Howl (29 page)

A Dog for All Seasons

[Patrick F. McManus]

O
NE OF THESE DAYS,
they’ll probably come out with a mechanical bird dog that locates pheasants with a special scent detector and radar. A small on-dog computer will record and analyze all available information and give the hunter a report: two roosters and five hens in the stubble field—253 feet. A pointer on the dog’s back would indicate the exact direction.

There would be luxury models, of course, with built-in stereo and FM sets, a special compartment for lunches, a cooler for beverages. The dog’s nose would be a cigarette lighter.

The really high-priced jobs would not only retrieve the bird but pluck it, dress it, wrap it in foil, and quick-freeze it. By the time the bird got back to the hunter it would be neat and trim as a TV dinner.

Since no self-respecting hunter would want to be seen carrying his dog around by a handle, all but the cheapest models would be designed to look like nifty attaché cases. If you passed by some good hunting ground on your way home from work, you could get out and let your attaché case nose around in a thicket or two.

There would be minor inconveniences (“We’ll have to go back, Harry. I thought I had my bird dog but it’s just a bag of briefs.”), but on the whole, the mechanical bird dog would have many advantages over the standard makes most of us have now.

Still, I’m something of a traditionalist, and if the mechanical bird dog were to go on the market tomorrow, I’d probably stick with my old readymade hound, such as he is. His eyes don’t light up much anymore, let alone his tubes, and you can’t light a cigarette on the end of his nose. The sounds that come out of him are not stereo (fortunately) and he has never been much on fidelity any way you look at it. But I would keep him nevertheless. There was a time in my youth, however, when I would’ve swapped my dog for a mechanical job and thrown in my T-shirt decorated with bottle caps to boot.

Take the flaws of character you find in all dogs and most human beings, roll them up in the hide of a sickly warthog, and you would have a reasonable facsimile of my dog Stranger, who was dirty, lazy, bigoted, opinionated, gluttonous, conceited, ill-tempered, and an incorrigible liar.

An old man once summed up Stranger’s character succinctly: “He’s a prevert!” he said. I didn’t know what preverts were but had no doubt Stranger was one of them.

We had called the dog Stranger out of the faint hope he was just passing through. As it turned out, the name was most inappropriate since he stayed on for nearly a score of years, all the while biting the hands that fed him and making snide remarks about my grandmother’s cooking. Eventually, the name was shortened to “Strange,” which was shorter and much more descriptive.

My mother used to say that Strange was like one of the family. Then my grandmother would bawl her out and say that that was no way to talk about my uncle George. That was one of Mom’s favorite jokes and was probably the reason she allowed the dog to stay on the place. At least nobody ever thought of another reason.

I used to beg for a decent dog—a Labrador Retriever, an Irish Setter, or just a regular old mongrel like most of the other guys had—but with no success. We just weren’t a two-dog family, and since no one in his right mind would take Strange and Mom wouldn’t take advantage of anyone who revealed his low mentality by offering to take Strange, I was stuck with him.

Strange didn’t even make good as a criminal. In our part of the country the worst crime a dog can commit is to run deer. As soon as Strange found this out, he rushed out into our clover field and tried to run the deer that grazed there. They would have none of it. They looked at the wildly yapping creature dancing around them and went back to their munching.

Strange had only two chores, but he could never get them straight. He was supposed to attack prowlers, especially those whose character bore the slightest resemblance to his own, and to protect the chickens. He always thought it was the other way around.

Whenever he was caught assaulting a chicken he would come up with some cock-and-bull story about how the chicken had been about to set fire to the house when he, Strange, happened along and prevented arson. “Bad enough we have a dog that attacks chickens, we have to have one that lies about it besides!” Mom would say. (It should be understood that Strange did not actually speak in words, or at least that anyone ever heard, but with his eyes and gestures with feet, tail, and ears.)

