Travels with Casey Read online

  “It’s like crack for dogs,” Sam marveled.

  “You’re not the first person to call it that,” the man said. “But it’s healthy crack.”

  STEPHANIE HAD to leave us eventually, so Sam, Casey, and I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the convention floor on our own. As we did, we took a moment to consider the most ridiculous pet invention of all time: the canine treadmill.

  “I guess it’s for people who are too lazy to walk their dogs?” Sam wondered aloud.

  Makers of canine treadmills insist the devices combat this country’s canine obesity epidemic. They certainly do little to combat this country’s human obesity epidemic (for some dog owners, walking their pet is the only exercise they get), but Sam imagined a scenario I hadn’t considered.

  “I bet there are people who have two treadmills next to each other—one for the dog, and one for them,” he said. “They can get in shape together, all without having to brave the elements—or interact with any other real people or dogs.”

  I nodded. “It’s the perfect solution for a country obsessed with privacy, liberty, and dogs. There’s no better place than America for the guy who wants to be left the hell alone with his dog.”

  “You sure you aren’t one of those guys?” Sam asked with a smirk.

  There weren’t many dogs in attendance at Global Pet Expo, which might explain why people would stop us every few minutes to pet Casey—and, if he was lucky, give him a treat.

  Casey had never eaten so well. He sampled a plethora of delicious treats, including chicken-cordon-bleu-flavored dog biscuits from Bocce’s Bakery in New York City. We also dropped by the booth of Halo Purely for Pets, which had generously donated enough food to feed Casey throughout our journey. Halo is co-owned by Ellen Degeneres, on whom I have a celebrity crush. I’d irrationally hoped she’d fly to Orlando to meet us.

  By the end of the day, Sam could barely walk under the weight of everything we’d accumulated. We had food, snacks, chew toys, harnesses, glow-in-the-dark dog collars, a doggie bed, and a Frosty Bowlz dish designed to keep a dog’s drinking water cool. I wasn’t convinced Casey cared how cold his water is, but I took one for the road just in case.

  “I never knew that half the things I’m carrying even existed,” Sam said. “I mean, is all of this stuff really necessary?”

  It was a good question, one Time asked back in 1974 when it argued that Americans were spending too much on their dogs and cats: “The U.S. pet set gets not only more nutritious meals but also better medical care and vastly more affection than the great majority of the world’s people.”

  In a 1969 New York Times article about the pet industry, reporter Alexander Hammer noted (under the heading “Snob Appeal”) that pet ownership seemed to be changing in significant ways. Americans were both increasingly “attributing human qualities” to their animals and expecting the pet industry to make living with pets easier. Hammer quoted several pet industry and advertising professionals, with the consensus being that a combination of anthropomorphism and human loneliness was fueling the pet industry’s growth.

  “The pet owner attributes the human qualities of taste, including eye, nose, and palate, to his dog,” Hammer wrote. Later in the story, he quoted an advertising man who delved deep into the psyche of the American pet owner: “People desperately want to love and be loved and the care and feeding of these pets is really an extension of the human need to fulfill a void.”

  We know today that anthropomorphism and human loneliness are linked. A 2008 University of Chicago study found that the more socially isolated people feel, the more they will attribute human motivations and mental states to their pets. Studies also tell us that Americans feel more disconnected than ever.

  “It appears that the more isolated we become as a society, the more pets we want—and the more we treat them like humans,” James Serpell, the director of the Center for the Interaction of Animals and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, told me at a conference on dog welfare. “If you plot the growth of the pet population against the decline in traditional forms of social support from friends and relatives, the two lines cross each other rather remarkably.”

  In an essay published in the The Domestic Dog, Serpell writes that “the dog has been granted temporary personhood in return for its unfailing companionship.” But it might be more accurate to say that we’ve granted our dogs babyhood. We push them in strollers, keep track of them on pet-monitoring phone apps, enroll them in school (where, theoretically, they learn how to behave), obsess about the consistency of their bowel movements, and consider medicating them when they “act out.”

