Don't Dump The Dog (3 page)

Then I heard the smelly terrier yelping from the confines of the supply room where we had stashed him solo for the night. Annie heard him too, and with the force of a mule team pulled me toward the door. Meanwhile, up front, Mr. Potato answered one call after another, frantically scribbling messages on the back of a Speedy Burger bag he’d pulled out of the garbage:

1. CALL LAURIE SOMEBODY ABOUT SOMETHING
   
2. Foster dogs got in fight. CALL BOB? Bill? Ben? ASAP. 233-67??
   
3. Vet’s office: Rotwyler Rotwiller Rotwhyller with neck wound doing better—German shepherd (with chain embedded in neck?) is OK—two spays and three nooters done this morning—pit bull with gunshot died last night.
   
4. Policeman, said he was friend, raided dog-fight ring. Needs help with six dogs, several in bad shape. Is on his way here with them!
   
5. Mindy. Volunteer. Says she and someone else out feeding packs and caught the starving mama dog and three puppies. Is on her way in with them now. Says to get a kennel ready!!!!
   
6. Lady named JEN says she got the doosh. Wanted to know why I was answering phones. Told her I DON’T KNOW.
   

When I came back to the front, fully intending to give Mr. Potato a piece of my mind, he ran toward me, shoved the Speedy Burger bag into my hands, stammered something about needing to “get ready,” and looked wildly around the room as if he’d lost something.

“Where’s my Annie?” he said. “Where
is
she?”

“Uh ...” I pointed to the back in confusion. He grabbed Annie’s leash from my hand and followed the direction of my finger.

I glanced down at the bag and barely had time to sigh before Mr. Potato rushed back into the room followed by an exuberant Annie and an equally exuberant stinky terrier on Annie’s leash.

“What ... ?”

Mr. Potato waved his hand back and forth at me to quell any questions. “Never mind—there’s no time. They’re on their way here.”

He headed for the door with both dogs.

“Wait,” I called, but he didn’t even look back at me, just said something about Annie needing a friend. He didn’t even close the door behind him.

Turns out, sometimes all an energetic dog needs is another energetic dog to keep them company. Several days after Mr. Potato had disappeared with the stinky terrier, he returned to the shelter with a smile of relief, a large donation check folded inside a thank-you note, and a scrap of paper covered with his handwriting.

The look of relief, he said, was because Annie and Flower played so much together, they wore each other out. They smelled to high heaven because he couldn’t get the skunk smell off but he figured it was a small price to pay for domestic tranquility.

“And, Annie’s happy,” he said.

The donation check and the thank-you note were for the “great public service” done by Stray Rescue, which Mr. Potato said he’d never understood until he answered our phones. “After taking all those horrible calls, I ran out of room on the bag and grabbed this,” he said and then handed me the scrap of paper on which was scribbled the following message: 7) LADY HAS HYPER DOG. WANTS TO BRING IN. “After calls about gunshot wounds and dog-fighting rings and starving mamas and puppies, this lady calls and complains she has a hyper dog. I wanted to tell her to go to hell, because there were dogs losing their lives out there ...”

“So what
did
you tell her?” I asked.

“That she had the wrong number.”

I nodded my approval, wadded the paper into a ball, and lobbed it with grace into the garbage can.

“Wait here a sec,” I said, then went in back to search for the twenty bottles of vinegar douche that Jenn had bought at the store.

Happy Ending/Quick Fix Recap for Hyper Dogs:

• Walk the dog every day.
  
• Buy twenty tennis balls, put them in a pillowcase and throw them across the yard for the dog to retrieve.
  
• Alternatively, teach the dog to catch a Frisbee.
  
• Consider adopting a companion for your energetic friend.
  

I
can just hear the neighbors: “Pretty soon, they’ll have truck tires, abandoned refrigerators, and rusty RVs in the front yard ...” and you, Dolly Dumper, alone will be responsible for lower property values, higher neighborhood death rates, and declining school test scores because your uncontrollable mixed-breed rescue dog jumped on the neighborhood children and traumatized them so much, they can no longer do arithmetic. So you hide in your house and pray for a worse neighbor to move in.

Believe me, I know. You’re talking to a guy who lives in a gentrified urban neighborhood and has
several
mixed-breed rescue dogs, one of whom has to wear a wire-basket muzzle, like Hannibal Lecter, just to be within 100 feet of any other human besides me.

