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Why I Write About Dogs

[Susan Conant]

I
CAN’T THROW.
As a child, I was spared the humiliation of never being picked for either team in baseball by my friend Debbie, a prodigy with ball and bat who always chose me. She was a sort of one-person Red Sox Dream Team. Because of Debbie and in spite of me, our team always won, which is to say that hers did. Because I love dogs, I have never inflicted myself on a Golden Retriever or a Lab.

For the last twenty years, I have lived with Alaskan Malamutes. One of the mysteries of dogdom unexplained by science is why the fetch gene is extremely rare in a breed that evolved in the snowball-perfect environment of the Arctic. But rare it is. The typical Malamute has a powerful desire to fly after and seize moving objects but requires that the poor things be edible—squirrels, chipmunks, rabbits, moles, and mice. What’s more, Malamutes don’t share. If we bipeds want rodent delicacies for dinner, we’re expected to hunt them down ourselves. As to playing fetch, the Malamute attitude is that if you wanted those balls, you shouldn’t have thrown them away.

Or so I always believed. Then along came my Django, who is named for a legendary jazz guitarist but who should properly have been called Lou, Babe, or Mickey. The dog is a fetch fanatic. When the rare gene manifests itself in Django’s breed, its effect is typically suppressed by competing genes that prevent Malamutes from engaging in such servile activities as picking up after members of a useful but lesser species. My late Kobuk would return a ball to me five or six times before he’d reach the disappointing realization that it was not going to spring to life and turn itself into a snack. My Rowdy never once retrieved anything but her obedience dumbbell, which she correctly viewed as currency exchangeable for beef and liver. She regarded Django’s insatiable appetite for fetch as stupid and treasonous; in her disdainful eyes, he was a brainless traitor to a proud and predatory breed. Rowdy’s scorn bothered Django not at all. Malamutes don’t give a damn about the opinions of others, including the heretofore universal opinion that I can’t throw.

So we play ball, Django and I. As I toss the ball, I follow the advice of athletically gifted friends: just as Debbie used to advise, I keep my eyes on the spot where I’d like to have the ball land. Meanwhile, all on its own, the ball leaps out of my grasp and comes to rest elsewhere. On some occasions, it mysteriously drops to the grass at my feet before I’ve had the chance to launch it into the air. When the mood strikes it, it travels great distances and lodges itself in the depths of hedges. Once in a while, it perversely decides to roll under the gate and out of our yard.

True pitching, as I understand it, occurs when a human being sends a tiny little round object soaring through space in such a fashion that it miraculously arrives at a predetermined place. In my experience, true pitching is thus an aberration, perhaps, or a freakish coincidence, the kind of bizarre phenomenon that happens once in a trillion times and then only by accident. It has never happened to me.

Does Django care? He does not. Never once, even while digging through forsythia roots after his ball or while watching it fall like a dead thing at my feet, has he ever accused me of being unable to throw. On the contrary, he enjoys the delusion that I am Debbie. In his view, the Red Sox lost gold when they lost me. If you ask Django what he thinks of my pitching, he’ll tell you that by comparison with me, Curt Schilling throws like a girl.

And that’s why I write about dogs.

What My Dog Has Eaten Lately

[Bonnie Jo Campbell]

G
IVING ANTIBIOTICS TO
the cat is a big deal. First, we have to catch the cat—he always suspects something is up and hides. Then we wrap him in a towel to restrain him, pry open his mouth, shove a pill down, then hold his mouth closed until he swallows. On the other hand, when I need to give the dog some medicine, I need only place the pill near some food. Eating is what my dog does best.

When Re-bar, a spotted Lab mix, was a puppy, he ate a lot of shoes. He also ate our couch, or enough of it anyway, that we put the rest of it out by the road for yard pickup. Unfortunately, because of cuts in township services, the yard pickup truck did not come for three months. To our surprise, we found that we enjoyed drinking coffee while sitting with Re-bar on what was left of the couch in the driveway in the mornings. Our neighbors often shouted to us from their cars, “When in the hell you getting rid of that thing?” My darling Christopher and I held up our coffee cups in neighborly greeting.

Now that Re-bar is getting to be middle-aged he hardly destroys anything anymore. And because of an accident with a car on Sprinkle Road, he has only three legs, so he doesn’t travel far from home. We only wonder about what he’s been eating when he’s flatulent or throwing up. Or perhaps when we catch him eating grass, which is what he does when he feels ill and which results, of course, in his throwing up. Once Re-bar ate a dish towel and attempted to throw it up for days. By the time he managed to digest the thing, he had practically mowed our lawn.

