“You have to understand, the club was so slow that night,” Kramer explained. “There was something going on—a big party in Miami, I think—so there were maybe two hundred people inside.” (Keep in mind that Sound Factory has four floors and thirty thousand square feet.) “They started the raid at about six in the morning,” Kramer continued. By then, Fanta had already been on the job for five hours, on top of the long commute. “So, yeah, she was sleeping. There’s nothing for her to do. Am I supposed to tell her to stand at attention? I can’t explain to her that she must stay awake for no reason.”
And, anyway, “an adult dog sleeps seventy percent of the time,” Kenneth Aronson, the attorney, said.
Fanta’s job, it turns out, was not to sniff people (that was up to the bouncers) but to sniff their bags. “We had a couple alerts that turned out to be residual odors,” Kramer said, reflecting on Fanta’s year of service with the club. (Kramer has not been paid for the night of the sting, and wants her seven hundred and fifty dollars.) But Fanta, for whatever reason, never found any drugs while stationed at this alleged “stash house.” Which does raise questions about her efficacy.
Kramer reports that, the same week Fanta got caught snoozing, she found six hundred dollars’ worth of marijuana in the parking lot of a high school in Pennsylvania. But Fanta is unable to recognize the scents of GHB (the so-called date-rape drug) or ketamine (Special K), and when it comes to Ecstasy “there has to be quite a lot of it, because she only smells the methamphetamine traces.” (“You and I go into someone’s home and they’re preparing beef stew—we smell beef stew,” Steve Browand, a drug-dog expert with the New York Security Service Group, explained. “The dog goes in, he recognizes the beef, he recognizes the carrots, he recognizes the peas, he recognizes the potatoes. He separates the ingredients.”) Pot is not exactly the chief concern of the nightlife police.
“An important function of the dog is as more of a deterrent,” Aronson said. “If people see a drug-smelling dog, they turn around and they get rid of what they have. They put it back in their car, or they throw it down the sewer. Or maybe they take it.” And then, sufficiently giddy, perhaps they return to the line and greet the dog with affection.
“Most people wanted to pet her,” Kramer said. “She rolls right over on her back and you could rub her belly.”
In the end, Fanta was probably not the right gal for the job, but “to me, she’s a good dog,” Kramer said.
| 2004 |
CHABLIS
Fiction
DONALD BARTHELME
My wife wants a dog. She already has a baby. The baby’s almost two. My wife says that the baby wants the dog.
My wife has been wanting a dog for a long time. I have had to be the one to tell her that she couldn’t have it. But now the baby wants a dog, my wife says. This may be true. The baby is very close to my wife. They go around together all the time, clutching each other tightly. I ask the baby, who is a girl, “Whose girl are you? Are you Daddy’s girl?” The baby says, “Momma,” and she doesn’t just say it once, she says it repeatedly, “Momma Momma Momma.” I don’t see why I should buy a hundred-dollar dog for that damn baby.
The kind of dog the baby wants, my wife says, is a cairn terrier. This kind of dog, my wife says, is a Presbyterian like herself and the baby. Last year the baby was a Baptist—that is, she went to the Mother’s Day Out program at the First Baptist twice a week. This year she is a Presbyterian because the Presbyterians have more swings and slides and things. I think that’s pretty shameless and I have said so. My wife is a legitimate lifelong Presbyterian and says that makes it O.K.: way back when she was a child she used to go to the First Presbyterian in Evansville, Illinois. I didn’t go to church, because I was a black sheep. There were five children in my family and the males rotated the position of black sheep among us, the oldest one being the black sheep for a while while he was in his D.W.I. period or whatever and then getting grayer as he maybe got a job or was in the service and then finally becoming a white sheep when he got married and had a grandchild. My sister was never a black sheep, because she was a girl.
Our baby is a pretty fine baby. I told my wife for many years that she couldn’t have a baby because it was too expensive. But they wear you down. They are just wonderful at wearing you down, even if it takes years, as it did in this case. Now I hang around the baby and hug her every chance I get. Her name is Joanna. She wears Oshkosh overalls and says “no,” “bottle,” “out,” and “Momma.” She looks most lovable when she’s wet, when she’s just had a bath and her blond hair is all wet and she’s wrapped in a beige towel. Sometimes when she’s watching television she forgets that you’re there. You can just look at her. When she’s watching television, she looks dumb. I like her better when she’s wet.
