Howl (32 page)

Leave Some for Me, Fido

[Rebecca Rose Jacobs]

O
N THE WAY
into my New York office earlier this summer, I stopped at my favorite bakery to pick up an iced coffee. I was feeling hungry after a short run, but didn’t fancy tackling one of the store’s signature “giant muffins.” Fortunately there was a jar of more manageable biscuits next to the till. These were small and plain. Just the thing. “An iced coffee, and one of those,” I said.

The muffin man looked over the counter and examined the empty floor by my feet. “You do know those are for dogs?” Humiliated, I left the place with only a drink in hand. What kind of establishment puts dog treats in a glass bowl next to the till?

In New York, many kinds of eateries do just that. As one who finds the sight of dog owners picking excrement off city streets vomit-inducing, I was not pleased to be sharing coffee-shop counter space with the neighborhood dogs.

Eventually I realized I wasn’t upset at the thought of the dog biscuits contaminating the human fare. Heck, I’d wanted the dog food for myself. I was jealous—jealous of the dog’s healthier options, jealous of the prominent display, jealous generally of all the fuss made about man’s best friend. If the doggie tidbits on offer were good enough to eat, I decided to try them out.

I was inspired by a classic essay by an owner who ate her dog’s food. Ann Hodgman’s “No Wonder They Call Me a Bitch,” written for
Spy
magazine in 1989, is now a favorite text in writing classes. In it, Hodgman tries the food she’s feeding her dog, from Milk-Bone Flavor Snacks to Kal Kan Pedigree chunky chicken. It offers a harrowing description of eating a can of meat containing a “long gray vein.”

I started my adventure in the safety of a specialty dog food shop where the employees claimed to try all the food themselves. Indeed, their Fido Eats oatmeal cranberry dog biscuits contained nothing more unsavory than organic white flour, organic oatmeal, organic cornmeal, and cranberry juice (for fighting urinary tract infections, as the sleek, minimalist packaging explains). I popped one in my mouth, then another. They didn’t taste bad, although they also didn’t taste very strongly of cranberry. They were a little hard, I suppose, and, at about the size of a 5p coin, difficult to dip into my coffee. This is good for dogs, since hard food is what cleans their teeth.

The only really distasteful aspect of the Fido Eats treats was the price: $18.99 for what couldn’t have been more than five ounces of food.

Izzy Yum Yums’ Sushi Snacks for Dogs, at $19 for two rolls and eight pieces of sashimi, contain rice, seaweed, chicken broth, and, weirdly, Parmesan cheese and ham flavoring. It was also the one item I tried that I really couldn’t bite into for fear of cracking my teeth. The bits of uncooked rice I managed to gnaw off didn’t taste like fish, and a small mound of “wasabi,” which I could do little more than lick, seemed to be mostly sugar.

Sugar is the one thing most treats avoid, perhaps because dogs can develop adult-onset diabetes from eating too much of it, according to Pratikshya Patil, a vet at the New York Veterinary Hospital.

So the Kung Fu Fido Fortune Cookies for Dogs (at $10) are infused with chicken livers, not sugar—not that I could have detected the difference. The cookies resemble those served at any Chinese restaurant. The only telling difference is the fortunes: “Someday you will find yourself barking up the right tree,” for example, or “Confucius say, dog who pee on electric fence get real zinger.”

After a morning of eating organic oatmeal-cranberry dog crackers, followed by dog fortune cookies and a fairly tasty, if hard, carob-and-peanut-coated homemade dog biscuit, I felt glum. I had crossed a line drawn far back in evolutionary time, and while I was still hungry, human food now also felt diminished, like mere calories dressed up as dinner.

