One attribute that Miss Saunders shares with no breed of terrier is her voice, which is low and husky. It is seldom raised in anger, but there is a perceptible undercurrent of annoyance in it when she’s dealing with dog owners en masse. This is especially noticeable when she is confronted, in one of the various armories and gymnasiums in which she works, by a bunch of would-be trainers who, to judge, by their actions, couldn’t impose their collective wills on a tame mouse. At the start of such a class, Miss Saunders usually manages to employ the most moderate of the three tones of voice she advocates for Obedience Training; namely, the coaxing. “Let’s try to improve just a little on our sit-stay this week,” she’ll say into a portable microphone she uses, addressing the thirty-odd dog owners lined up in front of her with their pets (ranging in size from Great Danes to Chihuahuas), each of which is stationed, in conformance with Obedience protocol, beside his owner’s left knee. As the owners timidly beseech their charges to plunk themselves down on their haunches by way of participating in the sit-stay, Miss Saunders emits a gusty sigh, well amplified by the microphone, and resorts to the second, or demanding, tone of voice. “Come on, see to it your dogs sit!” she says firmly. “String them down on that leash. Who’s supposed to be training who around here, anyway?” When, in consequence of resisting a good deal of tugging on choke collars, most of the dogs have decided that it’s in their best interests to sit down, the owners drop their leashes and back gingerly away to a distance of fifteen or twenty feet, uttering what they fondly believe to be forceful requests to the dogs to stay put. At this point, two or three representatives of the more flighty breeds are likely to begin frolicking about the arena, and Miss Saunders is obliged to fall back on the third, or commanding, tone. “Bring your dogs back! Make them sit! Snap them down! See that they stay!” she shouts lustily into the microphone. “Put a little conviction in your voice for a change! No diplomas for you if you can’t learn a simple exercise like this!”
Although this threat obtains results in most cases, each class is very apt to include at least one overwrought lady dog owner who not only is unable to make any impression whatever on her charge but may even burst into tears as she pursues him around the floor. When this occurs, Miss Saunders sets her microphone down with a crash, mutters “My goodness sakes!”—her strongest exclamation—and strides forward to take over the delinquent dog. Seizing his leash, she gives it a brisk tug, remarks matter-of-factly that the dog isn’t boss around the place, as he seems to think, and repeats the sit-stay command. Sometimes a brief clash of wills ensues. More often, the dog gives Miss Saunders a speculative look and quietly falls in with her wishes, leaving his owner with the suspicion that something occult has taken place in her presence.
The effectiveness of Miss Saunders’ trainer personality, as manifested in her direct dealings with dogs, is difficult even for experts to explain, but it is generally conceded that she is the fortunate possessor of what those in the know refer to as “dog hands.” This attribute, they say, is a matter of rapport, of which, as the late Josef Weber, of Princeton, New Jersey, one of the most noted of all German-born trainers in this country, said in a still widely quoted apothegm, “It yoost goes down the leash.” In addition to being endowed with dog hands, or leash rapport, Miss Saunders is said to be able to anticipate to an uncanny degree the way a dog will act in almost any set of circumstances. In this way she averts many of the crises—dogfights, for example—that often harass less intuitive trainers. Despite her talent for keeping intellectually one jump ahead of a dog, however, she hasn’t been able to wholly avoid one perennial training hazard—plain dogbite. At one time or another, representatives of practically every recognized breed, and quite a few mutts, too, have sunk their fangs into various portions of Miss Saunders, mistaking her, possibly, for an owner devoid of trainer personality. From a canine point of view, the results of these onslaughts have been unrewarding. “A dogbite to Blanche is as a mosquito bite to you or me,” a man from the A.S.P.C.A. told a dog owner who was taking a breather during a training session one evening not long ago. By way of example, he cited an occasion on which Miss Saunders was driving him and a dog of hers home after a class. As she stopped for a traffic light, she complained mildly of a disagreeable tickling sensation in one foot. When they reached his home, she got out and examined her foot under a street light. She discovered that the toe of one of her substantial leather brogues had been gnawed open and a wound inflicted that would have disabled the average person for a week. Miss Saunders’ only reaction was a relatively casual “My goodness sakes!” Then she bade the A.S.P.C.A. man a polite good night and leaped back into her car.
