Dog and I

by Roy MacGregor

  Such shifts seem to happen from time to time. Loud men talking on their ear-clip cellphones in busy airports are, most would agree, the new sign of mental illness, as surely as it used to be the goofy guy talking to himself as he walks down the street and makes sure to touch every passing telephone pole.

  I was tempted to suggest that dogs have become the new Barbie dolls—something for grownups to dress up and play with using elaborate pretend sets—but then it was pointed out to me that dogs, in fact, now have their own Barbie-like dolls to play with, and so the analogy hardly works. Better just to admit that dogs have become the new children for those who have not yet had their children or, just as often, have had their children and need some replacement to blow their life savings on as they drive themselves increasingly around the bend.

  Certainly, the madness applied to the care and raising of dogs has reached heights not even imagined by those who devoted previous years to the care and raising of small humans. The young girl helping out in this shop, for example, is at the computer, trying to register her puppy on some website devoted to purebred Labrador retrievers. She has stalled because she does not have its full identification numbers yet, including the details required for a computer chip that the veterinarian will be embedding between his shoulder blades. This is frustrating to her and, being naturally curious, I ask her how old her puppy is.

  “I don’t have him yet,” she says.

  “Oh,” I nod, understanding. But, it turns out, not understanding at all.

  She continues on: “He won’t be born until August— he’s not even conceived yet.” Planned Parenthood, eat your heart out.

  This friendly store is busy and, apparently, prospering. It has a line of fur products—Buddy Wash, Woof, Flip—and even a line of mint pet aromatics devoted to improving the morning breath of your dog: Dewdrop Doggie, Honeysuckle Hound, Bow Wow Bouquet. There are designer clothes, including tuxedos for small dogs. There are dog bath towels with “Stud” stitched on them, little ball caps (with holes for ears) featuring favourite sports teams, party hats, tutus, fake-diamond-encrusted collars, and an entire section dedicated to doggie bling: tiaras, charms to hang from collars, even strings of fake pearls as fat as ping-pong balls.

  But this is nothing.

  AT THE BIG-BOX BOOKSTORE in the suburbs of this city, there are more publications devoted to pets than to world peace, religion, and philosophy combined. There is a book on petrosexuals, a play on that irritating “metrosexual” word that essentially stands for everything self-centred and, ultimately, meaningless. There is a distinguished-looking “Memory Book” for the assemblage of photographs, anecdotes, tributes, and final collars of the dear departed family pet.

  And there are more magazines on dogs than on … children. Modern Dog, for example, has a cover story titled “Britney vs Spot—Trends in Dog Names.” It has a feature article on “What to Get the Dog Who Has Everything,” another on actress Shannon Elizabeth (one of Maxim’s “hottest women in the world”), who says, “My dogs are my kids!”, and a third on the art of interviewing potential dog sitters. There are small news items of interest to modern dog owners, including the story—can this possibly be serious?—of a Hindu dog wedding held recently in India for two Labrador retrievers who met through an online doggie dating service. The bride, Diana, is described as looking “ravishing wearing traditional red.”

  There are ads for $5,000 oil portraits of the family pet, ads for lines of wine—including Pinot Noir and Chardonnay—that “salute ‘man’s best friend,’” and page after glossy page of haute couture advertisements for faux fur coats and collars and diamond accessories. High-end hotel chains, including Hilton and Delta, have taken out ads to let potential customers know that their pooches are more than welcome for overnight stays. Whether they get doggie points is not mentioned.

  There are also ads for neckties featuring more than seventy-five different breeds. There are pet urns and memorials. There is a special service, Little Lotus Hearts, that provides prayer to ease the mourning of lost pets and even offers to help the distraught sponsor such things as bird and bat houses in the hopes that giving to others might help ease the loss. There are dozens upon dozens of ads for special doggie carrying bags—made famous, presumably, by Paris Hilton and her Chihuahua—including one brand that claims to be “moisture, stain, bacteria and odor resistant.”