This dog thing is getting to be a big issue. I said to my wife, “Well you’ve got the baby. Do we have to have the damn dog too?” The dog will probably bite somebody, or get lost. I can see myself walking all over our subdivision asking people, “Have you seen this brown dog?” “What’s its name?” they’ll say to me, and I’ll stare at them coldly and say, “Michael.” That’s what she wants to call it, Michael. That’s a silly name for a dog and I’ll have to go looking for this possibly rabid animal and say to people, “Have you seen this brown dog? Michael?” It’s enough to make you think about divorce.
What’s that baby going to do with that dog that it can’t do with me? Romp? I can romp. I took her to the playground at the school. It was Sunday and there was nobody there, and we romped. I ran, and she tottered after me at a good pace. I held her as she slid down the slide. She groped her way through a length of big pipe they have there set in concrete. She picked up a feather and looked at it for a long time. I was worried that it might be a diseased feather but she didn’t put it in her mouth. Then we ran some more over the patched bare softball field and through the arcade that connects the temporary wooden classrooms, which are losing their yellow paint, to the main building. Joanna will go to this school someday, if I stay in the same job.
I looked at some dogs at Pets-A-Plenty, which has birds, rodents, reptiles, and dogs, all in top condition. They showed me the cairn terriers. “Do they have their prayer books?” I asked. This woman clerk didn’t know what I was talking about. The cairn terriers ran about two ninety-five per, with their papers. I started to ask if they had any illegitimate children at lower prices, but I could see that it would be useless and the woman already didn’t like me, I could tell.
What is wrong with me? Why am I not a more natural person, like my wife wants me to be? I sit up, in the early morning, at my desk on the second floor of our house. The desk faces the street. At five-thirty in the morning, the runners are already out, individually or in pairs, running toward rude red health. I’m sipping a glass of Gallo Chablis with an ice cube in it, smoking, worrying. I worry that the baby may jam a kitchen knife into an electrical outlet while she’s wet. I’ve put those little plastic plugs into all the electrical outlets, but she’s learned how to pop them out. I’ve checked the Crayolas. They’ve made the Crayolas safe to eat—I called the head office in Pennsylvania. She can eat a whole box of Crayolas and nothing much will happen to her. If I don’t get the new tires for the car, I can buy the dog.
I remember the time, thirty years ago, when I put Herman’s mother’s Buick into a cornfield, on the Beaumont highway. There was a car coming at me in my lane, and I didn’t hit it, and it didn’t hit me. I remember veering to the right and down into the ditch and up through the fence and coming to rest in the cornfield and then getting out to wake Herman and the two of us going to see what the happy drunks in the other car had come to, in the ditch on the other side of the road. That was when I was a black sheep, years and years ago. That was skillfully done, I think. I get up, congratulate myself in memory, and go in to look at the baby.
| 1983 |
DOG
They say, my dog, your love is pure,
And like my taxes will endu
re,
That when your eyes with ardor burn,
It is not food for which they yearn
But only recognition, which
Is breath of life to dog or bitch.
Yet am I still uneasy, since
I see a likeness there—and wince.