As Miss Saunders frequently points out in her training manual, the element of surprise is an all-important one in the master-dog relationship. It is also one of which she has always taken fullest advantage. In this field, as a trainer, she presupposes a good deal of ingenuity, alertness, and agility on the owner’s part. If a dog is too vocal, for instance, and sets up a clamor the minute the owner leaves the house, Miss Saunders advises the owner to put on his hat and coat, shut the dog in the living room, stride to the outside door, slam it, and then sneak back noiselessly to the living-room door. “At the first sound [the dog] makes, call out, ‘Stop that!’ ” she counsels. “This may come as such a surprise that he will probably be quiet the rest of the day, trying to figure out how you got back into the house without his knowing it.” Miss Saunders also recommends some rather unusual items of equipment for startling dogs out of their shortcomings and making them ponder the singular requests of mankind. Among these are mousetraps (to be placed on sacrosanct chairs or couches), short lengths of chain (to be tossed at a dog’s hindquarters if he barks when the doorbell or telephone rings), carriage whips (to be used in breaking dogs of chasing automobiles), and BB guns (to be aimed, it should be noted at once, not at but away from an erring pet). Illustrating the use of a BB gun, Miss Saunders tells in her manual of a distressingly loud-mouthed poodle who was an inmate of a kennel she once ran. “I crept inside the kennel with a BB gun,” she recalls. “For fully twenty minutes I stood in total blackness with the BB gun pointed toward the wooden door of the pen.… Then when [the dog] decided it was time to begin [barking] again I pulled the trigger. In the dead of night the little pellet sounded like an exploding firecracker when it hit the door. From then on there was perfect silence.”
In the hands of an impetuous or highly nervous dog owner, a BB gun might well turn out to be a dangerous, or even lethal, weapon. In Miss Saunders’ hands, never. She has been distinguished for both her marksmanship and her aplomb with firearms ever since the memorable day when, at the age of fifteen, she first hefted a rifle. As she recalls the incident, she was summoned out of a high-school history class and asked to pinch-shoot for a friend in a rifle match. After taking only two practice shots, both of them bull’s-eyes, she entered the match, and wound up with two firsts—high score for girls and high score for boys and girls. To Miss Saunders’ classmates, this was not a violently surprising accomplishment, for she had already established herself as proficient in sports, having earned a position on five of the school’s six championship athletic teams for girls. It is Miss Saunders’ suspicion that her athletic aptitude was a result of trying to hold her own in a household in which the other offspring consisted of seven older brothers and one older sister. She became a member of this top-heavy brood on September 12, 1906, in the town of Easton, Maine, where her father, the Reverend Abram Saunders, was the Baptist minister. After his death, in 1916, the family moved to Detroit, where she attended high school, ending up with excellent marks as well as a shelfful of trophies. Upon graduating, in 1924, she got a summer job on a small farm near Brewster, in Putnam County, New York, owned by Ethel Perrin, a family friend and the founder of the department of physical education in the Detroit public-school system. Tending Miss Perrin’s livestock proved so congenial to Miss Saunders that she decided to learn more about the subject and, accordingly, enrolled that
autumn in Massachusetts Agricultural College, which is now a part of the University of Massachusetts. There she majored in animal husbandry and poultry raising, and took side courses in engineering, carpentry, and automobile repairing. As part of its curriculum, the college insisted that its students take jobs on farms for at least six months of each year. Such was the local reputation Miss Saunders had achieved while working on the Perrin place that she had little difficulty finding a berth for herself as first in command of a fifty-acre farm in the vicinity of Brewster.
“What other tricks does he need?”