Still, as demoralizing as my initial encounters had been, they did not approach the repulsive experiments Hodgman conducted. Maybe it is simply that all food—dog and human—marches ever upward, becoming more sophisticated, clean, and refined with each decade. After all, the 1960s recipe book
Saucepans and the Single Girl,
recently rereleased for the nostalgic and post-modernist among us, contains recipes for Humbleburger Soup and Sardines and Cream Cheese. I’m no gourmet, but I’d sooner serve my dinner guests dog food crackers than steaming bowls of burger soup. Mind you, in ten years, some other single gal living in a studio apartment in Brooklyn may choke at the thought of serving prosciutto-wrapped figs at a cocktail party.

A conscientious pet owner recommended that for high-end wet food, I try Wellness brand, which according to its Web site makes dog food with ingredients “fit for human consumption,” if not officially “human grade.” Peeling back the top of the can of Lamb & Sweet Potato Formula, I was met with a slightly shimmery surface of light brown meat, ground so finely it might have been mistaken for grains of overcooked barley.

It tasted like lamb at first bite, with an emphasis on “like” lamb, as distinct from “as if it were” lamb. Indeed, its main ingredients were: lamb, lamb broth, and lamb liver pulsated into a smooth, soft consistency and mixed with grains and root vegetables. Its aftertaste, however, was 100 percent whitefish. In fact, that wall of whitefish, in combination with the gelatinous, push-back consistency of the stuff, made me realize why I didn’t find Wellness all that bad: I’d been conditioned by a lifelong fondness for gefilte fish.

Merrick brand’s Campfire Trout Feast was a different story. The label suggests you crack open this can of wet food while “on the banks of the Rio Grande River next to a campfire with your beloved dog…under the stars, the two of you feast on freshwater trout and all the fixin’s.” Those fixin’s include trout, salmon broth, fresh Yukon gold potatoes, fresh carrots, fresh courgettes, and olive oil. Not bad, I thought. I had almost been persuaded to buy a can of the Napa Valley Picnic as well.

The trout feast was spookily odorless and looked like old chocolate gone white. It slid from the can only after some prising, and then in a massive chunk. It’s amazing that something completely lacking in flavor can nevertheless produce a gagging effect. I spat out my first bite. On my second try, I detected what for a second I thought might be a hint of trout spread, but then identified as the pure taste of preservatives. The nothing taste flooded back and I gagged again.

I learned my lesson, and decided to dress up the next selection: Stella & Chewy’s freeze-dried chicken steaks, which the proprietors at my favorite West Village pet store, Canine Styles, assured me were very popular with their customers. The “steaks,” at $16.99 for nine pieces, contained U.S. Department of Agriculture–inspected free-range chicken, which buoyed me. However, that free-range product includes bone, which sank me once again. Cartilage aside, the ingredient list seemed perfectly acceptable, with sweet potatoes, alfalfa, blueberries, and ginger.

The steaks crumbled into sawdust when sliced. After putting on a pot of water to boil for pasta, I sautéed some garlic and tomatoes and added a cutting-board’s worth of chicken-steak. What I learned was that if a cruel restaurateur ever tries to serve you pasta with dog food, even high-end dog food, you’ll detect the trick by the overpowering, unmistakable smell of low-grade meat. The price of that lesson was biting into what may have looked like browned sausage, but tasted like gristle, tendons and, yes, ground-up bones.

During my first visit to Canine Styles, I was invited to a dog ice cream social. I had assumed dogs were lactose intolerant, maybe because it seems half the population of New York is, but it turns out they can eat ice cream (sugarless) with abandon. On learning this, I first felt a creeping annoyance that canines had managed to horn in on yet another of our food groups. Then I remembered the times when Meggie, our family dog, felt sick, and how comforted she was by the healing diet we would give her of cooked rice mixed with yogurt. For the first time, I began to understand what these owners must be thinking as they buy their pets outrageously expensive snacks and put them on raw-food diets: human food for dogs isn’t always an attempt to erase lines between species; sometimes it’s just because we care about the critters.

At the ice cream social itself, my sympathy for the animals increased. The ice cream was great—a homemade blend of yogurt, honey, and peanut butter (the humans got ice cream sandwiches, full of preservatives, I’m sure)—and the social scene was friendly and open. No one seemed to mind that I didn’t have a dog. But as I spooned up my ice cream happily, I looked around and noticed the dogs licking away desperately as their containers slid around on the sidewalk. Opposable thumbs are a privilege, I thought—there but for the grace of Dog go I.