—VIRGINIA WOODS BELLAMY | 1937 |
DOWN THE LEASH
ANGELICA GIBBS
Blanche Saunders, a dark-haired, wiry, youthful-looking woman of forty-five with a pronounced affinity for black standard poodles, is this country’s best-known practitioner of Obedience Training, an up-and-coming branch of pedagogy that she has been instrumental in popularizing in America during the past fifteen years. Among Miss Saunders’ professional acquaintances—dog fanciers whose affinities range all the way from Afghan hounds to Yorkshire terriers—the word “obedience” has but one meaning. It denotes the social polish that a qualified trainer can impart to a dog through the medium of his owner, or at least to any dog able and willing to react cooperatively to such exclamations as “Hup!” (or “Hop!”), “Pfui!” (or “Phooey!”), and “Heel!,” to sit or lie motionless for prolonged periods while interlopers do their best to distract him, to bound over a series of hurdles with a dumbbell gripped between his teeth, and otherwise either to control himself or channel his energies along more or less useful lines in everyday life. Since, unlike more traditional systems of education, Obedience Training involves a chain of command, rather than direct communication between teacher and pupil, Miss Saunders can’t exactly be classified as a dog trainer. Instead, she thinks of herself as a trainer of dog owners, those ineffectual bipeds whose only reason for existence is to act as intermediaries between her and their dogs. Some dog owners who have undergone the rigors of Obedience Training have been inclined to view the program as discriminatory, for the certificates and degrees Miss Saunders doles out upon the completion of her courses are awarded not to the owners but to their pets. Most owners, however, accept their anomalous status with good grace and when their dogs are guilty of a fault, or in extreme cases a flunk-out, sportingly insist that they and not their pets are to blame.
All this is as it should be, in the opinion of Obedience Training experts, but they often wish that dog owners, in their day-to-day dealings with their pets, would take a firmer stand. The Obedience Training people point out that dogs, as opposed to cats, are fundamentally amenable to being bossed around and that it is therefore not becoming for dog owners to take a subservient attitude toward the whims of their animals. According to this view, the dog owners of America, by allowing their dogs to precede them through doorways, to monopolize and muddy their furniture, to take sips from their cocktails or tidbits from their tables, and to intimidate, or even bite, their guests, not only have managed to lose the respect of their maladjusted animals but have become one of the major educational challenges of our day. There can be no denying that Miss Saunders has met this challenge with praiseworthy vigor, and from every conceivable angle. She has put in her most direct pedagogical licks in New York, where since 1944 she has been conducting Obedience Training courses, each consisting of nine lessons, in various armories and gymnasiums, mostly under the sponsorship of the A.S.P.C.A. The tuition for a course, for which Miss Saunders receives a fee of anywhere up to five hundred dollars, depending on the size of the class, is nine dollars. To date, about twenty-two hundred men, women, and adolescents have turned up for these courses, snaked along by their dogs and clinging to the wrong, or hind, end of the leash. “By the time they’ve finished the nine lessons,” an A.S.P.C.A. official said proudly the other day, “the relative positions on the leashes have been reversed in at least two-thirds of the cases.”
A considerably larger group of dog owners has had its eyes opened to the merits of Obedience work through a manual Miss Saunders has written, called Training You to Train Your Dog, published by Doubleday in 1946 and listed by the Times last December as a “hidden best seller,” meaning that it belongs, along with dictionaries and cookbooks, in that enviable category of books that, though they never reach the best-seller lists, continue to be bought in respectable quantities over a long period of time. So far, forty thousand copies of Miss Saunders’ book have been sold. In addition to fulfilling the obligation implicit in its title, this volume has an unexpected appeal for its purchasers, many of whom ordinarily have little time for reading anything farther afield than the American Kennel Gazette and Leash and Collar, in that it gives them a nodding acquaintance with the prose style of Walter Lippmann. Mr. Lippmann dashed off a preface for it not long after Miss Saunders made a trip to Washington to induce the Lippmanns’ black standard poodle, Brioche, to stop biting the columnist’s secretaries. “To [those] who cannot or will not train their own dogs, [this] book ought to carry conviction that for dogs, as well as for others, education and discipline are not accompaniments of tyranny but are necessary to the pursuit of happiness,” Lippmann wrote resoundingly.
