Travels with Casey Read online

  I agree with Ingrid that too many American dogs are failed by their caretakers, just as too many American kids are failed by their parents. But she was reluctant to acknowledge that some dogs might be better off—might even prefer—sharing their lives with humans.

  PETA argues that dogs should be allowed to “engage in their natural behavior.” But for the past several millennia, the “natural behavior” of dogs has been to live alongside us. For the domesticated dog, human society is its natural habitat. Dogs rely on humans for their survival as much as we rely on them for companionship. This “romantic and timeless . . . interspecies contract,” as writer Lars Eighner once put it, is somehow lost on PETA.

  Ingrid insists that even dog owners with what she calls “the best of intentions” don’t always understand what a dog actually needs. She ticked off a handful of examples: pet owners who don’t think to move an arthritic dog from a draft; who believe that a daily walk or two around the block is enough exercise for a young dog; who don’t stop to let a dog sniff whatever it wants; and who don’t let a dog bark freely.

  “Barking is totally natural for many dogs, but too many people yell at them for it,” she said. “You see them on the street screaming, ‘Be quiet! Be quiet! Do this, do that.’ As if the dog is in the Marines.”

  I thought about all the times I’d impatiently shooed Casey away from something he wanted to sniff, or snapped at him to “stop barking” when I wasn’t in the mood. Was it cruel of me to not let Casey speak whenever he wanted? Is unfettered barking really what a dog needs?

  As I listened to Ingrid, it seemed to me that her conception of a good dog life is one where the animal never hears the word “no.” But is a life without rules, structure, or delayed gratification ideal for any animal, canine or human? As much as most of us want to protect our pets from suffering, I couldn’t help thinking of dog trainer William Koehler, who had “the now old-fashioned idea that suffering might have an important place in the good life—even for a dog,” John Homans writes in What’s a Dog For?

  Ingrid went on, calling out people who leave their dog home alone for too long. “I tell people, ‘If you expect your dog to hold it for eight hours, then you hold it for eight hours at work,’ ” she said. “See how that feels. Because dogs don’t have any supernatural powers.”

  She’s especially frustrated by those who treat their pets like “an accouterment” to their lifestyle. “A dog is not a handbag,” she said, handing me a pink and green coffeetable book she wrote called Let’s Have a Dog Party! 20 Tail-Wagging Celebrations to Share with Your Best Friend.

  Ingrid explained that the book looks frivolous by design—she’s hoping to reach the Paris Hilton crowd, she told me. Interspersed between chapters on hosting fabulous dog parties (including “bark” mitzvahs) and creating doggie goodie bags, Ingrid imparts serious messages about what she considers responsible dog ownership, from buckling up a dog in a car to letting him run freely in a park.

  TOWARD THE end of our talk, I brought up what I would soon realize was a touchy subject—the euthanasia rate of PETA’s shelter at its headquarters in Norfolk, Virginia. In 2011, PETA euthanized 95 percent of the 2,050 dogs that entered its shelter. In the last fifteen years, PETA has put down some 27,000 animals.

  For an organization that claims to care so much about them, I couldn’t understand those numbers. When I pressed Ingrid on them, her face tensed for the first time. “We are a shelter of last resort,” she told me, sounding exasperated at having to explain herself. “We take the broken animals that we know from experience no one wants, the animals that people are giving up because they’re elderly and they can’t afford the vet fee to put them down. We take in the dregs. These are mostly unadoptable dogs.”

  I had a hard time accepting that answer. I told Ingrid about Randy Grim, a man who has devoted his life to saving unwanted and supposedly unadoptable dogs in the St. Louis area. In 2009, I’d spent a week with Randy rescuing dogs—dregs, all of them—from two dangerous, dilapidated neighborhoods. (I was looking forward to visiting him again on this trip.) With the help of his small staff and a volunteer army of dog lovers, Randy has proven that very few dogs are truly unadoptable.

  “I know that there’s nothing more emotionally satisfying than putting your arms around a dog and saying, ‘I saved you,’ ” Ingrid said. “Anyone who does anything to help is appreciated, but touchy-feely doesn’t alter the scheme of things. Wouldn’t that money and energy be better spent on a spay and neuter program so that we can stop the birth of many dogs who are born under the steps of a trailer and who will have no shot at a good life?”

