In Which We Deal With All The Doggerel

On the Question of Dogs

by EDWARD HOAGLAND

The idea has gotten abroad in New York that nobody in a metropolis should keep a dog. There is a lot of shitting on dogs going on. "Children before dogs," and so on, as if most of the dog-owners didn't have children as well and if children didn't love and profit from dogs.

My daughter weighs half as much as our dog, stands shorter than he goes, and in the absence of woods and a farmyard to wander around, leanrs a good deal about where her roots in the world are from him, learns about her own wellsprings of love, because of course he's a different proposition from us and her affections as they encounter his are different -- discovers that there are bigger things than than herself in the world besides us.

He's a large country dog (both images that set the sort of person who objects to dogs to gnawing his elbows and toes), and during the winters he doesn't spend in the city is curled up asleep in his polar-bear coat in deep Vermont snow like a husky. He was middle-aged before he first smelled a stone building or went for a drive in a car. (He smelled a river that we were riding by and jumped right out of the window like a puppy to go for a swim, not realizing that we were traveling fast.)

The city is a smorgasboard of new smells, but the cranks say it's mean of us to deprive him of that winter spent vegetating in the snow. What they fear most in a dog -- these amateur sanitary engineers who would chop themselves off at the knees if it would free them entirely from their origins on land -- is that he actually may be an honest-to-goodness animal, and not some kind of substitute human being and therefore fair game for them, comprehensible to them. They hate the fact that milk comes from udders of cows and that grapefruit juice mostly water which has been down percolating in the soil.

Admittedly, we live near the lower Manhattan waterfront, with its Gold Star Mother ferryboat, where the addicts line up for a methadone fix, its House of Detention, and many truck parks, gritty dead lots, and the West Side Highway and a derelict railroad spur running above. Find the right spot and what is a little uric acid there?

But if our site is less citified than some, as a group we make up for that by the size of our dogs: hundred-pounders on occasion, Airedales, shepherds, Great Danes, Great Pyrenees, Afghans, Saint Bernards, Salukis, big wolfish chows, Malemutes, Newfoundlands, collies like mine.

We are up with the sun, cold but alive to the morning because of the company we keep, smelling the sharp west wind, and much happier-looking than those other outlaws of the city who keep cars and are looking for some place to park.

We are out kite-flying, if you want to know, our eyes fixed away on a reality as old as the sky. We have tugging on the end of our string the friendly spirit of Canis, fifteen thousand years removed from the Near Eastern wolf, fifteen million years removed from the fox, thirty million years distant from the ancestral bear-racoon, forty million or fifty million years removed from ancestral weasels and cats, and from our own line by sixty to seventy million years, perhaps. The dog family is thought to have originated in North America, dispersed, then come back. And here it is, with poundingly cheerful feet, kiting across the street, snuffing out traces of life.

If after all this time the world of life is grinding to an end, it won't be by the agency of dogs. Nor will they give up the ghost without a final leap of the feet and grin of their pointy teeth. Even set down in this ultimate slag heap on the waterfront, if they can't find any life, then, nose to the ground, wagging their tails, they seek out the wastes of life.

The pennysworth psychology of the day would have it that keeping pets is a way of avoiding the mainstream concerns -- of putting one's tenderness in a jewelbox, so to speak -- a premise that, like any other, can be illustrated if you pick your cases carefully enough, because there are certainly some fanciers who confine their affection to a fish tank.

My own impression is that a commoner, deeper motive than escapism is the wish to broaden one's base, to find the fish in oneself. Another fascination, especially with small wild creatures hemmed into a terrarium or cage, is seeing how they cope, and helping them cope. Every man is an experimenter and every experimenter is a small boy, but in this day and age the observer's promptings are not generally cruel; it seems quite crucial to us to know how they do function and cope.

No matter how sensibly their needs have been anticipated, however, I wind up pitying wild animals and want them released. But where released?

They are pushed face to face with us wherever they survive. Even in the effort to help them survive there are absurd misplays. Recently an entrepreneur somehow gathered together two hundred specimens of a South American sidenecked turtle which is on the list of endangered species and flew them to California, where he hoped to capitalize on their rarity. Instead they were identified and seized by federal officials. So the federal men confiscated the shipment of turtles to teach him a lesson. What did they do then -- fly them back? No, killed them.

There's an excellent pet store on 14th Street called Fang and Claw, Aldo Passera, proprietor, where I go to look over the field. Burmere and Ceylonese pythons cost $150 or so, button quail are $25 apiece, sungazar lizards $30. Horbills and stump-tailed macaques are for sale. The prettiest beast Passera has is an emerald tree boa for $125, and the biggest a regal python of seventeen feet, at $44 a foot. If I went in for wildlife, what I'd buy for my house to represent what has gone before and paralleled us and diverged from us and just stood still would be a common iguana, I think.

An iguana as green as a tree, with a stillness about it, but undaunted, tall, gallant in posture, with a mouthful of teeth a face like that of a god's palace guard, carved by the millenia as if by the workings of water and wind on a grim cliff, only more so. More sculpted than sculpture, an iguana's face is really a great double-take, reacting maybe to what was going on in the room forty-five minutes ago and maybe to what was happening during the Triassic Age. It's a face like a trumpet blast, practically a caricature of fortitude, and so it's a face to come home to, a face to get a grip on, I should think. If I wanted a wild animal, it would be that.

But I go for intelligence and good will and good spirits of my dog instead. He is my fish, my macaque, my iguana, and more.

Edward Hoagland was born in New York City in 1932.

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