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The Dog Mumbler

[Merrill Markoe]

I
N THE BEGINNING,
like dog-loving Americans everywhere, I was utterly transfixed by “The Dog Whisperer.” Between his self described “calm assertive manner” and his earnest, well-meaning solutions to dog behavioral dilemmas, Cesar Millan seemed to represent everything good and smart, sensible and loving about the human/doggy bond.

But by season two, it appeared to me that, like all good media figures, he had begun to accumulate some video mange. His problem-solving techniques, though still impressive, had started to feel repetitious and just a little suspect. I began to wonder how many of those easy solutions of his kept working after he and his calm assertive manner had donned their inline skates, hooked up their Pit Bulls, and headed home.

Still, I kept on watching. Right up until the day I tried using one of his methods of behavioral correction myself. After months of struggling to cope with the impolite leash manners of my overly enthusiastic dog Hedda, I followed Mr. Millan’s advice and moved a choke chain high up on her neck, by her ears, as I had seen him do with dozens of Dog Whisperer clients. In the context of the show, that was all that was ever needed to cause a formerly rowdy dog to begin strolling quietly beside (and slightly behind) his or her calm assertive owner.

In my own case, however, about a half hour in to tiptoeing near the uncomfortably restrained, overly upright, lightly choking Hedda, I was convinced that this method of “walking” with her was about half as much fun as it had been when she was out of control and barreling down the street, pulling me behind her like an inadequately tethered caboose.

That was the day when I began to give some thought to becoming a dog guru myself. After all, there are no standardized credentials for this position. Advice taken from a dog guru is an act of blind faith, like buying vitamins or going to a psychic. You pays your money, and you takes your chances. And best of all, by the time anyone can prove that the service isn’t very effective, it’s so long after the fact, there’s no way to get your money back.

Hmm, I started thinking, This could be the career path I seek. Why not weigh in with my own special dog care tips and methods! And not only because dog gurus make a lot more money than I do! But, okay…mainly because they do.

F
LEXIBLE
C
OHABITATION (PATENT PENDING)

My Dog Training Plan for YOU

FAQ

1. How do I know if Flexible Cohabitation (patent pending) is right for me?

Well, let me ask you this: Do you have the patience and follow-through necessary to work with your dog for an hour a day, every day for months, repeatedly giving stern commands, then reinforcing them with a correction or a reward? If you answered “What if I did it once a week instead?” then I believe that Flexible Cohabitation (patent pending) is the plan for you.

With Flexible Cohabitation (patent pending) all that is required is that you sit back in your favorite chair with an icy cold beverage and enjoy the fireworks. Because unlike Cesar Millan, I was not raised in the macho culture of Mexico and therefore am not inclined to ask my clients to put themselves in harm’s way or subject themselves to painful puncture wounds by doing an alpha rollover when their dog appears aggressive. Instead, with Flexible Cohabitation (patent pending) I will show you how to relax and let the dog you love behave exactly as he or she wishes. After all, if I want to be covered in dog hair and mud, I can simply sit down on my own furniture!

2. You can’t mean that you are advocating letting dogs run wild through your home?

To this I reply, “Obviously you have never been to my home.” Frequent visitors have compared it favorably to the Badlands of South Dakota.

With Flexible Cohabitation (patent pending) I will teach you a form of Zen nonattachment to material goods that your bank account is going to love! Get ready for no more worrying about how to get unusual stains off delicate upholstery or fretting about removing dog nose prints from gleaming reflective surfaces! In fact, no more delicate upholstery, no more gleaming reflective surfaces period!

3. Will I have to employ terrifying guilt-inducing accessories like an electrified fence and collar?

Not only will you have no need for so much as a choke chain, but I will show you how to execute a form of dog walk that I call Asphalt Water Skiing (patent pending), wherein you simply hook the pet to the leash of your choice, and hang on for dear life! In addition to providing exercise for your dog, this highly aerobic technique will shape and tone your calves, thighs, biceps, and abdominals.

And that’s not all!

With Flexible Cohabitation (patent pending) you will learn how allowing your dog full access to your plate at meal times can help you cut out thousands of calories a day!

You’re going to be amazed at how much more free time you have when you abandon the tedium of traditional dog training and accept living alongside your dog in the harmony and chaos that nature intended! When all is said and done, you will find that they love you exactly the same amount! And all it takes, besides writing a check to me, is doing absolutely nothing!! (Offer good where not prohibited by law.)