  Ingrid told me that PETA spays about ten thousand dogs each year at no or low cost. It also focuses on trying to pass ordinances banning chaining and on counseling dog owners before they bring their animal to a shelter.

  “If anyone who criticizes our priorities wants to come to our shelter and adopt one of these dogs, then come on down,” she said. “We’re doing what we think will do the most good for the most dogs.”

  It’s no surprise, really, that PETA’s shelter kill rate is so high. If you believe, as Ingrid does, that too many dogs suffer needlessly at the hands of human caretakers, then what better way to alleviate that suffering than by permanently ending their suffering? A dead dog can’t be chained outside, or cooped up all day inside, or treated like a handbag.

  But a dead dog is also cheated out of a chance to be paired successfully with humans, nor can it bring meaning and joy to people. PETA might dismiss this kind of thinking as “our selfish desire to possess animals and receive love from them,” but that’s just one of the ways that the group caricatures—and sometimes misunderstands—the human-canine bond.

  I looked down at Casey, who napped on the floor in Ingrid’s office. Though I’d spent many of our years together worrying that he might rather be paired with a different human, I had no doubt that he wanted—needed—my species.

  I wondered what PETA would do if Casey meandered alone with no tags into its Virginia shelter. Would its workers look at my nine-year-old dog and assume that he’s been failed by the human race? Would they huddle up and agree that it would be a waste of time and resources to try to find Casey a human who wouldn’t fail him? Would they convince themselves that the most humane course of action would be to kill my dog?

  ON OUR final morning in the D.C. area, Casey and I went for a long walk through the Cherry Hill Road Recreation Center, a park that connects Cherry Hill with the University of Maryland.

  Casey trotted along ahead of me, a thin tree branch in his mouth. When a black cat darted across the path ahead of us, he dropped the stick and halfheartedly chased the animal into some bushes.

  “You’re not going to catch anything with that kind of effort,” I said, forgetting, as I often do, that Casey is a dog. (Patricia McConnell writes in The Other End of the Leash that the human need to talk to dogs is so strong that dog trainers “talk to deaf dogs even when we know they can’t hear us.”)

  On our way back to the RV park, we came upon a tiny woman being walked by a large German Shepherd. The woman did not look happy. She was panting heavily and leaning backward with all her body weight, trying to reel the dog in as if it were a shark. I feared the leash might snap.

  “Big boy you have there,” I said as the German Shepherd came to a full stop to check out Casey. The woman breathed a sigh of relief.

  “If I let him go,” she told me sheepishly, “he’ll run away. He doesn’t listen to anything I say.”

  The dog was her son’s, she explained, but the teenager had recently escaped to college. “I guess it’s just assumed that mom gets stuck taking care of the dog,” she said. “It’s like everything else we get stuck doing. No one asks for our opinion!”

  “A grave injustice,” I agreed.

  She pulled a water bottle from her coat pocket. “What’s your dog’s name?”

  “Casey,” I replied. “I know—not very original.”

  “Oh, this g
uy’s name is even more boring,” she said. “My son named him Max.”

  Though Max has been the most popular male dog name for several years, I couldn’t remember meeting a dog named Max before. They must run in different circles, I thought. But I did know a Max-related dog story. I told the woman—as is typical of these encounters, I learned her dog’s name but not hers—about Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, who bestowed the name Max to all seven of his Dachshunds. After Koffka’s first dog named Max died, he got another dog and initially called him a different name.

  “Yet he looked like Max, and he acted like Max, and sometimes I found myself calling him Max,” Koffka recalled. “So I said to myself, ‘If he wants to be Max, then he is Max.’ I suppose that I just wanted him to be Max and to live forever. That is the nice thing about a purebred dog. If you find one you like, you can have him again and again, since they are all so much the same. I suppose I call them all Max because they are all Max, and that is who I wish to live with.”

