“May I keep my collar on?”
Dazed but not done in at having their Obedience baby taken out of their hands by the A.K.C., Mrs. Walker and Miss Saunders, a resilient pair, swiftly began adjusting themselves to the new order of things. One of the marked advantages of being nestled under the maternalistic wing of the A.K.C., they realized, was the circumstance that from that time on Obedience trials could be held without any quibble at all in conjunction with A.K.C.-sponsored bench shows, the most fertile possible spots for long-range Obedience proselytization. In the matter of purebreds versus crossbreeds, both women were, and are, leniently disposed toward mutts; Miss Saunders, in fact, in later years, after her prestige as an Obedience trainer was such that she could get along without the cachet of A.K.C. backing, pretty much threw in her lot with the A.S.P.C.A., which makes no distinction between purebred and mongrel and can therefore award only certificates, and the majority of the classes she conducts today are held under its auspices. At the time, however, as thoroughbred-poodle fanciers and breeders, both she and Mrs. Walker had to admit that the A.K.C.’s discriminatory stand had its points, and before long the Obedience Test Club’s literature was proclaiming that its ultimate aim was “to demonstrate the usefulness of the purebred dog as the companion and guardian of man and not the ability of the dog to acquire facility in the performance of mere tricks.” In order to further this aim, Mrs. Walker and Miss Saunders embarked, in the fall of 1937, on a trek that has become legendary in the dog world. Rigging up a twenty-one-foot trailer with all the installations of a well-run dog-diet kitchen, they hitched it to Mrs. Walker’s car and set out in the company of Glee and two other blue-ribbon poodles—Ch. Carillon Joyeux and Ch. Carillon Boncœur—to give their demonstrations in communities where, as Miss Saunders puts it, “the word ‘obedience’ had never been heard before.” These included most of the focal spots on the Southwestern dog-show circuit—Wichita Falls, Dallas, San Antonio, Houston, Galveston, Fort Worth, and Los Angeles. It was a lighthearted trip, as well as a successful one from a missionary point of view. “In that part of the country, dog people are rather like circus people,” Miss Saunders later told some friends. “Just a big, happy family. On their way to shows, and going home, they shouted to each other from car to car, and often pulled up by the side of the road to compare notes on their dogs.”
Ten weeks and some ten thousand miles later, the peripatetic kennel, its personnel intact, returned to Bedford Hills, greatly to the relief of several of the community’s human inhabitants, who had considered the venture a perilous one and who now gathered about to shudder delightedly over the two women’s accounts of its hazards, such as a Texas sandstorm that clogged all the drains in the trailer, and encounters, in several remote spots, with hoboes who, peering in the trailer’s windows, reeled back when confronted by the merry faces of Boncœur, Glee, and Joyeux. As a more or less direct outcome of the trip, the number of Obedience trials held in conjunction with dog shows doubled within the next few months. The long-range results of the two travellers’ efforts were recently pointed up in some figures released by the A.K.C., showing that since 1936 it has awarded to representatives of a hundred and eight of the hundred and eleven officially recognized breeds 6,550 C.D.s, 1,680 C.D.X.s, 460 U.D.s, and 296 O.D.T.s, and that in all, during that time, well over fifty thousand purebred dogs have competed in Obedience trials. While Obedience people regard these statistics as impressive, they also see in them a challenge to intensify their campaigning, especially when they reflect upon the fact that the total number of dogs in the United States is somewhere around twenty-two million, about five million of them purebreds and the rest kitchen cousins, or mutts.