I stopped eating dog food on the day I ate a dog biscuit simply because I was hungry. I was at work, with a snack machine in the office and a mélange of human options outside, but I had at my desk one of the garlic-and-chicken bones from that original muffin shop. I took one bite—hard but subtly flavorful. Better than the hardtack the pilgrims ate on the
Mayflower.
I took another—it hit the spot. But by the time I had finished the bone, hiding it from my coworkers, I knew I had to stop. After all, defecating on the street was only a few logical steps away.

[Editors’ Note]

Our dogs not only give us joy and laughter, they also enrich our lives with their constancy and immediacy. For the endpiece of this collection, we have chosen a work with a slightly different twist—Meghan Daum’s contemplative essay on her experiences as one of today’s “dog people.” It is a fitting bridge to the heart of
Howl
’s raison d’être.

Dog Is My Co-Dependent

[Meghan Daum]

H
OW DOES ONE
own a dog without becoming a dog person? The answer, I suspect, depends upon whether or not you have a dog and the degree to which you’re inclined to buy in to the idea that pet ownership, like child rearing, isn’t what it used to be. Of course, most things aren’t what they used to be, but when it comes to the relationship between helpless creatures and responsible adults, many of us aren’t in Kansas anymore. In my case, I mean this literally. When I got my dog, a Collie/St. Bernard mix named Rex, I lived on a farm in the central plains. He slept in the barn, flanked by a horse on one side and a pig on the other. On frigid mornings I’d come in with his food and often find him curled up with the cat. He was just eight weeks old when I got him, a squiggly fluff ball of black and brown fur, and he knew nothing of the inside world for several months. I remember the winter day when I first brought him indoors. Negotiating the strange new surface of the polished floors, he actually slipped and fell down several times as though he were on another planet. I remember the combination of alarm and delight he seemed to take at spotting his image in a full-length mirror on a closet door. He lurched back, startled, then looked behind the door in search of the strange dog lurking there. He soon grew restless so I led him back outside and watched as he trotted back to his familiar environs, a ten-acre pasture where he convened with horses and pheasants with such obvious pleasure that even my fear that he’d be hit by a passing truck was not enough to make me do anything but let him run free.

Now, seven years on, I live with Rex in Los Angeles. His world is a 900-square-foot house and a small fenced yard he can access through a dog door. He has a microchip implant in case he gets lost, an assortment of stuffed toys so he won’t get bored, and eats prescription low-calorie dog food because he’s gotten fat. Every day, I put on his leash and take him to a wilderness area where he can run free for 45 minutes and socialize with other dogs who have microchips and follow prescription diets. Whereas I used to give him baths in the river, he now goes to a groomer who hoses him off in a giant sink and then sets a fan by a cage to dry him. Whereas he used to spend his nights in a nest of hay, lulled to sleep by the secret world of the barn, he now sleeps with me in my bed, sometimes with his head on the pillow next to me.

I am not so far gone that I don’t recognize that Rex’s life, albeit safer than his life on the farm and better than the lives of the vast majority of animals in the world, took a turn for the worse when he stopped being a dog and became a pet. At the same time, I would be a liar if I didn’t admit that having a pet brings a level of happiness to my life that I wasn’t able to experience by merely having a dog. Having an animal, like having a child, is the kind of pursuit to which you can ascribe the world “selfless” only up to a point. There are the obvious hassles—feeding and sheltering and the handling of excrement—but once you put aside the logistics you are looking at a relationship that is almost entirely wrapped up in the need for unconditional love. When I lived on the farm (and I lived there with a man who’d no sooner let a dog in the house than invite a mountain goat over for drinks), the love I felt for Rex was intense, unqualified, and respectful. Here in Los Angeles, where it’s not unheard of to take your dog to dinner parties, that love is intense, unqualified, and more akin to the kind of affection traditionally reserved for romantic partners. Since leaving the barn, Rex’s responsibilities have increased dramatically. No longer simply my dog, he is my friend, my confidant, and my greatest solace. Though he no longer has to keep himself warm at night, he’s been charged with the far weightier task of keeping me warm.