  Most curious of all, however, is a large advertisement for Nintendogs Software, a Nintendo game that lets you research, purchase, and raise a “digital puppy.” The game comes in three versions with six available breeds—mutt likely not among them—and is considered the perfect real-puppy replacement therapy for the “high-rise dweller who doesn’t relish those regular post-and-plastic bag trips, via the elevator, to the park.” And, once your digital puppy is up and running and you’re willing to shell out extra for Nintendo’s state-of-the-art DS Touch Screen, “you can also pet and rub your puppy’s ears.”

  New York Dog seems just a tad brassier, especially when your eye catches the cover stories: “374 Hot Looks,” “Desperate House Dogs,” and “Is My Dog Bi-Polar?” This magazine is far more into apparel than Modern Dog, from leather designer carrying bags to designer paw wear and more bling than Mr. T. would dare wear were he purebred rather than pure ham. “Diamond Dogs,” reads one full-page ad from The Gilded Paw, “… when it’s more than love.”

  The most functional-looking collar in the magazine is a specially designed unit to put an end to the lost dog. It has a built-in Global Positioning System so that the owner can track the frisky dog that has caught spring fever and bolted. It has a call-back system for easy use by those who might find the dog, built-in Auto-LED lights for night tracking, and a “Hear Now” two-way radio pet communication with a twelve-mile range for those owners who still feel they can talk some sense into the poor randy beast.

  There is also an elaborate glamour photo section showing various celebrities with their dogs: “Carmen Electra and Daisy shopping at Intuition in Hollywood.” “Mickey Rourke and Loki on location in London.” Hilary Duff, Serena Williams, Sandra Bullock, Uma Thurman, Sharon Osbourne, and Pink are all lovingly photographed with their main pets.

  New York Dog offers dog horoscopes—Taurus: “The dust settles and you have survived a domestic storm. You can come out from hiding”—as well as a pet psychologist’s advice column called “On the Couch,” which in older days was the last place in the world the dog was allowed. And where the psychologist comes up short, the “Psychic Companion” columnist steps in. Shown nothing but photographs of, for example, a hugely missed dead dog, the psychic is able to offer remarkable comfort: “I picked up that he was deeply connected to your spirit, and has been so for centuries.”

  When it comes to advertisements, New York Dog is in a class by itself: edible gingerbread homes for dogs, temporary tattoos for dogs—“Dogs Rule! Cats Suck!”— and even pet jewellery for the owners, including a $1,200 14k gold bracelet with five charms specific to your pet.

  There are fashion pages featuring fully dressed animals wearing the same insouciant, world-weary look that supermodels affect. There are more shots of the famous with their dogs—Princess Grace, Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, Martha Stewart—and there is, most unexpected of all, page after page, complete with colour photographs, of obituaries sent in by bereaved families, the pet every bit as lovingly remembered as—perhaps more so than—grandma herself.

  Ol’ Yeller, one suspects, would pull the trigger himself if he were still around.

  Dogs as Fashion Accessories

  It was not, I can assure you, an acid flashback. There it was, on channel seven, a dog that had not been seen since shortly after Jim Morrison took up permanent residence in Paris, since Pierre and Margaret were together and having Christmas babies, since it seemed the entire world, not just this particular dog breed, had long and silky hair.

  An Afghan.

  It was riding in the back seat of something called an Optra, a new Chevrolet that is bei
ng flogged as “sleek and stylish,” and the dog, presumably, had been placed in the commercial to demonstrate just that—as well as to make a corny joke about sunroofs and the tangled, windblown hair that some of us, long, long ago, once enjoyed.

  I sat there wondering where they found the dog. I have not seen an Afghan since, oh, around 1975, when the street we lived on in Toronto had five and they seemed as momentarily fashionable as leisure suits and quadraphonic sound. Where did they all go?

