us from falling under the spell of another charismatic but impossible dog. All the best, sweetest dogs we know are rescued dogs; nevertheless—a little guiltily, a little nervously—we drove to Frederick, Maryland, and picked up a tiny ten-week-old Cairn terrier. We named him Hector. A few months later, on the coldest morning of the coldest winter in decades, I took Hector to Central Park. There was smooth, slick snow on the ground. We made our way to Hearnshead Rock, a scenic jog of boulders rolling out into the lake. In spring, deep-yellow irises rise up there. In winter, the cove lets ducks and swans escape the wind. On this dark, achingly cold morning, the lake was almost completely frozen. The silver ice and the silver sky were cut in two by the skyline, and only in the crook of the rocks, where hundreds of ducks swam in circles, had the gray water been prevented from freezing. There were buffleheads and scoters and coots and even a wood duck. There was a great blue heron standing, not a foot from shore, as still as the black trees. The dog and I had been watching this tableau for twenty minutes or so when suddenly the heron shot his head into the shallow water, then snapped his neck back into its looping posture, a large fish dangling from his beak. He swallowed it. We watched the fish, a protrusion inching slowly down the bird’s elegant throat, and then we walked home through silent woods, catching each other’s eye now and then, checking in, companionable and intimate, sharing the exhilarating quiet. Hector, trotting beside me in the snow, was, like Buster, just a dog. And if, at that moment, I didn’t know exactly how to explain why people want to own dogs, with all the inconvenience and heartache attached, I felt that here, at least, was a clue.

  Hector prances along the street Buster skulked, greeting neighbors and strangers and men in hats and toddlers in snowsuits. He loves everyone and everyone loves him. I often think of Bu
ster, and it breaks my heart. People say, “You did everything you could.” But did we? What about Phenobarbital, even though every vet recommended against it? What about the autism suit? We should have moved to the country or sent him to the man in San Diego who leads a pack of dogs through the hills. What about the pet psychic? Then Hector pounces on an empty forty-ounce Budweiser can, almost as big as he is, and carries it proudly home. He kisses babies like a politician. He comes in peace.

  | 2004 |

  PEACOCK

  ALEXANDRA FULLER

  In the early nineties, it was possible to walk along the Zambian side of the upper Zambezi River without seeing many people—just a couple of fishermen, children out hunting for rats, or women in search of mopane worms. On the Zimbabwean side, blond savanna reached extravagantly into the distance and elephants often ventured out from the shelter of the bush to drink. Zambia, however, was considerably poorer than Zimbabwe in those days; anything remotely edible on our shore was quickly harvested, and large animals were scarce. Traditionally, ordinary people would not have eaten certain animals—hippos, for example—but a long ache of hunger had eroded the luxury of cultural norms and now nothing was exempt from culinary consideration.

  An elderly Belgian aristocrat (unstitched from the wealth of her family by wars and bad luck) owned land here, where the river quickened into rapids as it made its way toward the waterfalls the locals called Mosi-oa-Tunya, “the smoke that thunders.” Madame was a refugee of colonialism, remaindered from Zaire, but too possessed by Africa to return to Europe. She lived with several untrustworthy servants and a ragtag menagerie of peacocks, monkeys, dogs, cats, ducks, geese, chickens, and parrots.

  My husband, Charlie, and I rented the cottage at the end of Madame’s plot. There was only sporadic electricity and no running water—inconveniences that we happily overlooked in our excitement at finding ourselves beyond the reaches of the nearest town. Livingstone, at that time, was a noisy, disgruntled place. A riot had recently broken out in a textile factory and the Indian owners had been badly beaten up. Indians—the only community that seemed to thrive in difficult economic times—were universally mistrusted by their jealous Zambian neighbors.

  While Charlie left each morning to run boat trips below Victoria Falls, I stayed in the cottage with our infant daughter and a mixed-breed dog called Liz. Madame quickly established the parameters of her relationship with me—we were to be cordial but formal—visiting each other by written invitation only. Ours was a friendship born of a mutual antipathy for society (we both preferred animals), and we gradually developed a genuine fondness for each other.

  Then Liz killed a duck (she was caught in the act by Madame, her mouth lined with bloody feathers). Clough, Madame’s gardener, brought over a brusque note on the afternoon of the murder, along with an invoice. Embarrassed, I sent cash and an apology by return post. Liz was confined to the barracks, except at night when she slept with us outside, where we had moved our bed to take advantage of the river breeze.

  The following week, Liz allegedly killed a few more ducks and a half-dozen chickens. Madame, faced with such grave losses, came to see me without a letter of warning. The dog had acquired a taste for her livestock, she declared. I was responsible for “damages.” Clough wrung his hands, and I knew, without a doubt, who was responsible for the killing spree. But Madame was scrupulously loyal to all her servants. To speak against them, I knew, was to speak against Madame herself! So I paid up with more apologies and a promise to keep Liz with me at all times.

  When a peacock was killed several nights later—sent plummeting from its roost in a paperbark tree—I finally summoned up the courage to protest. “But, Madame,” I said, “Liz could hardly have climbed all the way up there to kill a peacock.”

  “Clough found the body,” Madame insisted. “He has taken it to be buried.”

  “Cooked, you mean,” I muttered.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing,” I said, counting out kwacha notes from my dwindling household budget.

  Another peacock and two peahens met their deaths before I confronted Clough: “I know you’re eating them.”