During the next ten years, while still an undergraduate and afterward, Miss Saunders worked on farms in and near Putnam County. This period of her life is recorded in considerable detail in several plump photograph albums that she treasures. A few of the snapshots in them show Miss Saunders—wearing overalls and looking handsome, healthy, and supremely contented—perched atop this or that item of farm machinery. Most of the pictures, however, are of animals, including calves named Precious, Marjorie, Sylvia, and Edna; Jerushe, a very photogenic shoat; Muffit, a stolid work horse; and innumerable anonymous milch cows—all of which, she feels, were in some measure responsible, by giving her a working knowledge of animal psychology, for her present skill in handling dogs. She believes, for example, that a flock of White Leghorns, shown in the albums in their various stages of development, laid the foundation for her ability to move casually and almost soundlessly among high-strung dogs. Most often, when looking through the albums, Miss Saunders turns to the photographs of some Boston terriers she encountered during her farm training, to whom she taught such tricks as begging, jumping over sticks, and balancing tennis balls on their noses. She frequently says that although she’d never heard of Obedience work at the time, these terriers—notably one named Tagalong, a performer of the highest calibre—provided her with the equivalent of a kindergarten, or even a grade-school, course in the subject.
Regrettably, there’s no photograph to record the afternoon, in the autumn of 1934, when Miss Saunders unknowingly took the plunge into what was to be her lifework, and experienced in the process the first faint intimations of her affinity for poodles. “I was working up in a haymow on a farm near Brewster that afternoon when a car with a rather large, intelligent-looking dog and a woman in it pulled into the barnyard,” she has since recalled. “I came running down, and the dog was introduced to me as Tango of Piperscroft, an apricot standard poodle. I said, ‘You mean that’s a poodle? I thought they were horrid little white things with runny eyes.’ ” When the matter of Tango had been settled, Miss Saunders learned that her bipedal caller was Mrs. Whitehouse Walker, of Bedford Hills, who owned the poodle and was, indeed, the leading exponent of standard poodles in this country. Now she was pioneering in Obedience work with Tango and the other poodles she had in her poodle kennel, the Carillon, at Bedford Hills. Her visit to the Brewster barnyard was prompted by the fact that she had advertised in the Rural New-Yorker for a kennel maid at twenty dollars a month, and Miss Saunders had answered the ad. “I must have been getting a little bored with heavy animals, I guess,” Miss Saunders says. “Anyway, until I saw that ad, I’d never thought of working with dogs. If anyone had suggested it, I’d have said, ‘My goodness sakes, not me!’ Of course, I didn’t know it then, but Tango was a very important dog—the granddaddy of Obedience in America.”
The granddaddy of Obedience in America, important though he was, wasn’t a perfect physical specimen, being a shade too wide in the rear, but he was presentable enough to overcome Miss Saunders’ anti-poodle bias. The week after Tango and Mrs. Walker called on her, she went to help out around the Carillon, and within a month she had been elevated to the role of kennel manager. During that period, her personality underwent the sort of metamorphosis that Obedience people consider one of the most valuable by-products of their specialty. Commenting admiringly on this, Mrs. Walker said the other day, “When Blanche first came to the Carillon, she was a shy, demure little thing, without much self-confidence. But as soon as she’d worked a couple of weeks with Carillon Epreuve—Glee, for short, and the most nervous and timid of all our bitches—she simply blossomed out. That’s the beauty of Obedience. It gives one poise. Takes one out of oneself. Glee was completely transformed, too. She ended up as the first dog in the United States, of any breed, to get her C.D., her C.D.X., and her U.D.”
Having Miss Saunders to run her kennel for her left Mrs. Walker free to devote her full energies to alerting the dog fanciers of America to the merits of Obedience—a task of some magnitude, for at that time most people on this side of the Atlantic were under the impression that the only reasonable goals of formal dog training were police work, sheepherding, hunting, and retrieving. Only a few months before the arrival of Miss Saunders at the Carillon, Mrs. Walker had taken her first step toward advancing her theory that a dog should be well behaved as well as utilitarian by giving an informal demonstration of Obedience on the lawn of her father’s estate, in Mount Kisco. Not long after that, she had succeeded in talking the officials of the North Westchester Kennel Club into letting her put on a similar affair as a part of their annual all-breed show. The small group of dogs and owners starring in this exhibition were rather uncertain about what they were up to, for their training was based solely on Mrs. Walker’s hazy recollection of some Obedience tests she had once watched in England, but even so they walked away with the show. “The spectator appeal was so fantastic that nobody paid any attention to the judging of the breeds,” Mrs. Walker afterward reported triumphantly to a friend.
