The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs Read online

  Swimming was his favorite recreation. The first time he ever saw a body of water (Alum Creek), he trotted nervously along the steep bank for a while, fell to barking wildly, and finally plunged in from a height of eight feet or more. I shall always remember that shining, virgin dive. Then he swam upstream and back just for the pleasure of it, like a man. It was fun to see him battle upstream against a stiff current, struggling and growling every foot of the way. He had as much fun in the water as any person I have known. You didn’t have to throw a stick in the water to get him to go in. Of course, he would bring back a stick to you if you did throw one in. He would even have brought back a piano if you had thrown one in.

  That reminds me of the night, way after midnight, when he went a-roving in the light of the moon and brought back a small chest of drawers that he found somewhere—how far from the house nobody ever knew; since it was Rex, it could easily have been half a mile. There were no drawers in the chest when he got it home, and it wasn’t a good one—he hadn’t taken it out of anybody’s house; it was just an old cheap piece that somebody had abandoned on a trash heap. Still, it was something he wanted, probably because it presented a nice problem in transportation. It tested his mettle. We first knew about his achievement when, deep in the night, we heard him trying to get the chest up onto the porch. It sounded as if two or three people were trying to tear the house down. We came downstairs and turned on the porch light. Rex was on the top step trying to pull the thing up, but it had caught somehow and he was just holding his own. I suppose he would have held his own till dawn if we hadn’t helped him. The next day we carted the chest miles away and threw it out. If we had thrown it out in a nearby alley, he would have brought it home again, as a small token of his integrity in such matters. After all, he had been taught to carry heavy wooden objects about, and he was proud of his prowess.

  I am glad Rex never saw a trained police dog jump. He was just an amateur jumper himself, but the most daring and tenacious I have ever seen. He would take on any fence we pointed out to him. Six feet was easy for him, and he could do eight by making a tremendous leap and hauling himself over finally by his paws, grunting and straining; but he lived and died without knowing that twelve- and sixteen-foot walls were too much for him. Frequently, after letting him try to go over one for a while, we would have to carry him home. He would never have given up trying.

  There was in his world no such thing as the impossible. Even death couldn’t beat him down. He died, it is true, but only, as one of his admirers said, after “straight-arming the death angel” for more than an hour. Late one afternoon he wandered home, too slowly and too uncertainly to be the Rex that had trotted briskly homeward up our avenue for ten years. I think we all knew when he came through the gate that he was dying. He had apparently taken a terrible beating, probably from the owner of some dog that he had got into a fight with. His head and body were scarred. His heavy collar with the teeth marks of many a battle on it was awry; some of the big brass studs in it were sprung loose from the leather. He licked at our hands and, staggering, fell, but got up again. We could see that he was looking for someone. One of his three masters was not home. He did not get home for an hour. During that hour the bull terrier fought against death as he had fought against the cold, strong current of Alum Creek, as he had fought to climb twelve-foot walls. When the person he was waiting for did come through the gate, whistling, ceasing to whistle, Rex walked a few wabbly paces toward him, touched his hand with his muzzle, and fell down again. This time he didn’t get up.

  | 1935 |

  DOG AROUND THE BLOCK

  Katharine and E. B. White (and

  Minnie) in the early 1950s

  Dog around the block, sniff,

  Hydrant sniffing, corner, grating,

  Sniffing, always, starting forward,

  Backward, dragging, sniffing backward,

  Leash at taut, leash at dangle,

  Leash in people’s feet entangle—

  Sniffing dog, apprised of smellings,

  Meeting enemies,

  Loving old acquaintances, sniff,

  Sniffing hydrant for reminders,

  Leg against the wall, raise,

  Leaving grating, corner greeting,

  Chance for meeting, sniff, meeting,

  Meeting, telling, news of smelling,

  Nose to tail, tail to nose,

  Rigid, careful, pose,

  Liking, partly liking, hating,

  Then another hydrant, grating,

  Leash at taut, leash at dangle,

  Tangle, sniff, untangle,

  Dog around the block, sniff.

  —E. B. WHITE | 1930 |

  DOG STORY

  ADAM GOPNIK

  A year ago, my wife and I bought a dog for our ten-year-old daughter, Olivia. We had tried to fob her off with fish, which died, and with a singing blue parakeet, which she named Skyler, but a Havanese puppy was what she wanted, and all she wanted. With the diligence of a renegade candidate pushing for a political post, she set about organizing a campaign: quietly mustering pro-dog friends as a pressure group; introducing persuasive literature (John Grogan’s Marley & Me); demonstrating reliability with bird care.

  I was so ignorant about dogs that I thought what she wanted must be a Javanese, a little Indonesian dog, not a Havanese, named for the city in Cuba. When we discovered, with a pang, the long Google histories that she left on my wife’s computer—havanese puppies/havanese care/how to find a havanese/havanese, convincing your parints—I assumed she was misspelling the name. But in fact it was a Havanese she wanted, a small, sturdy breed that, in the past decade, has become a mainstay of New York apartment life. (It was recognized as a breed by the American Kennel Club only in the mid-nineties.) Shrewd enough to know that she would never get us out of the city to an approved breeder, she quietly decided that she could live with a Manhattan pet-store “puppy mill” dog if she could check its eyes for signs of illness and its temperament for symptoms of sweetness. Finally, she backed us into a nice pet store on Lexington Avenue and showed us a tiny bundle of caramel-colored fur with a comical black mask. “That’s my dog,” she said simply.