  “Our expectations are really going up,” pet industry analyst David Lummis told The New York Times Magazine in 2008. “Owners want their pets to be more like little, well-behaved children.”

  The problem, of course, is that dogs are not children. As Serpell puts it, we humans are often disappointed when a dog “reveals too much of its animal nature.” It helps itself to trash from the garbage can, pees on the couch, barks at the neighbors, and sometimes bites the neighbors. (Some 4.5 million people in this country are bitten by dogs each year.)

  Pet industry professionals know that people are significantly more likely to rid themselves of a troublesome pet than a troublesome child, so they’re doing their best to convince us that dogs are “four-legged little children,” Serpell told me, “with desires, needs, and rights. And they’re succeeding.”

  THE DAY after the expo was Sam’s last with me in the Chalet, and I was feeling sad. “I’m going to miss you, man,” I told him when he joined me briefly by the pool at the Orlando Lake Whippoorwill KOA.

  As I bronzed, senior citizens and their grandchildren frolicked in the water. Word around this KOA was that the pool’s temperature gauge was broken, and a concave-chested man in his eighties scrunched his face in displeasure when he dipped his hairy toes into the water.

  “I need some soap with this bathwater!” he said loudly, startling a young girl dangling her feet at the pool’s edge.

  Apparently these seniors were professional RVers, because they spent the next few minutes trying to remember where on their travels they’d encountered water this warm.

  “Doesn’t this pool remind you of that place in New Mexico?”

  “What place?”

  “You know. Back in 2009.”

  “You think I remember 2009?”

  “Didn’t you get sick out there?”

  “Where?”

  “New Mexico.”

  “That pool water was even hotter than this.”

  “Wasn’t that in Arizona?”

  “He gets sick everywhere.”

  “I miss Arizona. Why the hell are we in Florida?”

  “Don’t swear in front of the little ones!”

  “Hell is not a swear word! It’s a real place where bad kids go. They should know their afterlife options.”

  After an hour by the pool, we headed north toward the Daytona Beach Airport. As we rolled north on 95, we passed a man and woman on a red touring motorcycle. “I think she’s holding a dog,” Sam said in disbelief.

  I slowed down to see the woman (who, thankfully, wasn’t driving) cradling a little brown dog against her chest. The animal was wrapped in either a towel or a thin white blanket—we couldn’t tell for sure. But we could see the dog’s head poking out from the top, its ears flapping in the wind.

  I’d spotted countless traveling dogs in my weeks on the road. In southern Virginia, I’d been passed by a dirt-smeared white pickup truck with the biggest Confederate flag I’d ever seen strapped to its side. At first the flag blocked my view of the chocolate Lab standing precariously next to machinery in the rear bed. The poor dog didn’t dare move, lest he lose his balance and go tumbling onto the highway.

  My other sightings were less dramatic. Near D.C., I’d waited for a green light next to an old Peugeot driven by a heavily made-up, cigarette-smoking woman with a French Bulldog on her lap. North of New York City
, I saw three Golden Retrievers in a Honda Accord, each with their head out one window. But the cutest sighting of all had happened the previous day near Orlando, when Sam and I spied a young girl holding her stuffed animal dog high out the back window of her family’s SUV. Her imaginary pup needed some air.

  When we arrived in Daytona, Sam and I drove past the city’s iconic racetrack before pulling up to the airport terminal. As the motorhome came to a stop, Sam turned in his seat toward Casey and gave him a pep talk. “You’re going to learn to love this RV!” he said, grabbing my dog by his scruff.

  On the curb, I gave Sam a hug and thanked him for his company. “Thank you,” he said, smiling broadly. “This is the most fun I’ve had in a long time.”

  When Sam had disappeared through the airport’s automatic doors, I climbed back into the Chalet, took my seat, and looked into Casey’s big brown eyes.

  “It’s just you and me for a while, buddy,” I said.

  Casey slumped into his usual spot and sighed.

  “WANNA GO to the beach!” I proposed to Casey the next morning on a blue-sky day in Jacksonville.