  I confessed to the woman that I harbored some shame about naming my dog Casey. The word held no special significance for me, nor was it in the least bit clever. It had popped into my head a few hours after meeting Casey as a puppy. It had seemed to suit him, so I went with it.

  Dogs, of course, probably don’t care what we call them. In fact, dog trainer Brian Kilcommons likes to joke that most American dogs probably think their name is “No!” Or, in the case of a dog who lives in a house with thirteen cats, “Kitty.” Pet photographer Walter Chandoha named his dog Kitty to simplify mealtime. When Walter calls out, “Here, Kitty Kitty,” thirteen cats—and one dog—come running from all directions.

  In the book The Complete Book of Pet Names, Roger Caras writes in the foreword that “a name for a pet is, or at least should be, equally meaningful” as the name given to a human child. But Caras concedes that there are important differences in naming kids and dogs.

  “Whimsy and humor can generally play a somewhat larger role than they usually do with our children’s names,” he writes, surely aware that it would be cruel to name a human child Mayhem, Trouble, Sassy, or Bear. (Dogs don’t have to survive middle school, after all.) But Caras urges dog owners to reach deep into the vault. “The naming of a pet is still a creative act,” he insists.

  The best pet name I’d come across on my journey to that point belonged to a Newfoundland/Chow mix I met at Tompkins Square Park. The dog’s owner, a mystery buff, named him Alibi. Sometimes, a deceptively straightforward name can be equally brilliant. A friend of mine calls his Jack Russell mix Little Dog. When the dog scampers out of sight for too long, my friend pipes up and yells, “Here, Little Dog!”

  There’s something to be said for naming your dog a word that’s fun to shout. I heard about a high school English teacher who named her dog Spot so she could quote Macbeth (“Out, damned Spot!”) every time she let the dog into the yard. Another woman—this one A Streetcar Named Desire fan—called her dog Stella for the sole purpose of leaning out her back porch and screaming, “Stella! Stella!” Then there’s the cousin of a friend who named his dog I Am. He was apparently in a long-standing feud with his neighbors, and it pleased him to stand on his porch and call his dog by yelling, “Here I Am!”

  In this day and age, when pet names increasingly overlap with human ones, calling out to your dog can lead to some confusion. My French cousin told me that his neighbor’s dog has the same name—Jacques—as my cousin’s father.

  “The dog hangs out in our garden a lot,” my cousin explained, “so it’s hilarious to hear the neighbor scream out with authority, ‘JACQUES! COME HERE!’ My dad’s always confused for a second, because he doesn’t know if it’s my mom calling him, or the neighbor calling the dog.”

  When I asked my friends and Facebook followers how they’d chosen names for their dogs, I was impressed by their due diligence. Many had spent days or weeks selecting the perfect name. Some were careful to match it to the dog’s personality or physical attributes. A man named his shy Labradoodle Shy. A woman named her dog Jack Sparrow (from Pirates of the Caribbean) because it was “one-eyed and as cute as Johnny Depp.”

  As I tabulated dog names, several trends emerged: a surprising number of dogs are named after Grateful Dead band members and songs—Aiko, Ripple, Jerry Garcia, Dupree. Countless dogs have sports-themed names—a Green Bay Packers fan, for instance, named her dogs Packer, Green Bay, and Lambeau. If there’s one book that seems to inspire dog lovers, it’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Scouts and Atticuses are everywhere.

  Among art lovers and feminists, the name Frida (after Mexican painter Frida Kahlo) is a popular choice. And among those who rescue their dogs off the street, it’s common to name the animal for where it was found. A dog discovered in a poison ivy patch becomes Ivy; one rescued from a freeway becomes Freeway.

  I also discovered some breed-specific tendencies. Those who live with Pit Bulls often give their dog the most nonthreatening name possible—Bella, Sophie, Angel, that kind of thing. Many Basset Hound owners believe their dogs need “old people” or “hillbilly” names.

  “I wanted to call my Basset Hounds Andy and Barney,” one woman told me, “but they were girls so we ended up with Miss Jane and Ellie Mae.”