  My wife and I looked at each other with a wild surmise: the moment parents become parints, creatures beyond convincing who exist to be convinced. When it came to dogs, we shared a distaste that touched the fringe of disgust and flirted with the edge of phobia. I was bitten by a nasty German-shepherd guard dog when I was about eight—not a terrible bite but traumatic all the same—and it led me ever after to cross streets and jump nervously at the sight of any of its kind. My wife’s objections were narrowly aesthetic: the smells, the slobber, the shit. We both disliked dog owners in their dog-owning character: the empty laughter as the dog jumped up on you; the relentless apologies for the dog’s bad behavior, along with the smiling assurance that it was all actually rather cute. Though I could read, and even blurb, friends’ books on dogs, I felt about them as if the same friends had written books on polar exploration: I could grasp it as a subject worthy of extended poetic description, but it was not a thing I had any plans to pursue myself. “Dogs are failed humans,” a witty friend said, and I agreed.

  We were, however, doomed, and knew it. The constitution of parents and children may, like the British one, be unwritten, but, as the Brits point out, that doesn’t make it less enforceable or authoritative. The unwritten compact that governs family life says somewhere that children who have waited long enough for a dog and want one badly enough have a right to have one. I felt as the Queen must at meeting an unpleasant Socialist Prime Minister: it isn’t what you wanted, but it’s your constitutional duty to welcome, and pretend.

  The pet-store people packed up the dog, a female, in a little crate and Olivia excitedly considered names. Willow? Daisy? Or maybe Honey? “Why not call her Butterscotch?” I suggested, prompted by a dim memory of one of those Dan Jenkins football novels from the seventies, where the running-back hero always uses that word when referring to the ha
ir color of his leggy Texas girlfriends. Olivia nodded violently. Yes! That was her name. Butterscotch.

  We took her home and put her in the back storage room to sleep. Tiny thing, we thought. Enormous eyes. My wife and I were terrified that it would be a repeat of the first year with a baby, up all night. But she was good. She slept right through the first night, and all subsequent nights, waiting in the morning for you past the point that a dog could decently be expected to wait, greeting you with a worried look, then racing across the apartment to her “papers”—the pads that you put out for a dog to pee and shit on. Her front legs were shorter than her rear ones, putting a distinctive hop in her stride. (“Breed trait,” Olivia said, knowingly.)

  All the creature wanted was to please. Unlike a child, who pleases in spite of herself, Butterscotch wanted to know what she could do to make you happy, if only you kept her fed and let her play. She had none of the imperiousness of a human infant. A child starts walking away as soon as she starts to walk—on the way out, from the very first day. What makes kids so lovable is the tension between their helplessness and their drive to deny it. Butterscotch, though, was a born courtesan. She learned the tricks Olivia taught her with startling ease: sitting and rolling over and lying down and standing and shaking hands (or paws) and jumping over stacks of unsold books. The terms of the tricks were apparent: she did them for treats. But, if it was a basic bargain, she employed it with an avidity that made it the most touching thing I have seen. When a plate of steak appeared at the end of dinner, she would race through her repertory of stunts and then offer a paw to shake. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it!

  She was a bit like one of Al Capp’s Shmoos, in Li’l Abner, designed to please people at any cost. (People who don’t like Havanese find them too eager to please, and lacking in proper doggie dignity and reserve.) The key to dogginess, I saw, is that, though dogs are pure creatures of sensation, they are also capable of shrewd short-term plans. Dogs don’t live, like mystics, in the moment; dogs live in the minute. They live in and for the immediate short-term exchange: tricks for food, kisses for a walk. When Butterscotch saw me come home with bags from the grocery store, she would leap with joy as her memory told her that something good was about to happen, just as she had learned that a cloud-nexus of making phone calls and getting the leash and taking elevators produced a chance to play with Lily and Cuba, the two Havanese who live upstairs. But she couldn’t grasp exactly how these chains of events work: some days when she heard the name “Lily” she rushed to the door, sometimes to her leash, sometimes to the elevator, and sometimes to the door on our floor that corresponds to the door on the eighth floor where Lily lives.

  But she had another side, too. At the end of a long walk, or a prance around the block, she would come in with her usual happy hop, and then, let off her leash, she would growl and hiss and make Ewok-like noises that we never otherwise heard from her; it was a little scary at first, like the moment in Gremlins when the cute thing becomes a wild, toothy one. Then she would race madly from one end of the hall to the other, bang her head, and turn around and race back, still spitting and snorting and mumbling guttural consonants to herself, like a mad German monarch. Sometimes she would climax this rampage by pulling up hard and showing her canines and directing two sharp angry barks at Olivia, her owner, daring her to do something about it. Then, just as abruptly, Butterscotch would stop, sink to the floor, and once again become a sweet, smiling companion, trotting loyally behind whoever got up first. The wolf was out; and then was tucked away in a heart-drawer of prudence. This behavior, Olivia assured us, is a Havanese breed trait, called “run-like-hell,” though “Call of the Wild” might be a better name. (Olivia spent hours on the Havanese forum, a worldwide chat board composed mostly of older women who call themselves the small dogs’ “mommies,” and share a tone of slightly addled coziness, which Olivia expertly imitated. Being a dog owner pleased her almost more than owning a dog.)