  We’d spent the night at a campsite under the canopy of tall trees in Kathryn Abbey Hanna Park, which abuts the Atlantic Ocean on the northeast side of the city. We’d made friends with some vacationing Canadians, who, like me, were driving around Florida in a motorhome in early March with their dog.

  It was a warm and breezy morning, and I couldn’t get to the beach fast enough. I practically skipped my way there, with Casey following close behind. We had a stretch of coastline mostly to ourselves, so we played fetch along the ocean’s edge and then wrestled in the sand. When I’d worn Casey out, I spread out my towel and dozed off.

  An hour later, Suzi Teitelman showed up on the beach as planned. A yoga and fitness instructor, she takes the Downward Dog pose more literally than most. Suzi is credited with inventing doga—yoga with dogs. (The shared “O-G” of dog and yoga practically demands a clever portmanteau.)

  Though I was raised in San Francisco by New Agey parents, I had somehow never tried yoga, let alone yoga with a dog. But Suzi—a tan, energetic, dog-obsessed transplant from New York City—urged me not to overthink my beginner status. “Doga is really just about connecting and having fun with your animal!” she said as her three dogs—Tucker, a Cockapoo, Coali, an American Cocker Spaniel, and Curli, a Malti-Poo—romped in the sand with Casey.

  “Are we ready to do some doga?” Suzi said a few minutes later, sitting cross-legged on a thin purple blanket. She wore a pink tank top, black spandex shorts, and big sunglasses that covered half her face. As she smiled at Casey, he barked at me to throw him the tennis ball.

  “Are you going to be a good monkey?” she asked him in a baby voice. “You going to lay down and do some doga with daddy?”

  To my surprise, Casey complied. He didn’t even sigh as he spread out on the beach next to me.

  “Good,” Suzi said before taking a deep breath. “Now, we just start by sitting and meditating and massaging our dogs.” She worked her hands softly into Coali’s side. Tucker, meanwhile, meandered down the beach in search of something. “He’s not really a doga dog,” Suzie explained. “He doesn’t like it as much as Coali does.”

  We sat quietly for a minute with our animals. “As we get calm and breathe gently through our nose, they get calm, too,” Suzi said. She was right—Casey became so relaxed that he practically fell asleep. She then guided me through a handful of poses, some of which involved Casey. In one position, she had me sit and lean my back against his. “We’re aligning our chakras,” Suzi said. Next we did Child’s Pose, which works the spine, hips, and thighs. (We petted our dogs as we stretched forward on our knees.) Then we did the Downward Dog—I leaned over Casey to form something approximating an upside-down V.

  “Yoga came from the animals,” Suzi told me during a break.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Monks were in the forest looking at the ways animals stretch and move, and the monks started to copy them. Animals automatically know that they need to stretch and keep their hearts open. You don’t really see a lot of animals with hunches in their back!”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “I mean, sometimes you see squirrels and stuff. But animals instinctively know that they have to stretch. It’s us humans that need the reminder.”

  Though some criticize doga for reducing an ancient tradition to a farce (one critic suggested that it must have been invented by “some really bored, unusually fit moron hipster”), Suzi and others defend it as valuable way to stay in shape—all the while bonding with your pets. “People include their dog in more and more activities, so why not in yoga?” she said.

  That seemed perfectly reasonable to me, though Suzi conceded that it’s easier (and probably more fun) to do doga with little dogs. I watched as she effortlessly incorporated Curli—who weighs eight pounds—into many of her poses, including lifting him high into the air for her Warrior Pose. Curli looked like he’d been there before, and he almost seemed to smile as the wind rustled through his shaggy white fur.

  THE NEXT day, I took Casey dock jumping. The sport—which tests how far dogs can jump into a pool—is considered one of the safest for canines; there’s little pressure on the animals’ joints, and dogs land safely in water. There’s also little doubt that dogs love competing. I’ve never seen as many wet, happy dogs as I did in the three hours I spent at the Ultimate Air Dogs event, which was held in a small Jacksonville park in the shadow of a highway overpass.