  Dogs were fashion accessories long before Paris Hilton went in search of a Chihuahua small enough to fit in her makeup kit. Afghans somewhat superseded the Irish setter, and soon enough both breeds—perhaps given up on by owners tired of spending all their free time cutting out burrs—gave way to a fad that wasn’t even a breed at all but rather the strange art of “puppy repackaging.”

  There was a time when, if someone had a poodle that went into heat and took off on the lam with the neighbourhood spaniel, the owner of the female would simply deal with the consequences of that lapse of judgment—or, more accurately, lapse of backyard fence. Weeks would pass, perhaps a couple of months, and the owner now of several dogs would pay whatever it cost to put a small ad in the local paper saying “Puppies: poodle and spaniel mix, free to good home.”

  But no longer.

  What the pet stores started to do—no one knows exactly where this devious practice began—was take that poodle running off with that spaniel and turn their natural byproduct into brand-new faux “breed,” which they then flog for the price of a used car. Once pet stores discovered that whatever came of that poodle and spaniel dalliance could be marketed as “spoodles,” the entire dog world underwent a paradigm shift in common sense. Soon there were cockapoos and terripoos—and, for all we know, Great Poos—until today there are nearly two dozen “poo” mixes available. Which only goes to prove that a poodle running loose is even looser than anyone ever imagined.

  The falling in and out of dog fashion was all brought home when a recent issue of Country Life, the rather snooty British leisure magazine, ripped into readers for choosing certain colonial dog breeds—the Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever and the Labrador retriever—over homegrown breeds. Canadian dogs, it seems, are suddenly hot. We have only four “recognized” breeds, and here were two of them on the list of most popular dogs in Great Britain, which everyone knows is the pet-loving centre of the universe.

  The tolling retriever I am not familiar with—they apparently have the ability to attract ducks and, oddly, Scandinavia has more of these dogs than North America does—but the Labrador retriever is, of course, familiar to all. Labs are, in fact, the most popular registered dog in the world, according to most lists released by the various kennel clubs.

  The German shepherd usually runs second or third in such lists, but the British are apparently in a dither over the fading popularity of such standard fare as the cocker spaniel and the bull terrier. The bull terrier has had its reputation somewhat shaken, however, by Princess Anne’s two bull terriers, Dotty and Flo, and their predilection for attacking small children, corgis, and maids’ knees.

  No one fully understands what makes a breed popular one decade while it vanishes the next. Labs are easygoing and great with children, which explains their continuing popularity, but the Chihuahua seems to have popped up on the lists in response to Paris Hilton and Taco Bell ads. And not that long ago, the Jack Russell terrier was enjoying a popularity that could be directly attributed to the Frasier television show and its endless reruns.

  I asked a friend who is a vet where the Afghan went, and he wasted few words in explaining its quick demise: not particularly smart, not particularly good with children, and too time-consuming to groom. “What I’d really like to know,” he said after summarily dismissing the poor Afghan, “is where did the standard collie go? You know, the Lassie dog—I hardly ever see one any more.”

  Nor have I, come to think of it. And yet there was a time when Lassie was Hollywood’s greatest star, appearing in movies with everyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Jimmy Stewart. The dogs were everywhere, big and friendly and as much a symbol of the happy suburban family as the Lab is today. “Great dogs,” said the vet. “Great, great dogs.”

  But the best dog, for his money, might be the one dog that has the least to do with money: the mutt.

  The mutt was once the only fashion—roughly separated into one group for work, one for hunting, one for hanging around—and it was only when the middle class began springing up and looking for anything that might translate into a little more social status that the poor mutt began having trouble finding its place. Having the “right” dog was just one more trapping.

  And if you think it’s tough being a mutt in today’s world, just think about what it was like back in Britain when the push for proper “breeds” began. There was even, at one point, an anti-mutt movement during the late Victorian era of the 1890s, with one famous commentator on animal care telling Brits, “No one would plant weeds in a flower garden, so why have mongrels as pets?”