Sometimes the dog throws up because of what I feed him. I am pretty brazen about the possibility of poisoning myself or Christopher—I never remember to refrigerate the meatloaf or roasted chicken overnight, and sell-by dates mean nothing to me. I have even less fear of poisoning the dog, since I figure he can just throw up whatever I gave him if it turns out to be bad. So if I’m cleaning the refrigerator and find something questionable, I toss it to the dog.

I wouldn’t go out of my way to give my dog really bad food. Nor would I give him especially good food. I would no more feed great food to a dog than I would feed it to a kid. Like a kid, Re-bar is just as impressed with a hot dog as he is with a filet mignon. And it would take him exactly the same amount of time to eat either the hot dog or the filet mignon—one and a half seconds.

There is a category of food that Re-bar rates above hot dogs, filet mignon, and even rawhide chews. That category is dead stinking things, the deader and stinkier the better.

And now that government cutbacks have mandated that Kalamazoo County Animal Control no longer pick up dead wildlife along the road, there is plenty of rotten stuff to gnaw on. (As if to prove that they’re really not going to pick up dead creatures anymore, the Animal Control has left a dead male mallard on the road in front of their building on Lake Street for two months.) My dog is grateful for the budget cuts, since chewing on a flattened possum or duck is, to him, an excellent way to spend the evening.

My Lakewood neighbors are the kind of people who, if they hit a deer on the road, will bring it home and dress it out. A little after midnight one night last year, our neighbor Bob was making a lot of noise outside our bedroom window. Chris and I dressed and followed Re-bar outside to discover Bob driving his lawn tractor beneath his basketball hoop. He was pulling a chain through the basketball hoop, and attached to the other end of the chain was a deer carcass. Re-bar barked in delight. A day and a half later, after the deer was in Bob’s freezer, Re-bar brought home a deer leg, hoof intact, which he chewed in the yard for a week, a leg that Bob claimed he knew nothing about.

Most impressive to me is the way Re-bar bites and kills and eats wasps. He seems to do it without getting his tongue stung, with a series of rapid jaw snaps. Watching him reminds me not to ever get my fingers between Re-bar and his food. Re-bar also has an irrational desire to bite fireworks, and sometimes even disposable lighters if they’ve been used to light fireworks.

People are nice to my dog. Last week, when Re-bar and I visited Grandpa, he gave Re-bar a lamb bone that was bigger than Re-bar’s head. When Re-bar and I visited my brother Tom, he and some friends were cooking up a dishpan full of smelt, and Re-bar caught and chomped at least eighty smelt tails. Because Tom is too busted up from his recent moped accident (he hit a bus) to cook, his friend Monty made him a venison stew; not only could Tom not stomach the stew, but even his cats wouldn’t eat it. We put the pan on the floor for Re-bar and he submerged his whole head in it. Luckily I realized in time the folly of letting a dog eat five quarts of aged stew and then having him ride home in the backseat of my car, so I put the stew into quart containers that I borrowed from Tom, brought them home, and gave Re-bar one quart of venison stew per day until it was gone.

To really cheer my dog up, I let him spend the day at my mom’s while I’m working. My dog was born at my mom’s house and his litter sister lives there, so together they swim in the creek, bark at the donkeys, and harass woodchucks who live under the woodpiles. By the time I pick my dog up in the evening, he is so worn out that he can hardly support himself on his three legs and is dragging himself around by his front legs. By the time I pick him up he can’t bark because he has barked all day non-stop. Bark! Bark! Bark! (Gary Larson of
The Far Side
cracked the code to dog language once and for all. When a dog says, “Bark! Bark! Bark!” he means “Hey! Hey! Hey!”)

My mother’s own two dogs have kind of a weight problem, so she feeds them only about a cup of dog food a day apiece; if they’re still hungry, they go up to the barnyard to chew on dead raccoons or chunks of manure. My dog too will chew on a chunk of donkey dung with great pleasure. When I say his name in a way that expresses my disgust (Oh, Re-bar!), he looks up with pride from what he is doing. In case you were wondering, I am not one of those people who kisses my dog on the mouth.