How to Change Your Adopted Dog’s Name to the Name You Want in under Six Months

[Brian Frazer]

ADOPTED DOG’S NAME
at pound or shelter:
SNOWFLAKE
.

Upon your arrival at home, give your new best buddy a loving pat on the head as you show him to his custom-made beanbag chair that matches his fur and begin calling him
SNOWBLAKE
.

Three weeks later, throw a birthday party for him, being sure to invite all of his closest pals from the dog park. Then, when nobody’s looking, sneak into the kitchen and change the inscription on the cake to “Happy Birthday,
BLAKE
.” He probably won’t notice with all the hoopla.

An hour after all the guests have left, reward him with a special cookie you’ve baked and refer to him as
BLAKEY
.

Ninety seconds later, upon digestion of said cookie, praise him effusively for chewing something that would probably crack one of your teeth by tweaking his name to
BARNEY
.

A fortnight hence, as you’re rubbing his belly, pop in an old Flintstones VHS tape, point his head toward the screen, and dispense his new moniker:
RUBBLE
.

Twelve hours later, pretend you’re drunk and begin slurring all your words as you put your arm around him and start referring to him as
RUBY
.

Five minutes later, act sober and explain that you had meant to call him
RUBY
.

A month and a day later, pretend you bumped your head on the fireplace and now have amnesia and can’t remember anything…except your dog’s name—which you swear was
ROO
.

One week later, cough as you say Roo a few times, then seamlessly sail into
KANGAROO
.

For the next month, don’t call him by any name, just do a lot of whistling or gargling when you want his attention.

Six weeks later, pretend that his name’s always been
KANGY
.

One month later, mumble
SUGAR BLOSSOM
in your sleep and hope he’s paying attention.

Congratulations! You’ve now made the transition a smooth one for your new furry pal! Well done, sir or ma’am!!!

All the Bags and Dante and Me

[Pam Houston]

I
T’S RAINING IN
northern California for the sixth day straight and my Irish Wolfhound, Fenton Johnson, is not particularly pleased. Every morning that we are here the routine is the same. I get up, shower, and dress, while Fenton waits in the big yellow chair next to the front door, and then I put my shoes on and hold his red leash in the air and say,
Do you want to go for a walk?
and he hops joyfully up and down with his front legs off the ground, and I put his leash on and we head for the ditch. I know that he is jumping up and down, not only because he is happy to see the red leash, happy about the prospect of going on a walk, but also because he knows that it makes me happy to see him jump up and down. This is one of the simple and beautiful ways that a dog takes care of his human.

It takes exactly one hour to walk the length of the ditch that borders the huge agricultural fields on the north side of town. On a sunny day Fenton will bound happily along the burry edges of the fields, flushing out egrets and rabbits and the low-flying birds he loves to chase. But today he puts his nose to the back of my knees and moves along at my pace, wincing slightly as if each raindrop is doing him some slight but accumulating damage, as if
he
is doing
me
a favor by going on this walk.

“Think of your ancestors back in the old country,” I tell him. “They had to put up with weather like this every day.” He gives his shoulders a little shake and tucks in tighter behind me. We walk in the ditch because it is one of the few places in Davis where he is allowed to be off leash most of the time, but there is one point along the walk where we come out of the ditch and cross a busy road to another field, and so I take the red leash out of my pocket and hold it in the air once again.
Do you want to go for a walk?
I ask him, and he hops up and down again joyfully, pretending not to realize that we are already on a walk, giving me another opportunity to get a kick out of him, to find it funny that he is acting
like a dog
again, when actually he is acting exactly like the very best kind of human would act, if only they had thought of it first.

We cross the road and the train tracks with a spring in our step, but when I take him off leash it is no time at all before he is sulking again. In spite of all the jumping up and down for my sake, today Fenton hates northern California. He is missing his sisters, Rose and Mary Ellen, who are back at our real home in Colorado. In fact, as he walks along with his head slung down between his powerful shoulder blades, I know that he is picturing Rose and Mary Ellen romping in the fresh Colorado snow, or wrapped around each other on the sunporch under a Colorado bluebird sky, or getting home-baked dog treats, one after another, from the Colorado house sitter Sarah even as the northern California sky spits and spits onto his nose and into his ears, and he starts to smell more and more like cinnamon toast. Fenton is the dog who this time has been chosen to spend the teaching quarter out here with me in our part-time California home, and today he is pretty sure he has gotten the short end of the stick.