  Well, I must confess here to having had an incredible string of them. And proud of it. The current one, Bandit, is going on fourteen, is stiff and deaf, but has never suffered from hip dysplasia and other assorted genetic conditions that seem to afflict so many expensive breeds. She is also excellent with children and alarming to burglars. Same for the previous mutt, who cost nothing and lived sixteen years. And the one before that, who also happily lived to a ripe old age. “Your next dog,” says one daughter, speaking like a car salesman trying to fit us into a minivan, “has to be a Portuguese water dog.”

  No thanks. I not only have no idea what they are, I don’t care. Besides, what would happen if they suddenly go out of fashion like the poor Afghan? It’s mutts for me, as it should be for all people—who are, if you think about it, themselves mutts of a fashion.

  Squirrels and Sisyphus

  Bark!

  (Bark!)

  Bark! Bark!

  (Bark! Bark!)

  Bark! Bark! Bark!

  (Bark! Bark! Bark!)

  “It’s your echo, idiot!”

  She pays no heed. Bark! Bark! (Bark! Bark!)

  It happens several times a day. This time it was a woodpecker that set her off. A while back, a squirrel. Last night, a barred owl. She barks, another dog instantly answers. It does not seem to occur to her that each bark is identical to the other, that they are bouncing back from across the bay. Even if I shout—“Shut up!” (“Shut up!”)—it doesn’t seem to register with her that there is absolutely nothing across the water, just a high hill and an echo.

  Willow and I have come here to this isolated northern lake to try to undo all that has taken place over the past few months as this poor mutt suffers through the petification of North American society.

  Having taken total control of their children’s lives, having sucked childhood dry of happenstance and idle time, those whose children have moved on and those whose children have yet to come have turned their astounding micromanaging skills on their dogs. When the pet stores are larger than Wal-Mart, you have a problem. When they serve the puppy first at the Tim Hortons window, you have a problem.

  This dog has more toys than any of the four children who previously passed through these doors. She has one diploma and is currently working on a second, which at the current rate will shortly give her more formal education than her master. Master—now there’s a word that has lost all meaning….

  No matter, with dog classes done for the week and no appearance of homework—I mean, how many times can you be told to sit and wait for a green street light you never noticed in the first place?—I decided to take the mutt and head up to the lake and let her learn for herself some of life’s great lessons. Like, no matter how quick you are, no matter how high you lunge, you will never, ever, catch a squirrel. And don’t poke that wet nose too close to the fireplace.

  The learning curve here at the lake is so different, in fact, from the world she lives in the rest
of the time that I have taken the liberty of assigning a few marks and comments:

  BUGS: D–

  It is not possible, no matter how many diplomas or degrees this dog ultimately ends up with, to leap into the air and snap every single mosquito and blackfly and deer fly to death. On the other hand, this may be the first time in history that a dog has been exercised daily by a swarm of insects. It can’t be long before the pet super-store starts selling portable “bug rooms” to keep city dogs as sharp and active as dogs at the lake.

  RESPECT FOR THE DEAD: F

  In the city, this mostly white-furred creature loves nothing better than to roll about in clean snow or a freshly cut lawn. Here, she has so far rolled on a dead squirrel, a crushed shrew, and some fish guts illegally and ignorantly left near the government landing by some intruder. An F also goes to the human who forgot to bring the ridiculous crate she sleeps in at home, which means that her now-rancid coat has left its delightful scent all over the bed.

  NATURE STUDIES: D+

  The dogwood is in full bloom and glorious. She has not even noticed. She has discovered, on the other hand, that rotten wood chews more easily than green hardwood and that there is nothing quite so cool, after some hot running, as lying down in the mud by the little creek.

  FAUNA RECOGNITION: F–

  On the drive in, we passed two small moose standing by the side of the road and one otter that ran across directly in front of the vehicle. She noticed nothing. Let a squirrel even tick a tiny paw nail while creeping about the property, however, and she is off like a heat-seeking missile. She has no sense, obviously, that they are the ones in charge of this endless game.