As for prowlers, Strange would go out and invite tramps in off the road for a free meal. While the dog was out in the yard apologizing to the tramp for my grandmother’s cooking, the womenfolk would peek out through the curtains and try to determine whether the fellow was dangerous. If so, they would wait until he had just about finished his meal and then my sister would bellow, “Do you want the gun, Ma? Do you want the gun?” This usually would bring the tramp to his feet and send him at a fast walk toward the nearest cover, the ditch on the far side of the road. Even had that gun been real, which it wasn’t, the tramp would have been in no danger—unless of course he happened to step between Mom and the dog.

As soon as I was old enough to hunt I would borrow a shotgun and sneak out to the woods in search of grouse. I had to sneak, not because Mom disapproved of my hunting, but because Strange would insist upon going along and contributing his advice and services. An army of Cossacks could have bivouacked on our front lawn for the night without his knowing a thing about it, but he could hear the sound of a shotgun shell being dropped into a flannel shirt pocket at a hundred yards.

Just as I would be easing my way out the door, he would come staggering out of the woodshed, his eyes bloodshot and bleary from a night of carousing, and say, “My suggestion is that we try Schultz’s woods first and then work our way up Stagg’s hill and if we don’t get anything there we can stop by the Haversteads’ and shoot some of their chickens.”

Strange made slightly less noise going through the woods than an armored division through a bamboo jungle. Nevertheless, we usually managed to get a few birds, apparently because they thought that anything that made that much noise couldn’t possibly be hunting.

My dog believed in a mixed bag: grouse, ducks, pheasants, rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, gophers, skunks, and porcupines. If we saw a cow or horse, he would shout, “There’s a big one! Shoot! Shoot!”

Fortunately, Strange tired of hunting after about an hour. “Let’s eat the lunch now,” he would say. If he had been particularly disgusting that day, I would lie and tell him that I had forgotten to bring a lunch, knowing that it was against his principle—he had only one—to ever be caught more than an hour’s distance away from a food supply. He would immediately strike off for home with the look of a man who has suddenly been deposited in the middle of the Mojave Desert.

Thus it went through most of the years of my youth, until finally Strange’s years totaled what we supposed to be about a dozen. He sensed death approaching—probably the first thing in his life he ever did sense approaching—and one day staggered to a window, looked out and said, “A dog like me should live for a thousand years!” Then he died.

Everyone wept and said he hadn’t been such a bad dog after all. Everyone except my grandmother, who simply smiled to herself as she stirred the gravy.

That night at dinner I said, “This sure is lumpy gravy,” and “This pie crust sure is tough.” It seemed like the least I could do for Strange.

As I say, there was a time when I would have traded a dog like Strange in an instant for a mechanical bird dog. But now? Well, let me think about that for a while.

[
What is muddier than a muddy Bichon Frise?—Dan Liebert
]

How to Housebreak Your Dog

[Mark Newgarden]

A
DOG LIFTS
his hind leg and urinates on a man’s couch. The annoyed man takes the dog outside, locates a tree and, demonstrating his preference in the matter, leans forward and urinates on the tree. They return home and the enlightened dog immediately follows suit; standing upright like his master, he dutifully leans forward and urinates on the man’s couch.

As far as historians have been able to determine, this simple, mildly off-color comic strip first appeared in the 1961
Dutch Treat Club Yearbook.
A privately printed edition of 750 copies of the yearbook was issued to the attendees of the club’s annual dinner in the Sert Room of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York on May 3, 1961. The Dutch Treat Club, a fraternal luncheon (and cocktail) organization founded in 1905, boasted a prominent membership of creative professionals. The club maintained no home base, operating instead as a floating Tuesday-afternoon gathering at designated Manhattan bistros. The yearbook was launched in 1920 as a souvenir program of the club’s bacchanalian annual dinner, which traditionally included a full-fledged theatrical revue, produced by and starring its multi-talented members. The yearbooks continued for decades, and the editions of the 1930s and 1940s boast elaborate production values and arresting graphic design. However sumptuous, those collections found their true niche as showcases for “blue” contributions by the famous illustrators and cartoonists among its ranks, work quite unlike the familiar fare that endeared these pulp entertainers to the general public.