Charley doesn’t take kindly to strangers. I rescued him from a pit bull fighting ring, and while he loves
me
to death, he wants to devour strangers with a nice Chianti and some fava beans. (It’s not his fault; I place the blame on the Michael Vicks of the world who think organized dog fights are fun sport. Someday I’d love to introduce Vick to Charley, sans muzzle. I’ll bring the Chianti.)

Charley has certainly done nothing to boost my social standing among the neighbors, who’ve invested whole retirement accounts to update the turn-of-the-century houses we live in. While I’d like to say that I don’t care what they think about me and my mongrel horde—which has turned my backyard into a muddy Sahara—the truth is that I do. I’m just so far gone in their eyes, it’s all I can do to keep from being tarred and feathered.

So picture this: It’s a rainy spring morning. I’ve just woken up, and I’m standing at the kitchen window on the second floor in my underwear, sipping coffee, looking down on the backyard and admiring the brand-new $5,000 privacy fence I had constructed to placate the landscape divas on either side of me who claimed Charley “scared” them.

Charley’s out there taking a dump in the rain, and I’m about to call him in when I see a Ford Escort tear down the alley behind the house, followed closely by a police car with its lights flashing. Just as my brain registers what’s going on, the Escort veers, skids on the wet pavement, and then plows straight through the back of my brand-new fence.

And right into Charley’s yard.

The last thing I remember clearly about the pursuit that ensued was the wide-eyed masked bandit running
toward
the police with Charley, in his wire-basket muzzle, not far behind.

The rest I can only imagine, and I now obsess daily about what my neighbors saw running past their windows that morning: A terrified guy in a ski mask, followed by a terrified policeman in uniform, followed by a large dog in a wire-basket muzzle, followed by yours truly in his rain-soaked underwear, screaming, “Charley,
sit
!”

Charley wasn’t brought up on attempted murder charges that day, but had I not been the director of the only nokill animal shelter in the city, I too might have considered dumping my seventy-pound would-be serial killer in someone else’s lap.

Instead, I called my therapist, Dr. Gupta.

“Have you ever heard of Wilfred Trotter?” Dr. Gupta asked after I’d told him how worried I was that my neighbors saw my butt crack when I finally tackled Charley and lugged him back to the house in the pouring rain.

“Exhibitionist?”

“No, a neurologist and social psychologist who coined the phrase ‘herd instinct’ back in the early 1900s. He compared the human need to be part of a group with that of a dog whose ‘terror of loneliness’ gave it the ‘capacity for devotion to a brutal master.’ ”

“And ... ?”

“And, people stick with the crowd because it’s safer than being on their own,” Dr. Gupta said. “They will believe, submit, and do almost anything to be part of the herd.”

The trick—which
is
a trick if you’re as socially phobic as I am (I’ve hosted parties I did not attend)—is to understand and use herd instinct to your advantage.

So I went home and called my neighbors.

“We’ve
got
to do something about crime rates,” I said before they could demand that I get rid of Charley. I then quickly suggested organizing a neighborhood watch group, demanding more streetlights from the city, and encouraging “our neighbors” to all get dogs like Charley who would scare away criminals, and, in extreme cases, like this morning, help the police track and apprehend them.

To a person, my neighbors applauded the idea.

You, Ms. Dumper, are terrified of rejection by the herd, which is understandable, because every human being, deep down, wants to be cool. It’s instinctual. The problem in this situation is that you’re
so
insecure about your status that you’d give up a friend who’s a little in the wrong. Just how much respect do you think that will gain you in the end? If you don’t get rid of the apologetic, groveling, just-wipe-your-shoes-on-me attitude and start acting like a herd leader, dumping little Sadie will be the least of your problems. Once the pack establishes you as its most-inferior member, even the way you prune your azaleas will come under group scrutiny.

Now I’m not talking about fake leadership—you know, the kind where you act like you think a leader should. Once, when my rottweiler/mastiff mix escaped and galloped into a neighbor’s backyard party, sending the guests running before devouring the abandoned chicken on the barbecue, I responded to their hysteria with a fist-pounding, “DOGS HAVE RIGHTS TOO!” This did nothing to help the deteriorating relationship and nearly landed me in jail. So I’m not suggesting that you bang the table about your place at it.