  Kids, I was reminded again and again, tend to complicate the dog-naming process. “Never, ever let a child name your dogs,” a friend told me. “You’ll end up with a bunch of obscure Aladdin characters running around your house!”

  One mother recounted rejecting most of the dog names suggested by her seven-year-old twins, including countless Star Wars characters and the Harry Potter character Nymphadora. They finally settled on Doo, named after the Harry Potter house-elf Dobby.

  For couples that try on a dog before having children, I learned that it’s wise to pick your naming battles. One woman relented to her husband’s wish and called her yellow Lab Rocco, “to avoid the possibility of ever having to give our son that name.”

  THOUGH NAMING a dog can seem like fun and games, it can also be serious business. At animal shelters across the country, employees work hard to come up with likable names for their dogs—especially ones stuck in the shelter for weeks or months. I heard about one shelter that named an entire litter after characters from the TV show Friends.

  “Where I used to work, all these dogs would come in with unattractive names that really wouldn’t do them any favors,” said Rodney Taylor, the associate director of the Animal Management Division in Prince George’s County, Maryland. During my visit to his shelter, Taylor told me that he increasingly instructs his staff to give the dogs celebrity names; recent choices had included Foxy Brown, Faith Hill, Al Capone, and Beyoncé.

  At the shelter, I learned that an enticing name is especially important for black dogs. “Many people subconsciously overlook them,” explained Amanda Leonard, an expert in what many shelter workers call Black Dog Syndrome, a phenomenon where dark-coated dogs are ignored in favor of their lighter-coated counterparts.

  Amanda, who joined me during my trip to the shelter, had first become interested in Black Dog Syndrome when she worked at the Washington Humane Society and noticed that black dogs were the last to be adopted and the first to be euthanized.

  In a later paper on the subject published in UC Berkeley’s Kroeber Anthropological Society, Amanda wrote that black dogs can appear more menacing than they are. Black absorbs light, which moderates a black dog’s facial feature definition and “makes it harder to read their facial expressions.” Since there’s little differentiation between black eyes and a black coat, it’s difficult for adopters to gauge a black dog’s mood, or to make an emotional connection with the animal.

  For the same reason, black dogs are a challenge to photograph well—their features become obscured by their dark coat. “Often, the crucial first glimpse a potential adopter has of a dog is through the shelter’s website,” Amanda explained. “If the picture of a dog is not good, many adopters will move on.”

  That meant bad news for several
black dogs I met at the Prince George’s shelter, including Oliver, a three-year-old black Lab mix who had been found by police running loose in a park. He’s been at the shelter for more than a month.

  “He’s a great dog—he’s friendly, and he’s one of the staff favorites,” explained a young shelter worker who showed us around.

  “So why hasn’t he been adopted?” I asked

  “Black Dog Syndrome,” she guessed.

  We also spent some time in front of the kennel of a two-year-old Rottweiler mix, who took some coaxing before letting us pet him through the grate. Amanda said that the dog—who was surrendered to the shelter on Valentine’s Day—would be difficult to adopt because he’s shy, black, and positioned next to an outgoing white dog.

  Most shelters are aware of Black Dog Syndrome, and they do their best to make their darker dogs stand out. Some hire professional animal photographers to capture the dogs’ personalities. Others dress the dogs up in colorful bandannas or ribbons. Shelters will also avoid kenneling multiple black dogs next to each other, so they don’t appear commonplace, and will train dogs to come to the front of their kennels when prospective adopters approach. Some even organize black dog promotions, reducing adoption fees for black animals.

  Amanda was careful to stress that most people don’t consciously discriminate against black dogs. “It’s not like people come into a shelter saying, ‘I am not leaving here with a black dog!’ ” she told me.

  Amanda speculated that black dog bias might have a cultural origin. In British folklore, black dogs are often portrayed as a sinister omen of death, most famously as the hellhound in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and the Grim in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The origins of the ominous black dog (black cats are also less likely to get adopted) may reach all the way back to ancient Greece—Plutarch’s biography of the prominent Athenian statesman Cimon mentions that he dreamed of an angry dog barking at him, which foretold his impending death. (And remember the Black Dog of the Hanging Hills?)