  “No.” Clough mustered a look of indignation.

  “It wasn’t Liz.”

  “I am not the one. We can’t eat peacocks. They are”—he searched for an excuse—“taboo for us.”

  “How can they be taboo? They aren’t even native to this country. They’re from India. How can something from India be taboo to you? Taboo means it must be something from your own culture.”

  Clough’s face cleared. “Exactly. In our culture, we Zambians hate Indians. They are even worse than you. We wouldn’t eat something of their country.”

  But the carnage stopped after that and my friendship with Madame survived, although very little else did. Eventually, Liz was killed by baboons, Madame sold the farm as a tourist camp, and we left Zambia for the less colorful comforts of the States.

  | 2006 |

  WHAT THE DOG SAW

  MALCOLM GLADWELL

  In the case of Sugar v. Forman, Cesar Millan knew none of the facts before arriving at the scene of the crime. That is the way Cesar prefers it. His job was to reconcile Forman with Sugar, and, since Sugar was a good deal less adept in making her case than Forman, whatever he learned beforehand might bias him in favor of the aggrieved party.

  The Forman residence was in a trailer park in Mission Hills, just north of Los Angeles. Dark wood panelling, leather couches, deep-pile carpeting. The air-conditioning was on, even though it was one of those ridiculously pristine Southern California days. Lynda Forman was in her sixties, possibly older, a handsome woman with a winning sense of humor. Her husband, Ray, was in a wheelchair, and looked vaguely ex-military. Cesar sat across from them, in black jeans and a blue shirt, his posture characteristically perfect.

  “So how can I help?” he said.

  “You can help our monster turn into a sweet, lovable dog,” Lynda replied. It was clear that she had been thinking about how to describe Sugar to Cesar for a long time. “She’s ninety percent bad, ten percent the love.… She sleeps with us at night. She cuddles.” Sugar meant a lot to Lynda. “But she grabs anything in sight that she can get, and tries to destroy it. My husband is disabled, and she destroys his room. She tears clothes. She’s torn our carpet. She bothers my grandchildren. If I open the door, she will run.” Lynda pushed back her sleeves and exposed her forearms. They were covered in so many bites and scratches and scars and scabs that it was as if she had been tortured. “But I love her. What can I say?”

  Cesar looked at her arms and blinked: “Wow.”

  Cesar is not a tall man. He is built like a soccer player. He is in his mid-thirties, and has large, wide eyes, olive skin, and white teeth. He crawled across the border from Mexico fourteen years ago, but his English is exceptional, except when he gets excited and starts dropping his articles—which almost never happens, because he rarely gets excited. He saw the arms and he said, “Wow,” but it was a “wow” in the same calm tone of voice as “So how can I help?”

  Cesar began to ask questions. Did Sugar urinate in the house? She did. She had a particularly destructive relationship with newspapers, television remotes, and plastic cups. Cesar asked about walks. Did Sugar travel, or did she track—and when he said “track” he did an astonishing impersonation of a dog sniffing. Sugar tracked. What about discipline?

  “Sometimes I put her in a crate,” Lynda said. “And it’s only for a fifteen-minute period. Then she lays down and she’s fine. I don’t know how to give discipline. Ask my kids.”

  “Did your parents discipline you?”

  “I didn’t need discipline. I was perfect.”

  “So you had no rules.… What about using physical touch with Sugar?”

  “I have used it. It bothers me.”

  “What about the bites?”

  “I can see it in the head. She gives me that look.”

  “She’s reminding you who rules the roost.”


  “Then she will lick me for half an hour where she has bit me.”

  “She’s not apologizing. Dogs lick each other’s wounds to heal the pack, you know.”

  Lynda looked a little lost. “I thought she was saying sorry.”

  “If she was sorry,” Cesar said, softly, “she wouldn’t do it in the first place.”

  It was time for the defendant. Lynda’s granddaughter, Carly, came in, holding a beagle as if it were a baby. Sugar was cute, but she had a mean, feral look in her eyes. Carly put Sugar on the carpet, and Sugar swaggered over to Cesar, sniffing his shoes. In front of her, Cesar placed a newspaper, a plastic cup, and a television remote.

  Sugar grabbed the newspaper. Cesar snatched it back. Sugar picked up the newspaper again. She jumped on the couch. Cesar took his hand and “bit” Sugar on the shoulder, firmly and calmly. “My hand is the mouth,” he explained. “My fingers are the teeth.” Sugar jumped down. Cesar stood, and firmly and fluidly held Sugar down for an instant. Sugar struggled, briefly, then relaxed. Cesar backed off Sugar lunged at the remote. Cesar looked at her and said, simply and briefly, “Sh-h-h.” Sugar hesitated. She went for the plastic cup. Cesar said, “Sh-h-h.” She dropped it. Cesar motioned for Lynda to bring a jar of treats into the room. He placed it in the middle of the floor and hovered over it. Sugar looked at the treats and then at Cesar. She began sniffing, inching closer, but an invisible boundary now stood between her and the prize. She circled and circled but never came closer than three feet. She looked as if she were about to jump on the couch. Cesar shifted his weight, and blocked her. He took a step toward her. She backed up, head lowered, into the furthest corner of the room. She sank down on her haunches, then placed her head flat on the ground. Cesar took the treats, the remote, the plastic cup, and the newspaper and placed them inches from her lowered nose. Sugar, the one-time terror of Mission Hills, closed her eyes in surrender.