Not long ago, the editor of Dog World—“If It’s about Dogs, Write to Dog World”—explained to a reader, who had taken him at his word, that Obedience trials in this country have proved to be “a vitamin for the dog-breeding and showing field.” He might well have added that Miss Saunders’ achievements both in Obedience work and in poodle breeding are an almost perfect case in point. At the time Miss Saunders took over as manager of the Carillon, poodles were comparatively rare in America; only a hundred and thirty-four of them—possibly a third of the country’s total—were registered in the A.K.C.’s studbook. As a pupil, and then as an instructor, in Mrs. Walker’s Bedford Hills Obedience Training classes, and later as a judge at Obedience trials, Miss Saunders became convinced that poodles constitute an eminently satisfactory breed for Obedience work, owing to two pronounced traits—their anxiety to please their masters and their intelligence, a term rather loosely applied by breeders to dogs who take readily to training and are able to retain what they have learned. Although it is impossible to put a finger on all the factors that determine the popularity of a given breed of dog, it is at present generally agreed that the increasingly frequent and successful appearances of poodles in Obedience trials in this country have had a decidedly tonic effect on their sale. By 1944, the number of poodle registrations had risen to 465, and by 1946 to 1,186; last year, the total was 3,195. A while ago, in reply to a letter inquiring about the total number of poodles now owned in this country, and, more specifically, in New York City, Arthur Frederick Jones, editor of the American Kennel Gazette, wrote, “I would estimate that now living in the United States there are about 14,000 Poodles of all sizes. This is estimated on the registrations over the last ten years, Poodles not usually dying too young. It would be practically impossible to estimate the number in New York City, other than to say that, aside from Southern California, and a few in the Middle West, the metropolitan area contains the bulk of America’s Poodle population.”
In 1943, Miss Saunders felt that the time had come to strike out on her own. By then, it was obvious that a local, and possibly a national, poodle vogue was in the making. At the instigation of Mrs. Walker, who had decided to close the Carillon, because of the difficulties of keeping it going in wartime, Miss Saunders came to New York and rented a house in the East Fifties, where she opened an establishment for the care and training of poodles. The shingle she hung out bore the Carillon name, bequeathed her by her former employer. She also brought with her, as an additional gift from Mrs. Walker, a poodle bitch named Ch. Carillon Colline—better known as just Colline—who was to be entrusted with the task of perpetuating the Carillon strain. Within a short time, the new Carillon, where Miss Saunders clipped, shampooed, manicured, boarded, and trained poodles (along with an occasional maverick from some alien breed), became immensely successful; its clientele included the pets not only of some of the most prosperous people in the city but of several well-known out-of-towners, among them some Wilmington du Ponts, who flew a number of poodles here regularly by private plane for their Carillon appointments. From the point of view of Colline, however, an urban base of operations offered serious disadvantages when offspring began to arrive, just as it has to many another young matron. This situation was remedied in 1946, when Miss Saunders and her photographer friend and business associate, Miss Branch, while in the throes of planning the first of their Obedience pictures, hit upon the idea of setting up yet another Carillon kennel, on an estate Miss Branch shares with other members of her family, in Pawling. By this time, Miss Saunders was working ten hours a day in her Manhattan establishment, in addition to running training classes for the A.S.P.C.A. once a week and judging Obedience trials on the side, and was therefore able to devote only weekends to the development of the Pawling project. Even so, she contrived to find time to draw up the architectural plans for the kennel, which started on a small scale but has been expanded over the years to accommodate sixty poodles, and which features such amenities of canine living as an electric dishwasher in its kitchen and ultraviolet lights over its whelping pens. A month or so ago, she expanded this operation by buying a ten-acre place near Bedford, which she is also calling the Carillon and where she plans to keep the kennel’s puppies. The show stock will remain in Pawling.
THE VISITOR
Young couple in Cambridge
who have been collecting modern black-and-white prints for several years arranged this summer, after a good deal of trouble, to have John McAndrew, director of the Wellesley College Art Museum, drive over and evaluate them. There was a heavy rainstorm on the appointed evening and they were afraid he wouldn’t come, but he did, and when they opened the door, he was standing there dripping, and so was a shaggy, standard-size black poodle. The hostess let them both in, and the director introduced himself, whereas the poodle just shook himself, showering three rare British prints and two Swedish ones. In the living room, Mr. McAndrew had a highball, and the poodle sat beside him, eying him affectionately and making a wet smudge first on the carpet and then on the cream-colored sofa, when he leaned against that. They went upstairs to view the rest of the collection, and the poodle came along, stopping in the bathroom for a drink of water. “Shouldn’t I get him a pan or something from the kitchen?” asked the hostess uncertainly. “Oh, he seems to be able to take care of himself,” said the museum man, chuckling. “I suppose that’s one of the advantages of being a big dog.”
