Every Dog Owner Has a Story About Life With Canines

Jon Winokur has published collections of sayings of and about writers, curmudgeons and female scolds, among other subjects, and now, inevitably, he has done dogs.

In “Mondo Canine,” which he chooses to subtitle “A Celebration of Doggie Joie-de-Vivre,” he has raked up a garden of wisdom, facts, anecdotes and speculation about the animal man thinks of as his best friend.

We may wonder why a dog is thought of as man’s best friend, but of course he is loyal, forgiving, helpful (often), reliable (sometimes), companionable and brave (when absolutely given no alternative.)

Naturally a lot of dog lore is mythology. I’ve never believed any of those stories about a dog running to warn his master about a burning barn. In that kind of emergency dogs are almost as stupid as horses.

Some dogs are pugnacious and combative, and will attack another dog or in fact a human being that it sees as a threat to its master. This indeed may be seen as courageous, though in fact is more likely just plain mean.

Pit bulls are subject to a lot of abuse because of their meanness. When I was a boy I had a pit bull that was indeed aggressive; but after he had attacked the postman several times, we put him in the cellar when the postman was due. Not long after that he began going into the cellar by himself and would bark at the postman from the vent. He may have been a mean dog but he was a very smart mean dog.

Over the years I don’t think I’ve had many dogs whose intelligence was at all remarkable. In fact, when our boys were small, we had a female shepherd whose stupidity was beyond belief. Unfortunately, I did not have her spayed in time and she passed along her low-grade genes to five offspring.

I did have an Airedale for about 13 years. I suspect that the Airedale was intelligent, but he used his intelligence only to make life easier for himself. He had a sort of cat intelligence that enabled him to eat, avoid work and roam free. If I seem to be saying that cats are smarter than dogs, have no doubt about it.

I set out to quote from Winokur’s book, but so far I have just reported what he lost by not quoting me. Anyone who has ever had a dog could add to the folklore.

There are many anecdotes by famous dog owners, including Virginia Woolf, Charles Dickens, Sidney Sheldon, Beverly Sills, James Thurber and E. B. White.

Tammy Faye Bakker’s memoir is especially touching: “As I lay on the floor in the dark, empty room, Tuppins, my puppy, looked at the tears running down my face. ‘Oh, Tuppins,’ I sobbed, ‘why has God forsaken me?’ ”

Perhaps that is not so much a dog story as a Tammy Bakker story, but it shows what dogs will put up with. Thank God Tuppins didn’t answer her question.

White’s story is from his boyhood: “I can still see my first dog in all the moods and situations that memory has filed him away in; for six years he met me at the same place after school and convoyed me home--a service he thought up himself. A boy doesn’t forget that sort of association.”

Sheldon’s story is interesting because it introduces two kinds of dogs. “When they play, they’re like a vaudeville act. When I toss a tennis ball into the pool, Max (a mixed breed) sits on the edge and supervises Jennifer (a German shepherd), who dives in for the ball. She then gives the ball to Max, who proudly presents it to us.”

Obviously the mixed breed has an intelligence more like a cat. Cats don’t like to get their feet wet, for one thing, and they’d just as well let somebody else do the work. Also, Sheldon’s story tends to validate the idea that mutts are more intelligent than a standard breed.

I have nothing against pure-bred dogs, but, like White, I think a good dog is a matter of chance. White said, “A really companionable and indispensable dog is an accident of nature. You can’t get it by breeding for it, and you can’t buy it with money. It just happens along.”

And Konrad Lorenz says: “One is probably less likely to obtain in a mongrel a nervous, mentally deficient animal than in a dog with eight champions in its pedigree.”

Finally, W. E. Farbstein gives us something to think about: “The dog is mentioned in the Bible 18 times--the cat not even once.”

Maybe if Adam had also had a dog, things would have turned out better.