I named my dog Fenton Johnson after my dearest friend, the writer Fenton Johnson, partly because
that
Fenton is named after an eleventh-century Irish monk, Fintan, but mostly because
that
Fenton has eight brothers and sisters, all of whom have children (Fenton himself is gay and childless), and none of his siblings have named any of their children Fenton. Not even as a middle name. Fenton was bemoaning that lack of a legacy to me one day, so I thought I could make it right for him in this small way. Fenton-the-human was at first not sure how he felt about having a dog named after him (especially first
and
last name), but he spoke to his therapist about it and together they decided to accept the gesture in the spirit with which it was intended.

In the four years of Fenton-the-canine’s life so far (or Fenton junior, as Fenton-the-human calls him), the two have grown very close. In a recent picture I took of them together, in fact, several people have commented upon how much alike they look, and Fenton-the-human is coming to understand that having an Irish Wolfhound rather than a human baby named after you—when you consider their comparative potential for good works versus crimes against humanity, the dog is probably going to win hands down—might be a very good thing indeed. There have been a few rare and slightly tense moments when we are all on a beach walk together, and I have to shout,
Fenton, don’t pee on that beach towel!
Or
Fenton, stop humping that little dog!
But for the most part Fenton-the-canine comports himself in a way that makes Fenton-the-human proud.

Last weekend in the little coastal town of Point Reyes Station, I stopped into the Cowgirl Creamery to pick up some cheeses for a beach picnic, and left the two Fentons standing outside, leashed together. As is often the case, an attractive man came over to chat Fenton-the-human up, and in the course of conversation, asked him the name of the dog.

“Fenton Johnson,” Fenton said, a bit tentatively, holding his breath for the question he feared would come next.

“I’m Jerry,” the man said, just as I came out of the store with the cheese in a bag and saw Fenton looking between the two men, wagging and wagging his tail.

“Hi Jerry,” Fenton said, “this is Pam.”

“Hi Jerry,” I said, “this is Fenton.”

“We’ve already met,” Jerry said, looking at the dog, which is when I realized Fenton’s predicament: the rock of rudeness or the hard place of narcissism. Either way it seemed best to make a hasty exit, before Jerry, cute as he may have been, came right out and asked Fenton-the-human his name.

That was the last sunny day in northern California, and today, in the ditch, I try to remind Fenton-the-canine of how much fun we had just last weekend. How sunny it was, how we took our cheesy picnic to Limantour Beach, and how those medium-sized birds who bob up and down right along the shoreline kept circling back in front of him so he could chase them and chase them, how the harbor seal kept popping his head out of the breakers as if he was asking Fenton to come out and play, and how Fenton ran and ran until he could hardly keep his eyes open long enough to eat all the organic chicken tenders that Fenton-the-human had brought him from the specialty dog shop in San Francisco.

But it is no use, last week is forgotten and now Fenton misses his sisters. When we get back to the house after our ditch walk, Fenton digs under the sofa for a toy he hasn’t been one bit interested in, in the two years since he officially left puppyhood behind. He puts the cartoonishly fat sheep into his mouth and gives me a long look over its woolly back. “This is what you’ve driven me to,” his eyes seem to say as the sheep gives off a strangled dusty squeak.

“Your sisters miss you too,” I tell him. I know for a fact that his sisters miss him because
two
weekends ago I left Fenton in California and flew back to Colorado and drove a rent-a-car up to the ranch just to make sure the dogs, the horses, and house sitter Sarah were all eating well and staying warm. Mary Ellen, after an enthusiastic, but very brief, greeting, planted herself on the leading edge of the porch and refused to come inside. Hours later as the thermometer dipped into the sub-zero range, she still couldn’t be persuaded and stayed exactly where she had been all day, eyes fixed on the rent-a-car. It was Sarah who finally figured it out late that evening: Mary Ellen was waiting all those hours for Fenton to hop out of the empty rent-a-car. If I was home, she was thinking, he must be home too. This is one way that our dogs teach us about faith.