The poodle then wandered into the nursery and rubbed his head against a sleeping baby. The hostess gave her husband a this-has-gone-far-enough look, but the husband gave her a he-seems-to-like-the-collection look, so she merely guided the poodle out of the nursery and shut the door. Downstairs, Mr. McAndrew praised the collection warmly, asked permission to exhibit it this fall, and made arrangements for his new friends to visit him later on that week. It had stopped raining, and the husband walked him to his car, while the wife went to the kitchen to get some damp cloths. She found the poodle there, accepting tidbits from the cook. Just as Mr. McAndrew was about to drive off, she rushed out of the house, holding the poodle by the collar and screaming, “He’s forgotten his dog!” The director looked at the young couple in a dazed way. “My dog?” he said mildly. “He was standing on your doorstep when I came up. I detest dogs.” The poodle, while this was going on, nodded pleasantly to all three people and trotted on his way. | 1952 |
Colline, now an extraordinarily agile matriarch of fourteen, no longer has any active duties around the Carillon, but she roams the premises with an air of marked, and justifiable, smugness. Occasionally, she is accompanied on her rambles by the most illustrious of all her offspring, Ch. Carillon Jester (C.D., C.D.X., U.D.T.), a handsome black standard poodle whose entire life has been consecrated to the cause of Obedience. Ever since he first posed, in his late puppyhood, for the illustrations for Miss Saunders’ training manual, Jester has been in the public eye almost without surcease, performing in Obedience movies, barking fetchingly at Miss Saunders’ request on radio programs, heisting dumbbells on Faye Emerson’s television show, and tracking down gardening gloves, handkerchiefs, and other items of Obedience paraphernalia at large-scale Obedience exhibitions in such places as Madison Square Garden and Yankee Stadium. In the opinion of Obedience people, gatherings for the observance of National Dog Week and Be Kind to Animals Week would be hollow occasions indeed were it not for the presence of Jester, who inevitably has his audience in his pocket.
“I can’t explain it. I see that guy coming up the walkway and I go postal.”
The advanced state of development to which Obedience Training has succeeded in bringing Jester’s talents is readily explained in the light of the evolution of his breed. Over the centuries, poodles have been distinguishing themselves for their savoir-faire in the hunting field, in circuses, on the stage, and in the laps of royalty. Poodles were once primarily used as retrievers of waterfowl, as Miss Saunders is about to point out in what she describes as “an unusually straight-from-the-shoulder dog book,” on which she is collaborating with Mrs. John Cross, Jr., the dachshund-fancying wife of the bench-show chairman of the Westminster Kennel Club. The book will also scotch the widely held notion that poodles originated in France. Actually, they originated in Germany; their name is derived either from the German Pudel, meaning puddle, or from puddeln, to splash in water. The poodle’s elaborate clip, which has been the target of much facetious comment from the uninitiated, dates back to its retrieving days, when it was adopted as a practical measure, to keep the animals from sinking under the weight of their coats as they dived into rivers or lakes to retrieve birds. Shortly before the French Revolution, poodles were taken up wholeheartedly by the ladies of the court at Versailles. As a result, the breed attained an aura of preciousness that still clings to it, obscuring what Miss Saunders feels is its true utilitarian worth. She regards it as lamentable that a lot of latter-day poodle owners have persisted in taking a frivolous attitude toward their pets, especially in the matter of discipline. “Of course [my Miss Matilda] is spoiled,” Mrs. James Lowell Oakes, Jr., blithely admits in The Book of the Poodle, one of the many recently published volumes devoted to rhapsodic appraisals of the breed. “She is going to school and learning Obedience Training … but I do not want her ever to lose her love of people. I do not want her to stop jumping up on the back of our love seat or barking at our car.”