Inspired by this coup, Mrs. Walker left Miss Saunders in charge of the kennel and hopped the next boat for England, where she headed straight for Tango’s birthplace, the Piperscroft Kennels, near Horsham. Here Mrs. Grace E. L. Boyd, the owner of the kennels, put her star Obedience dog, King Leo of Piperscroft, through his paces for Mrs. Walker’s edification. Next, Mrs. Boyd took her guest to meet a neighbor, a Captain Radcliffe, who had been influential in introducing Obedience Training tests into England from Germany. Under the Captain’s guidance, Mrs. Walker mastered the subject, from hup to pfui, in about three weeks. Then she hopped a boat home. During the crossing, she stayed in her berth, outlining in her mind the first set of American Obedience rules. These were modifications of the English rules, which, numbering among their requirements such feats as scaling walls, retrieving objects over six-foot hurdles, and refusing food from strangers, Mrs. Walker considered too exacting. When she got home, she set about with renewed vigor serving as an evangel of Obedience and soon succeeded in stirring up so much interest among dog fanciers in this country that she was unable to deal singlehanded with the requests for information that inundated Bedford Hills. She was relieved to find that Miss Saunders had become infected by her enthusiasm and was able to take over all the correspondence while Mrs. Walker was in the field plugging her hobby.
In 1936, Mrs. Walker gathered a number of small East Coast Obedience groups she had helped organize into the Obedience Test Club, with headquarters at Bedford Hills, and introduced its members to the intricacies of a scoring system she had worked out for Obedience trials—the exhibitions, most often held in connection with bench shows, that determine the eligibility of the competing dogs for degrees. That same year, the officials of the American Kennel Club, who had been viewing this newfangled aspect of the dog business with skeptical aloofness, apparently came to the conclusion that their organization was better equipped than was the relatively insignificant Obedience Test Club to handle all the red tape connected with Obedience records and scoring systems and with the dispensing of degrees. They therefore announced that the A.K.C., whose official sanction carried almost overpowering weight among dog fanciers, would recognize Obedience Training, but only if it was given by clubs that paid the organization a fee of two hundred and fifty dollars. To the chagrin of those who had got in on the ground floor of Obedience, the A.K.C. declined to recognize the accomplishments of dogs who had already forged ahead in Obe
dience Test Club classes, which made it necessary for those luckless animals to re-enroll as novices and compete all over again, under a slightly different scoring system. The A.K.C.’s appearance on the scene also had the effect of automatically disqualifying any dog with a bar sinister in its background from earning recognized degrees, no matter how talented it might be. The unfortunate owners of dogs in this category nonetheless managed to keep their chins up, and continued to form Obedience clubs—unsponsored ones, which awarded a tactfully worded certificate rather than a degree. A few years later, their morale was raised considerably when a woolly-coated little dog named Squeaky, a stray adopted by Dr. Mary Julian White, then of New York and now a psychiatrist practicing in Washington, was shown on the cover of the American Kennel Gazette, along with two dogs of unquestionable ancestry, in a photograph taken during an intermission in an Obedience demonstration put on by Miss Saunders in Rockefeller Plaza. Since Squeaky was, and still is, the only mutt ever to be thus honored by the magazine, the photograph caused a furore which hasn’t yet died down completely. Nowadays, the staff of the Gazette is noncommittal when questioned about l’affaire Squeaky, but some defenders of the publication’s editorial integrity claim that Squeaky is, to the expert eye, no mutt at all but a representative of a rare Tibetan breed, the Lhasa Apso. (Squeaky’s owner, too, likes to think of him as a Lhasa, but, as a psychiatrist, feels obliged to admit that her thinking may be wishful.) Miss Saunders, however, who originally trained him, is an outright dissenter. “Now, look, that dog’s no more Lhasa than I am,” she said the other day. “Last month, in Canada, I met up with a real Lhasa, and he didn’t look a bit like Squeaky. When he lived in New York, Squeaky used to be clipped to look sort of like a schnauzer, but he isn’t that, either. He’s just a terribly talented mutt, and that’s how he got into my Rockefeller Plaza demonstration, and met up with that photographer.”
The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Page 21