Rex is not the only dog in the neighborhood carrying this kind of burden. When we go walking in the park—and our proximity to these 600 acres of trails is the primary reason I depleted my savings to buy a house here—we encounter many others like us. The dogs are overwhelmingly mixed breeds who, unlike Rex, have been rescued off the streets or from shelters. The owners are overwhelmingly female and overwhelmingly single. Like me, they have purchased homes in this neighborhood not only for the disheveled charms of the overgrown vegetation and absurdly steep and narrow streets but because this is an indisputably “dog friendly” place. Flyers advertising dog walkers, pet sitters, subsidized spaying and neutering, and lost and found animals are perpetually pinned to telephone polls. An organized alliance of concerned pet owners (though they prefer the term “human guardian”) maintains a lively online message board, gathers food and bedding donations for local shelters, and runs a “pet photos with Santa” booth every year at the neighborhood holiday crafts fair.

I call this group the Dog Squad. I suppose I’m one of them, though the extent to which I want to be swings on a sort of pendulum between my visceral love for animals and the remaining vestiges of my ability to be rational about the way the world works. It bears mentioning that in addition to being mostly female and mostly single, the members of the Dog Squad are overwhelmingly Caucasian and middle to upper-middle class. That is to say we’ve bought or rented homes in this neighborhood mostly in the last decade, which is roughly how long it’s been since the neighborhood began to shake off its reputation for having some of the worst gang violence in the city. We are the ones paying upwards of $500,000 for small bungalows because we know more of us are coming and despite the shifts in the market, the values are only going up. We are the ones with the hybrid cars and the Democratic-candidate signs in our yards, the ones on whom no one will ever file a noise complaint, the ones who place a simple wreath on the door at Christmastime rather than an entire team of high-wattage reindeer. We are the ones who don’t care how crappy the public schools are because we either don’t have school-age kids or, if we do, make a second career out of finding private or magnet schools that offer German classes and diving teams.

This is a fairly standard portrait of gentrification, of course. You’ll find it from Brooklyn, New York, to Oakland, California, and minus a few regional specifics, it all looks pretty much the same. This neighborhood, for its part, has always straddled the line between the bohemian mythology of its radical leftist roots and the majority rule of the Spanish-speaking immigrant population that has dominated it since the 1960s. On balance, tensions around here don’t run as high as you think. The white people, even the recent gentrifiers (among whose ranks I have no choice but to count myself ) define themselves in distinct opposition to the kinds of white people who live in L.A.’s pricier areas. Our combination of earnestness (we have a pottery studio and a weekly antiwar rally) and tough, urban pioneer posturing (we have green-haired hipsters smoking outside the coffee shop) gives us a liberal, egalitarian sheen you tend not to see in quieter, more manicured communities.

But my status as both a white person and a dog owner (I’ll continue to say “owner,” if only to convince myself I haven’t joined the cult entirely) has made me complicit in a pernicious kind of bigotry. More than once I have found myself entangled in a “rescue operation” involving a dog whose guardians have been deemed unsuitable by the Dog Squad. Depending on which Squad member you ask, “unsuitability” can run the gamut from having a debris-strewn yard to not registering adequate concern when the dog is found to be wandering the neighborhood. Depending on how politically correct that Squad member is, the underpinnings of these issues will either be chalked up to vague assertions like “people are so irresponsible” or the thornier—and more honest—recognition that what we’re dealing with has less to do with animals than with a treacherous gulf between two cultures. Though most Squadders won’t say it out loud, the majority of the pet owners who are deemed unfit are economically disadvantaged, Latino immigrants from countries where dogs run loose as a matter of course. Though most Squadders would no sooner trade their Priuses for Hummers than admit to racism, there is little denying that their work load (or do I mean “our” work load?) would be significantly lighter if not for the fact that even though we live in the United States, a good portion of our neighbors are still playing by the rules of Central America. This begs the question of whether, when we rescue a dog, we’re really saving an animal or merely attempting to save our culture while disregarding someone else’s.