Whimsical and overindulgent dog owners, although a notably free-spending group when it comes to providing comfort for their pets, nevertheless cause Miss Saunders a good deal of anguish. She suffers greatly in this respect at nearly all the Obedience Training classes she conducts, and perhaps most of all on those nights when she presides over a series of classes open only to poodles, sponsored by the Poodle Obedience Training Club of Greater New York, an organization of some seventy-five poodle fanciers, each of whom is convinced that his dog is superior on every count to all other poodles. As Jester’s owner, Miss Saunders is able to ignore and even to smile at this communal fantasy, but she has found it extremely difficult to overlook some other, far more serious misapprehensions that members of the group cling to. On one recent all-poodle evening, for example, when the class convened in the gymnasium of the Washington Irving High School, on Irving Place, it became apparent as the novice division paraded before her, with only three more sessions to go before graduation, that the owners had been cherishing the illusion that their dogs were far too smart to need to bother their heads about the homework assigned them. “My goodness sakes!” Miss Saunders said rather early in the evening. “Where’s this class been for the last four weeks? My all-breed class last night had only had a couple of lessons and their dogs heeled perfectly, on and off leash. Don’t any of you ever work your dogs at home?”
“It’s been raining a lot,” explained the owner of a gray miniature with a red ribbon on its topknot.
“So what?” Miss Saunders said. “Your poodle can heel in the living room, can’t he?”
Meanwhile, at the far end of the gymnasium, where a number of folding chairs had been set out, the members of the advanced, or utility, division were assembling. As Miss Saunders continued with the novice lesson (“Turn! Turn! Snap! Praise! Command when you start! Get those leads slack!”), one of the most enthusiastic of the local poodle fanciers, Count Alexis Pulaski, made an impressive entrance. In his retinue were Ch. Pulaski’s Masterpiece (U.D.), Deauville Coquette, and Pulaski Master’s Pinocchio, three of his finest gray miniatures; their handler, Miss Lucy Copestake; and Miss Dorothy Dorn, head of the dog department at Hammacher Schlemmer, who was staggering under the weight of several large suit boxes, which turned out to contain various articles of canine apparel. As the newcomers seated themselves, Ch. Carillon Jester, tethered nearby, set up a prolonged howl.
“What goes on over there?” Miss Saunders inquired irritably from her end of the gymnasium.
“Jester’s teaching my Cocoa bad tricks,” complained the young and pretty owner of a brown standard two seats away from the Count.
“Well, I can’t believe my ears,” Miss Saunders said. “Jester never howls unless he’s interested in being a daddy. Slap his nose, somebody. Now, class, make your corrections again, and make them severe!”
The novice trainers obediently shouted “Heel!” at their dogs, with various degrees of conviction, and on the sidelines Miss Dorn opened the
largest of the suit boxes and lifted out some poodle-size navy-blue serge sailor collars, ornamented with white rick-rack braid and red stars.
“Adorable!” cried Cocoa’s owner.
“My dogs are going to wear these collars at next week’s cocktail party at the Coq Rouge,” the Count explained to her. “Masterpiece is to be guest of honor. Did you know he makes about ten thousand a year in stud fees?”
“No! Really?” exclaimed the young woman.
“Less noise over there!” Miss Saunders called bitterly into her microphone. “This isn’t a tea party, it’s a class,”
“We’ll try on Coquette’s costume first,” said Miss Dorn in a stage whisper, and proceeded to squeeze that sleepy and reluctant animal into a black velvet jacket, ornamented with ermine tails. “She’s gained a good deal of weight,” she added doubtfully.
“Try to make her walk,” said the Count. “I want to see the effect.”
“If the buttons are moved over, she can get away with it,” Miss Dorn assured him.
“We’ll diet her,” the Count said.
“If there isn’t less noise over there, somebody’s going to have to leave,” Miss Saunders said balefully as Jester commenced howling again.
“I don’t think you’d better work Masterpiece tonight,” the Count said to Miss Copestake as the novice division began to straggle off the floor. “He got a little overexcited at the photographer’s today.”
The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Page 22