Of all my dogs, Mary Ellen is the largest, about 160 pounds, and being the largest, is the most insecure. She is afraid of a great many things, including the linoleum that covers the kitchen floor. In an average day Mary Ellen might go out and come back in six or seven times, and lucky for Mary Ellen, we have another door besides the kitchen door, one on the front of the house that opens directly onto the living room, which has nice soft pine floors where dog pads can get a somewhat better grip. Oddly though, Mary Ellen asks to come in only at the kitchen door, with one sharp scratch of a paw down the wood. At that point Sarah or I will get up, open the kitchen door, and say, “Okay, go around!” and she will bound off the porch and around to the front of the house where we will open the front door and let her in. Why she doesn’t just ask to come in at the front door in the first place is one of the things that makes Mary Ellen Mary Ellen, but I suspect it is some complicated scheme she has cooked up to ensure that her humans feel needed. One day Sarah was on her way from the kitchen door to the front door, and she stepped over Rose (who loves the cool kitchen linoleum because she is almost always overheated). “She’s going around,” I heard Sarah say to Rose, even though Rose was sound asleep, which is how I knew Mary Ellen’s plan was working just as she had hoped.

Sometimes I bring both Fenton and Mary Ellen to California. We drive across 50, the Loneliest Road in America, and we have our favorite stops: a quick dip in the Colorado River near Fruita; a stop to chase the ubiquitous rabbits at the giant rest area near the highest point of Utah’s San Rafael Swell; the dog-friendly Silver Queen Hotel and Casino in Ely, Nevada; the giant sand dunes just east of Fallon; and the Sno-park on the top of Donner Pass. It is immeasurable how much less lonely the Loneliest Road in America is when you have the good company of one or two or even three Wolfhounds (which, added all together in the back of a 4 Runner, provide excellent traction on wet or snow-covered roads, adding up as they do to 450 pounds of dog). Mary Ellen is even a better town dog than her brother Fenton, because another one of the things she is afraid of is having fun. I call her the leashless wonder because leashed or not, she is never less than six feet from my right hand. She is the only dog I have ever owned who simply won’t chase cats, dogs, cows, or cars, no matter how much her misbehaved older sister eggs her on.

Which brings me to Rose, who after many years of being my driving companion back and forth across Utah and Nevada with the much-celebrated and now-departed Dante (Fenton and Mary Ellen’s uncle), has hung up her traveling booties and retired permanently to the ranch. There she fills her days keeping track of her horses, heading out to the barn once or twice a day to grab a poop-cicle or two, ambling out to the end of the driveway to rough up the rock marmots from time to time. She likes to watch the mountains turn color from indigo to lavender to crimson in the morning, and from tawny to vermilion to cobalt at night. This is the way a dog teaches us about stillness.

Rose is counting the days until summer, when we will all be reunited on the porch in Colorado: Fenton, Mary Ellen, me, Sarah, maybe even Fenton-the-human. Maybe someone will pull out a mouth harp, and Rose will start thinking back to her traveling days, when the rhythm of the tires on the asphalt led her to write the song that made her famous all those years ago:

A
LL THE
B
AGS AND
D
ANTE AND
M
E

(sung to the tune of “Me and Bobby McGee,” by Kris Kristofferson, as Janis sang it at the Warfield)

Stuck in the hot car again,

Windows barely cracked,

Wonder why I’m always in the back.

Dante says it won’t be long,

It’s just a grocery store.

Man I hope those humans bring a snack.

I took my last dump, at a truck stop near Elko.

Haven’t stretched my legs since Wendover…

Stuck in back I’ve done no crime, oh,

Is it ever suppertime?

Is it ever time to take a stroll?

Road trip’s just another word for nothing much to do.

Nothing…they won’t even let me pee.

Oh, the humans love to travel,

But I haven’t got no room

Room enough for all the bags and me…eee.eeee.

Room for all the bags and Dante and me.

Rooo, roooo, rooo, rooo, rooo, rooo, rooo. Roo, roo, roo, roo, roo, roo, roo. Roo, roo, roo, roo, roo, roo, Dante and me, rahr rahr. Rahr, rahr, rahr, rahr, rahr, rahr, rahr, rahr. Rahr, rahr rahr, rhar, rhar. Rahr, rahr, rahr, rahr, rahr, rahr, Dante and me, rahr. Rahr rahr, rahr, rah-ra-rah, rah-ra-rah, rah-ra-rah, rah-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-rah-ra-rah, hey, now, hey now hey now, Dante and me, yeah. Rah, ra, ra-rah-ra, rah-ra-rah, ra-rah-ra, rah-ra-rah, ra, rah, ra, hey, hey, hey Dante and me, rah-ra.

[
A dog says “snow” by eating it.—Dan Liebert
]