  When Casey and I arrived, a handful of dogs were frolicking in a forty-foot pool. Music blasted from speakers. Other dogs barked and chased each other in the grass. I made the rookie mistake of telling Casey to “stop barking,” prompting Ultimate Air Dogs founder Milt Wilcox—a big, hulking man in a red baseball cap—to utter three words I’d never heard before: “We encourage barking!”

  It was Casey’s lucky day.

  A former major league pitcher who won a World Series with the Detroit Tigers in 1984, Milt said he fell in love with dock jumping thanks to his black Lab, Sparky. Any dog that likes water and has a “toy drive” can dock jump—even Bulldogs and Chihuahuas have competed at Ultimate Air Dogs events. But retrievers, Border Collies, and Belgian Malinois tend to dominate the sport. At the time of my visit, the reigning world champion was a five-year-old Chesapeake Bay Retriever from San Diego who’d jumped twenty-nine feet, one inch.

  “Let’s get Casey in the water!” Milt said, leading him up some stairs to the carpeted dock, where I’d watched Milt and others use the “chase” technique to get dogs to leap high into the air after a toy. (The dog would wait in a sit position while the handler walked to the end of the dock. The handler would then call the dog, who bolted toward him like a sprinter after a starting gun. When the dog was nearly out of running room, the handler would throw the toy high and out over the water, just in front of the dog’s nose.)

  “A dog’s jump is only as good as his human’s throw,” said Victor Sparano, who was there with his wife, Susanne, and their year-old black Lab, Cooper. The dog hadn’t been jumping that well on the day of my visit, which Victor and Susanne attributed less to Susanne’s throws and more to the psychological impact of the relatively small crowd.

  “Dogs are just like humans—most feed off the energy of the audience,” Milt explained. “The more energy, the more screaming, the farther they jump.”

  Milt said that while a dog can improve his jump height and distance with training, a good jumper will instinctively leap into a pool after a toy. When I’d told Milt that Casey loves tennis balls and water, he’d practically guaranteed that my dog would be a dock jumping marvel. And though Milt tried valiantly to coax Casey into the pool, my dog—a relative old man at nine—was perhaps evidence that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks. Casey eyed the two-foot drop between the dock and the water and then looked back at Milt, as if the discrepancy warranted some kind of explanation. Casey wasn’t so
sure about jumping off what probably felt like the end of the world.

  He did eventually lower himself into the pool (carefully, front paws first) to retrieve the tennis ball. It wasn’t a jump so much as a slow-motion flop, but it was a start. Casey got more daring as the day went on, especially when I got up on the deck with him. Dogs can be excellent copycats, so I threw a tennis ball in the pool, ran down the deck with great enthusiasm, and cannonballed into the water. A few minutes later, Casey did his best jump of the day. It was generously scored at four feet. The crowd went wild.

  Maybe Florida wouldn’t be so bad, after all.

  AFTER A few days in Jacksonville, I drove south to the Radisson Hotel in Melbourne Beach, host of the 19th Annual International Conference on Comparative Cognition. I’d never been to a canine cognition conference, and I was taken aback to learn that my dog wasn’t welcome.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but dogs can’t be in the hotel,” a Radisson employee announced as I strolled down a hotel hallway with Casey.

  “But I’m here for the animal cognition conference,” I protested.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s hotel policy.”

  “I hope you get the irony of a dog not being allowed at a conference partly about dogs,” I said.

  She stared at me blankly.

  I walked Casey back to the Chalet, deposited him inside, and returned to the hotel with a chip on my shoulder. To take my mind off the indignity, I perused the conference program for panels I might want to attend. There were a dizzying number to choose from: “Attentive Spiders That Eat Mosquitos,” “Social Learning by Imitation in Bearded Dragons,” “The Behavior of Asian Elephants During Mirror Exposure,” and my favorite, “When Pigs Fly.”

  For some of the handful of canine cognition researchers in attendance, a more pressing concern than all that was the motivation of the American dog. Can dogs be said to love us? In The Modern Dog, Stanley Coren writes that “if you want to cause a commotion in a psychology department or any other place where animal and human behavior is studied, all that you have to do is to claim that your dog loves you.”