Along with other wide-awake modern educators, Miss Saunders has recently begun employing audio-visual aids in her teaching. Her most successful effort in this branch of instruction has been a series of three 16-mm. films produced, in both black-and-white and color, by United Specialists, Inc., a firm in which she is associated with Louise Branch, who owns it and who, happily, is not only a fellow poodle fancier but a photographer. The three films, collectively also called “Training You to Train Your Dog” and billed by the producers as a “five-bark picture, a real bow-wow!,” are designed to drive home the points made by Miss Saunders’ manual, and they are available separately or in complete sets, the cost in the latter case being two hundred and ten dollars for a black-and-white version or five hundred and seventy dollars in color. Puppy Trouble, the first of the series, covers, as set forth in its subtitle, the “Kindergarten and Grade School Training Stage” of a dog, and the voice of Helen Hayes, a poodle owner herself, has been dubbed in, expressing the presumed thoughts of the starring puppy, who, it was found, could not be relied upon to respond vocally at the proper moments and was not quite as comprehensible even when he did. “Some very cute little touches,” as Miss Saunders described them over the radio not long ago, resulted from this collaboration. “In one scene, where the puppy was getting his first bath,” Miss Saunders went on, “Miss Hayes made her voice shiver so realistically you could almost hear the little fellow tremble.” The second United Specialists film, called Basic Obedience Instruction and subtitled “High School and Prep School Training Stage,” and the third, called Advanced Obedience Instruction and subtitled “College and University Training Stage,” have Lowell Thomas on their sound tracks, explaining the steps by which Obedience Training may lead to the granting of degrees represented by initials, analogous to B.A., M.A., and Ph.D., affixed to a dog’s name. Basic Obedience Instruction depicts Miss Saunders and one of her favorite poodles demonstrating to a number of more or less intelligent-looking dogs and their owners the requirements for the degree of C.D., or Companion Dog—the lowest rung on the academic ladder. These include the heel on leash, the heel free, the recall, the long (one-minute) sit, and the long (three-minute) down. As might be expected, the third film, leading through the halls of higher learning, covers far more esoteric accomplishments, such as the retrieve on flat, the retrieve over obstacle, the speak on command, and the seek-back for lost article, by which the pupil progresses up the ladder to the degree of C.D.X. (Companion Dog, Excellent), then to U.D. (Utility Dog), and finally to U.D.T. (Utility Dog Tracker).
Overheard in Central Park, stout dowager to drooping toy poodle: “I told you not to talk to strangers!”
| 1963 |
The “Training You to Train Your Dog” films are distributed to the public, usually at a nominal charge, by a number of rather disparate organizations, including the American Meat Institute and the American Museum of Natural History, which buy the reels from United Specialists. One of the distributors, the Gaines Dog Research Center, maintained by the makers of Gaines dog foods, estimates
that through its facilities alone at least five hundred thousand people in this country are privileged each year to hear Miss Hayes whimpering in her imaginary tub and to watch one of Miss Saunders’ talented poodles discriminating, at the command of his mistress, between a scented and an unscented gardening glove. These performances have undoubtedly proved instructive to a further, unestimated number of people in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela, where the movies have also been distributed. The most recent request for them from abroad came in to United Specialists, to the gratification and mystification of everyone there, from the Rajkumar Preatum Sherjung, of Bijnor, United Provinces, India, who demanded the whole works, Puppy Trouble and all.
Obedience Training is of Teutonic origin, and because it involves not only a good deal of canine regimentation but downright physical coercion on the part of the handler, who uses a choke collar to induce a dog to fall in with his wishes, its opponents frequently claim that its ranks consist of what they describe as Prussian types, or people desirous chiefly of imposing their wills forcibly on others. Obedience trainers, these detractors say, are imbued with top-sergeant, or bulldog, tendencies, to a man, or woman. But though Miss Saunders is considered in dog-fancying circles to be the embodiment of what is reverently termed “trainer personality,” there is little in her manner to suggest the top sergeant and there is absolutely nothing of the bulldog about her. A dog-show official who is at his most articulate within his own very special frame of reference once said of Miss Saunders that she combines all the commendable qualities, both physical and temperamental, that are customarily associated with the terrier group—the slimness and stamina of the wirehair, the pleasing facial contours and limpid eyes of the cairn, the activity and gameness of the Border, and the amiability of the Dandie Dinmont—an opinion concurred in by the majority of her admirers but highly disconcerting to a minority who hold that Miss Saunders, since she is a confirmed poodle fancier, should bear a resemblance to her favorite, rather than to an alien, type of dog.
The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Page 20