How to Housebreak Your Dog
was drawn by Ernie Bushmiller (1905–1982), famed as the creator of the syndicated comic strip
Nancy
and renowned to aficionados as a minimalist who “dumbed down” his gags to their barest essentials, resulting in a strikingly austere visual language. Bushmiller joined the Dutch Treat Club in mid-career, long after the yearbook’s heyday. His name first appears in the membership rolls in 1952, and he remained a loyal member until shortly before his death. Despite this longtime affiliation,
How to Housebreak Your Dog
was Bushmiller’s sole yearbook effort. Ernie later referred to this strip as “the only dirty thing I ever did.”

Although intended as a cheap laugh for his Dutch Treat Club cronies,
How to Housebreak Your Dog
assumed an illustrious afterlife. The irresistible (and uncopyrighted) page was promptly bootlegged, perhaps by a fellow Dutch-Treater gone bad, and was soon launched into the labyrinthine networks through which illicit printed matter of the day was channeled to its eager audience. No other work produced for this obscure social club ever enjoyed such far-flung distinction. Over the past forty-six years, in various modes and media, this mutt has stepped up to the couch again and again. Bushmiller’s humble dog-pee joke flows gloriously onward, replicating like mutant bacteria through the dark alleys of our pop culture.

Canine Einstein?

[John Warner]

GREENBROOK, IL—April 5, 1978

See Spot run. See Spot bark. See Spot fetch. See Spot engage in complex cause-and-effect reasoning previously only observed in humans and other primates?

Yes, yes to
all
of the above, according to researchers at the University of California Davis Institute for Canine Behavior.

The “Spot” in question is actually a Lab/Shepherd/Setter mix named Melvin, member of the Warner family—parents Mike and Sue, children Mike Jr. (12) and John (8)—of Greenbrook, Illinois.

Traditionally, canine intelligence has been measured by a dog’s ability to absorb “conditioning” through the process of repetition. Pavlov’s ringing bell at feeding time that induces drool is no different from the basic “sit” command. The lives of even the most highly trained service animals are merely a series of discrete actions, each unrelated to the other.

However, Dr. Kathleen Sullivan, head of the research team that recently spent three months conducting observational studies in the Warner home, says that Melvin is a whole new ballgame. “If we’re right, you’re talking to the future Jane Goodall of dogs.”

Humble origins

Originally born in an Indiana University fraternity house, Melvin was adopted by the Warners as a puppy from a neighbor as part of a package deal.

“We got half-price tickets to
The Sound of Music
for agreeing to take the dog,” says Mrs. Warner.

At first glance Melvin appears to be your average dog: medium-size, predominantly black with brown accents on the muzzle and brow, white chest speckled with black spots from his Setter heritage. He likes to fetch, chase squirrels from the backyard, and sleep, but according to Dr. Sullivan, there’s something very different going on behind this pooch’s wagging tail.

“Most dogs will break their gaze when looking at a person, recognizing their lower place in the pack order,” Dr. Sullivan says. “Melvin will look you right in the eyes, not even blinking, like he’s speaking right to your very core.”

When asked what Melvin is trying to communicate, Dr. Sullivan says, “‘I own you’—that’s as close as I can come.”

Who’s in charge here?

Melvin uses his abilities to hold sway over all the members of the Warner family, but according to Dr. Sullivan, Melvin’s favorite target for his “intelligence” is the youngest Warner child, John. “From Melvin’s perspective the slower, and—pardon me—dumber target is most inviting. He’s zeroed in on the weakest member of the pack.”

Like most dogs, Melvin is highly “food motivated,” and most of his problem-solving schemes involve separating young Mr. Warner from his lunch or snacks.

One afternoon-long battle over sandwiches illustrates Melvin’s ability.