As I have mentioned before, at my mother’s house the dog food is not plentiful, but the dogs get plenty to eat one way or another. My mother has the habit of tossing food to the dogs from her plate while she is eating. She usually eats at her desk with her feet up. Mom has some really tough meat in her freezer from a milk cow that Steve Kirklin the dairy farmer had to put down. Mom also has a removable dental bridge, which she takes out at night; it is made of wire and one prosthetic tooth. One day my mom was chomping on a particularly gristly piece of milk-cow meat and she gave up on it and tossed it to Re-bar, who caught it in his mouth and gulped it down without chewing.

Mom felt around in her mouth with her tongue and realized her removable bridge was missing. She looked at Re-bar, who had a stupid grin on his face and who awaited more meat.

My mother resolved not to tell me what had happened until a month was up, so that I would not feel obligated to follow him around and reclaim the device. I am grateful for this kindness of hers. If I come across it in the yard, though, I’ll certainly offer it back to her.

Canine Films Currently in Production

[Brian Frazer]

Air Bud: Enough Already!

Air Bud gets tired of all the leaping and jumping and runs away. Also starring Mare Winningham as Mrs. Abernathy.

Dogs Gone Wild: Totally Off Leash!

These dogs are
totally
wild! Corgis who roll over without even being asked!!! Irish Setters who will lap up ANYTHING! Terriers who won’t stop barking—even when there’s nothing to bark at!!! They howl, they fight, they love, they hump chairs! They’re completely out of control!!! Starring Forest Whitaker as the guy on a bullhorn trying to see if
anyone
knows how to sit!

Honey, I Shrunk the Mastiff!

Rick Moranis is back in this
dog
-sterical farce. This time the family’s 184-pound Neapolitan Mastiff is accidentally shrunk to the size of a Pocket Puggle.

Cold ’N Tired

It’s Erin Brockovich meets the Iditarod as a group of Siberian Huskies go on strike because they’re sick of pulling sleds across the 34-degrees-below-zero (not factoring in the wind chill) tundra for some pointless race that should be held on snowmobiles.

Wes Craven’s Microchipped!

A timid Goldendoodle (played by Sharon the Labradoodle) is off to the vet to get a tracking device injected between her shoulder blades in the master of horror’s latest masterpiece. Little does the doctor know, this ’doodle’s out for revenge: she’s packing a nuclear warhead!

Really Really Really Old Yeller

Old Yeller’s back! With the original cast! You’re guaranteed to shed some tears during Old Yeller’s walk to the mailbox in this 322-minute epic.

Watch Dogs

A group of Pugs fight back when their dog walker (Toni Collette) only takes them for a twenty-three-minute walk instead of the full-hour walk their owner paid for in advance. Directed by Jerry Bruckheimer.

The Shaggy Bailiff

A Doberman with hair extensions stars in this hilarious legal romp where justice is served without the kibble. Cameo by Kurt Russell as the court stenographer.

Non-opposites Attract

The touching story of a Basenji and an Akita who fall in love, consummate their marriage, and then start to bark like there’s no tomorrow, perplexing their respective breeders. Costarring Crispin Glover as the dog-walker who introduces them.

Kennel Cough 3

Dustin Hoffman stars as a veterinary specialist trying to find out why none of the strays at the pound are responding to any antibiotic. Finally, Robert Downey Jr. puts it all together: a disgruntled volunteer has replaced all the drugs with placebos!

This Maltese Ain’t No Falcon

A Maltese named Scooter tries to solve a jewelry-store heist with the bumbling duo of William Shatner and David Caruso.

Turner and Hooch and the 101 Dalmations vs. Cujo (In 3-D!)

In this tail-wagging adventure from the producers of
Wedding Crashers,
Tom Hanks and his 102 pals’ joyful afternoon gets turned upside-down when Cujo shows up with Vince Vaughn and opens up eight dozen cans of whoop ass on our cuddly gang!

Ebony and Yellowy

A yellow Lab and a black Lab hook up and are immediately ostracized by their own families. Halle Berry tries to smooth things over, but will her pleas fall on deaf ears?

My Puppy Looks Weird!

A self-conscious Mexican Hairless teams up with Fabio on a nationwide search for a really good wig. Thanks to a determined Newfoundland, a surly groomer, and a little Epoxy,
MPLW
is a heartening tale of acceptance, friendships, and learning how to make the best of what you’re stuck with.

The Poodle Wears Prada

No matter how expensive the designer sweater Penelope is forced to wear, this prissy pooch wants no part of it! Costarring Reggie as the Lhasa Apso who helps set her free.

In a Jam!

Teddy the Bloodhound searches for the misplaced raspberry jam in this BBC thriller.