My best guess is that it’s a little of both. It would be entirely wrong to suggest that all or even half of the Latinos in this neighborhood are letting their dogs roam the streets. In fact, most are as responsible and loving (if not as self-congratulatory about it) as the Dog Squadders themselves. And to its credit, the Squadders go to great lengths to solve these problems without running roughshod over the humans who have ostensibly caused them. They will offer to walk neighbors’ dogs themselves, procure vouchers for free spaying and neutering, and assist in finding good homes for pets whose owners need to surrender them. They maintain relations with the Department of Animal Control, work with the dogs of homeless people, and build fences and dog runs for neighbors who can’t afford them. But I cannot ignore the fact that every time I’ve joined forces with the Dog Squad to help an animal in need, I’ve found myself feeling less like a Good Samaritan than a crazy white lady who needs to get a life. I’ve provided foster care for dogs who needed homes, taken my neighbors’ dog to the vet for neutering, and jumped out of my car more times than I can count to scoop a wayward dog away from oncoming traffic. But when I look out my window, past the fence that confines my dog and into the valley of quiet streets below my house, I can’t help but see a free-running dog as a thing of fragile beauty. And every time I’ve assisted in the “re-homing” of one of these animals to a place that will offer a fence and stuffed toys and, I hope, a little love to go along with the amenities, I wonder if I’m doing the right thing. I wonder if I’m making life better for this dog or simply preserving the value of my real estate.

To be honest about the conditions of any dog’s life requires being honest about the conditions of our own dogs’ lives. And as most urban dog owners know, this sort of assessment is little more than a series of small lies we tell ourselves so that we may continue to function as human beings in the modern world. I can tell myself that Rex’s quality of life is somewhere in the 90th percentile—he’s developed a taste for sushi, he accompanies me to the Redwoods, he is the recipient of no end of tummy scratching and gooey declarations of love—but the truth is that any measure of his happiness can only be calibrated in relation to my own. I can tell myself that our happiness is symbiotic, that I take pleasure from his apparent pleasure so it all works out in the end, but that would be an insult to his truest essence, which is not that of a love object or even a pet but, simply, a dog.

How does one love a dog and respect it at the same time? The answer, I suspect, is that we cannot. As humans, we are genetically programmed to give love in a singularly human way. We can, of course, choose to extend that love to animals, but to presume that that affection translates into anything resembling the way
we
experience love is to cross the line between keeping our pets safe from harm and keeping our hearts safe from loneliness. There is a reason I fell (and continue to fall) so easily in step with the blurred logic of the Dog Squadders: Like me, they are women who live alone, who’ve made their own way in the world, and who, by choice or circumstance, have channeled their inherent nurturing instincts not on children or even men, but on dogs. As it has with me, the hard work of this kind of independence has made them blind to the privilege that bequeathed it.

There is no doubt in my mind that dogs should not be allowed to run loose in city streets. But I say that knowing that my own dog’s life changed for the worse the minute I brought him inside the farmhouse on that chilly afternoon seven years ago. Though it would be more than a year before I’d leave the farm, I knew then that his days as a free-range dog were numbered. I knew I’d eventually do not what was best for him but what was best for me and that all the bed-sharing and doggie playdates and expensive groomers in the world would never give him half as good a life as he’d had when, like the dogs I now see fit to “rescue,” he lived in perpetual danger of getting run over on the road. I knew then, as I know now, that when he looked in the mirror on that first day indoors he was seeing not himself or even another dog, but the reflection of insatiable human need. We call that love, but there is no love that doesn’t come at the cost of some degree of freedom. To love our dogs is to hope they love us back enough that it was worth their sacrifice.