  But what could account for that odd double nature, that compelling sweetness and implicit wildness? I began to read as widely as I could about this strange, dear thing that I had so long been frightened of.

  Darwinism begins with dogs. In the opening pages of On the Origin of Species, Darwin describes the way breeders can turn big dogs into small ones, through selective breeding, and he insists that all dogs descend from wolves. This was proof of the immense amount of inherited variation, and of the ability of inheritance, blended and directed, to take new directions. “Who will believe that animals closely resembling the Italian greyhound, the bloodhound, the bull-dog or Blenheim spaniel, etc.—so unlike all wild Canidae—ever existed freely in a state of nature?” Darwin wrote. Out of one, many.

  Ever since, what we think Darwinism says has been structured in part by what we think it says about dogs. Darwin’s instinct was, as usual, right. Dogs do descend directly from wolves; the two species can still breed with one another (producing many scary-looking new back breeds). The vexed issue is how long ago they parted ways, and why. The biological evidence and the archeological evidence are at war: DNA analysis points to a very remote break between wolves and dogs, certainly no later than a hundred thousand years ago, while the earliest unequivocal archeological evidence for domesticated dogs dates to just fifteen thousand years ago or so.

  One haunting scrap of evidence is a grave site in Israel, twelve thousand years old, where what is undoubtedly a dog is embraced in death by what is undoubtedly a woman. It suggests that the dog, completely doglike—smaller cuspids and shorter muzzle—was already the object of human affection at the dawn of the age of agriculture. The fullness of this early relation suggests the classic story of domestication, that of the master man and the willing dog. The historian of science Edmund Russell summarizes this story in his new book, Evolutionary History: “Some brave soul burrowed into a wolf den, captured cubs, brought the cubs back to camp, and trained them to hunt by command.” Before long, “people realized that tame wolves (dogs) could perform other tasks too.… Breeders manufactured each variety by imagining the traits required, picking males and females with those traits, and mating them.” If you needed to rid your camp of badgers, you bred one long, thin dog to another until you had a dachshund, which could go down a badger hole. The problem with this view, Russell explains, is that it implies a level of far-sightedness on the part of the first breeders that defies all evolutionary experience: “Wolves do not obey human commands, and it is hard to imagine that people persisted in raising dangerous animals for uncertain benefits far in the future.” To see a Butterscotch in a wolf would have required magical foresight, as if our Paleolithic fathers had started breeding leaping mice in the hope that they would someday fly.

  And so countering this view comes a new view of dog history, more in keeping with our own ostentatiously less man-centered world view. Dogs, we are now told, by a sequence of scientists and speculators—beginning with the biologists Raymond and Lorna Coppinger, in their 2001 masterwork, Dogs—domesticated themselves. They chose us. A marginally calmer canid came close to the circle of human warmth—and, more important, human refuse—and was tolerated by the humans inside: let him eat the garbage. Then this scavenging wolf mated with another calm wolf, and soon a family of calmer wolves proliferated just outside the firelight. It wasn’t cub-snatching on the part of humans, but breaking and entering on the part of wolves, that gave us dogs. “Hey, you be ferocious and eat them when you can catch them,” the proto-dogs said, in evolutionary effect, to their wolf siblings. “We’ll just do what they like and have them feed us. Dignity? It’s a small price to pay for free food. Check with you in ten thousand years and we’ll see who’s had more kids.” (Estimated planetary dog population: one billion. Estimated planetary wild wolf population: three hundred thousand.)

  The dog maven Mark Derr, in his forthcoming book How the Dog Became the Dog, offers a particularly ambitious and detailed version of how the wandering wolf became the drifting dog. He adds to the Coppingers’ story
many epics and epicycles, including a central role for Neanderthal dog-lovers. Though Derr’s book, given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, is sometimes a little fantastical, his motive, only half-disclosed, is touching: Derr isn’t just a dog fancier, one realizes, but a kind of dog nationalist, a dog jingoist. He believes that what was an alliance of equals has, in very recent centuries, been debased to produce Stepin Fetchit dogs, like Butterscotch, conscripted into cuteness. Dogs began as allies, not pets, and friends, not dependents.

  At a minimum, the theory of the drifting dog can point to some living proof, though not of a kind likely to bring joy to the dog-dignifiers. As the British anthrozoologist John Bradshaw points out in his new book, Dog Sense, even now most dogs drift—not as equals or allies but as waifs. In Third World towns, “village dogs” hang around, ownerless, eating garbage, fending for themselves, and getting beaten off only when they become nuisances. (There’s a reason that it’s called a dog’s life.) The usual condition of a dog is to be a pigeon.