The scenario began with John trying to transport a sandwich from the counter to the kitchen table, and Melvin simply grabbing it from the lowered plate. A second sandwich prepared, John tried carrying the plate extended over his head, seemingly out of the dog’s reach. However, before John was able to reach the safety of the table, Melvin delivered a well-timed double-pawed blow to the boy’s solar plexus, causing John’s arms (and the sandwich) to drop into snatchable range.

In tears, the boy made a third
and
a fourth sandwich, reasoning that he could distract the dog by hurling the extra sandwich into the corner, providing enough time to scurry safely to the table.

Here are Dr. Sullivan’s observations: “Where every fiber of this dog’s breeding should have been screaming ‘retrieve’ as that sandwich flew toward the corner, he instead lay down on the kitchen floor and pretended to be asleep. Unbelievable.”

Lulled into a false sense of security, John went to pick up the “diversion sandwich” while carrying his own sandwich. The researchers’ stop-motion cameras indicate that it took Melvin 1.6 seconds to leap from a prone position and fully ingest both sandwiches.

“Essentially, a three-year-old dog exerts complete control over an eight-year-old child,” says Dr. Sullivan. “If the dog doesn’t want that child to eat, he doesn’t eat. Of course, because Melvin is so intelligent, he seems to recognize that he can’t completely crush the boy’s spirit or he’ll lose the drive to even prepare food. After six or seven sandwiches Melvin usually lets John have one, or at least a handful of bites of one.”

Skepticism

However, not all animal behaviorists are impressed with Melvin’s feats. “He’s a clever dog, no doubt,” says Dr. Herman Lodell, dean of Tufts University Center for Canine Research, “but it’s entirely possible that we’re dealing with a unusually dim kid, as opposed to a unusually bright dog.”

When reached by phone, John Warner’s third-grade teacher, Barbara Goldsboro, would not comment on his intelligence or school performance other than to cite Mr. Warner’s unique ability to simultaneously shove three pencils up his nose.

Michael Warner Sr. is skeptical about the researchers’ claims as well. “This is a dog that begs to eat your snotty Kleenex. How smart is that?”

In rebuttal, Dr. Sullivan offers a recounting of what has come to be known as “The Nut-crusted Cheese Ball Incident.”

The cheesy part

“This happened at the Warners’ holiday party. There were thirty to forty guests at any given time, and always at least two to three people present to prevent Melvin from grabbing a cantaloupe-size ball of cheddar cheese encrusted with walnuts located on a counter-height sideboard. It was delicious, I had some myself.

“Unable to gain free access to the cheese ball, Melvin’s first attempted move was to upset the bar cart, which did succeed in toppling the ice bucket, but the diversion wasn’t sufficient to give him a clear shot. After that, he went for the nuclear option.”

In the words of Michael Warner Jr., “Mel took a big stinky dump.”

“He hadn’t done that ever,” Sue Warner confirmed.

“This was not an accident, not in the slightest,” in Dr. Sullivan’s opinion.

Only the research-team cameras captured what happened next: as Michael Warner Sr. moved all the guests into the next room, Sue Warner opened the back door to provide ventilation before turning to grab cleaning supplies. That’s when Melvin made his move. Gripping the entire cheese ball in his jaws, he bolted for the open door.

“We’re confident that he’d consumed forty percent of the ball even before he made it through the door,” Dr. Sullivan said.

Dogs rule?

Dr. Lodell of Tufts is once again impressed, but not convinced, and perhaps even a little worried. “If this dog really is capable of this level of reasoning, in a few dozen litters we could be looking at a
Planet of the Apes
–type situation, only with Schnauzers and Dobermans in charge.”

“Sounds pretty cute to me,” counters Dr. Sullivan.

Although, in reality, as one looks into homes across America where the four-legged creatures spend their days lounging around the house, licking their genitalia and sleeping while the two-legged creatures work long hours to provide food, shelter, and security, one might wonder if we aren’t already living on the Planet of the Puppies.

[
A Pekingese spends half his life trying to keep his tongue in his mouth.—Dan Liebert
]