Instead, act cool, very cool, and establish in less than ten minutes who is superior to whom. First, bring the neighbor some store-bought cookies (heated in the microwave and put on a plate to give the illusion of homemade) and then commiserate with her about her children’s fear-of-dogs
neurosis
. Make sure to use that word. No parent wants a neurotic child who will repeat everything to a psychiatrist twenty years down the road. Then suggest that the kids might get over their
neurosis
if they help you walk Sadie every day, and if that doesn’t cure their
neurosis
, you will, as a superior neighbor, build a fence to keep Sadie in her own yard, which won’t cure the kids
neurosis
but will keep them out of an institution for at least a few more years. Finally, gossip about some other neighbor to take the spotlight off you.

Then, go get the big yellow phone book out of the hall closet, open it up to the “F” section, and turn each page until you see the following sequence of letters: F-E-N-C-E. Pick one of the numbers, any will do, and then dial it. When someone answers on the other end, give them your credit card number and your address.

Do
not
say anything else. Do not go on and on with the fence person about what a bad neighbor you are, or about your uncontrollable mixed-breed rescue dog, or about the “cutest little tail wag you ever did see,” because the fence person will immediately peg you as a—let me grab the thesaurus to find a more tactful word for “pushover”—as a “ninny,” and will consequently take advantage of you and charge an arm and a leg.

If you really can’t afford a fence, consider some good old-fashioned dog training. Sadie, as well as your neighbors, needs to understand who steers the ship.

First, teach Sadie to sit for everything and
anything
that she wants. To do this, place a food treat on her nose. Then raise the treat over her head so that her eyes will follow it and her disobedient little rump will fall to the floor. As soon as this happens, immediately give her the treat.

Then, whenever Sadie wants anything—to be petted, fed, played with, let outside—she must sit first. This automatically becomes a habit, what Dr. Gupta would call a “default behavior.”

So if Sadie regularly escapes the house by bolting out an open door, for example, teach her to sit-stay by the door when people are coming and going. Before you teach her to be trustworthy, keep her in another room or crate, (see chapter 14 for crate-training lessons) away from the door, to anticipate and avoid opportunities for escaping.

If you look at this problem from Sadie’s point of view, running away is rewarding. She gets to do all kinds of groovy things like chase squirrels, smell whatever she wants, and jump on the neighbor’s children. Even if she isn’t strictly running away, you are probably like many other dog guardians who let their pooches do their own thing while off lead, and only call them back when it’s time to put the lead on and go home. This doesn’t encourage a dog to want to come back to you, since it means fun time is over.

As with your neighbors, you must use a little Machiavellian cunning and a few treats to get the results you want.

Happy Ending for Escape Artists

• If your dog doesn’t come to you in the house when you call her, she sure won’t do it when she’s outside playing. Start at home, then, where you have no traffic or other dogs to worry about if she ignores you.
  
• Walk her only on the lead for a while. If she pulls, a head collar will give you more control.
  
• Put some hard tidbits in a small plastic box or bottle, so you can rattle them. Keep them in your pocket around the house, and three or four random times a day, rattle the container. Call Sadie to you at the same time, and give her lots of praise and a tidbit when she arrives. Get everyone in the family to do the same. Sadie may look at you as if you’re mad at first, especially if you wake her up, but stick to it. That rattling sound will soon mean food.
  
• Do this when you are in the same room at first, and then try it from another room so she has to come and find you. Make sure it’s a fun game with lots of love and praise.
  
• Don’t give her any food at any time (tidbits or meals) unless she responds to a recall command first. Always recall her to have her lead put on, to be groomed or patted, or anything else nice. Give lots of praise and a tidbit when she comes. All of this helps her associate pleasure with coming when called.
  
• Always take her out when she’s hungry, preferably just before a meal, as this makes the tidbits more tempting. Take plenty of tidbits with you in your usual container. Cut her meals down to allow for this—I don’t want the blame if she gets overweight. It doesn’t matter if she gets, say, a third of her daily food like this at first; you can taper it off later.
  

Play the calling game whenever you’re out, even though she’s on a lead. Call her every few hundred yards, praise her, feed her, play with her—make a big game of it. Do this on the street, as well as where you normally let her off lead. This should make her start keeping one eye on you all the time.

In conclusion, when you take a dog into your family, she becomes a real member of your family. As tempting as it may be to just dump her at times, remember this responsibility, and your life—and your dog’s—will be richer as a result.

And, like me, you’ll probably get a few good stories in the bargain. Like, one time an ice storm knocked out the electricity for several days, and I had to take Charley with me to the swankiest hotel in the city....

Quick Fix-1