We never had cats or dogs when I was growing up. Whenever my brother or I would raise the subject with my parents, my father would say, "No goddam dogs no goddam cats." End of discussion. But then he was a farm boy, and like a lot of people who grew up on farms he believed animals should be outside working or preparing themselves to end up in the roaster.
The closest we came to having a dog was summer visits to my grandfather’s farm. Grandfather had a collie named Spikey. That dog actually saved my life. I had formed the brilliant idea that if climbed a tree and sat on a branch, then tied a rope around my waist and tied the other end of the rope to a parallel branch, I could leap off my perch and zoom back and forth on the rope like Superman. Instead I fell, the rope cut into my waist, and I was suspended in the air slowly turning blue.
I croaked to my brother for help. He went in the house, got a chocolate bar and turned on the TV. But Spikey, sensing something was wrong, started barking her head off. The noise brought my mother who cut me down.
That was a good dog.
When Spikey died my grandfather took me and my brother to pick out a new farm dog. A neighbor of his had a beagle that had just had a litter. We chose one and I named him Bandit because of the black, mask-like markings around its eyes. It was a very cute, if not particularly bright, pup. The next summer when we came back it had grown into an out-of-control barking machine with no sense of self-preservation. It would chase any car that drove down the gravel road that passed the farm and, one fateful day, it caught one. Goodbye Bandit.
When we were slightly older our parents allowed us a couple of goldfish that died almost immediately, a turtle, who as far as I can tell never moved (perhaps was already dead when my parents bought it), and finally a gerbil. The latter, purchased in the early 70s, was actually considered quite exotic at the time. We named it Beastie and it lived in an aquarium in the room I shared with my brother. It slept all day and ran frantically in its squeaking exercise wheel all night. I was sleep-deprived for two years and did not shed a tear when the thing finally had the good graces to die.
Years later I lived with an artist in a studio on the top floor of an industrial building just off of Queen Street in downtown Toronto. She wanted a dog so we bought a Cairn Terrier puppy which we named Bear. Something of a mistake. Cairn Terriers are bred to scramble across the rough highlands of Scotland chasing stoats. They are small but tough and independent. They need a good deal of exercise. We were living on the sixth floor of an industrial building. Can you guess how hard it is to house train a dog under those conditions? Let’s just say that the elevator never smelled the same.
Anyway, when I broke with the artist she took the dog. Thank goodness. Then I got engaged and K and we moved in together. And she wanted a cat.
Now, I hate cats. I’m sorry, but they are stupid and evil animals. Oh, I know, you’ll tell me "my cat is different." No. It isn’t. It’s a stupid evil cat. You’ll tell me that they’re too intelligent and independent to do tricks and listen to commands. Lies. Cats can be trained. The Russians train the for circuses. It just takes the life time of the cat to get it to do something like, oh, "sit."
No. Cats are moronic. The only intelligence a cat is capable of is managing to lull you into complacency so that one day, when you least expect it, the it can shred your face with its claws, take a dump in your coffee mug, and spray some toxic mixture from its anal glands on your best jacket.
But K wanted a cat, so off we went to visit some white trash wack-jobs in East Toronto who were advertising free kittens. Now, as soon as I saw their rental house, with the overgrown lawn, Canadian flag serving as a curtain, and collection of hubcaps in the garden, I was suspicious. When we actually met the couple – a hippie chick was must have been, like, 17, and her partner, a towering but soft-spoken serial-killer-in-the-making who must have been 45 – I had more than doubts. I had fears.
But in we go to their house which smelled (wait for it . . .) like cat urine. Actually, like it contained a cat urine distillery. The "furniture" was all torn to ribbons by the claws of some sort of wild animal (how odd. . .) and puffs of matted hair floated through the air making breathing dangerous. This couple had, as far as I could tell, more cats than brain cells, but somehow had decided that they could part with one of the newest litter of four-legged piss atomizers. All we had to do was chose one.
Okay. Imagine six kittens scrabbling around on the floor. Five of them come hopping over to play with the new comers, doing all those cutesy things that cats do to trick you into believing that wouldn’t kill you in an instant if they weighted 80lbs more. But one kitten skulks away under the futon and glares out at us, hissing and spitting.
Which one do you think K chose?
So, home we go, to our apartment above a pottery store on Toronto’s Queen Street west, with the psycho kitten. We named it Sweeney.
Sweeney grew up, became, in fact, quite a huge cat. It remained a psycho. It would, for example, drool. A veterinarian explained that it had a very common cat lung disease, but I think it just liked drooling. With its mouth overfull with saliva it would make hideous wet mewling sounds until two long ropes of spit hung from either corner of its mouth. It would also spray. The furniture, the door, the wall, it didn’t matter. It just wanted to make sure that every inch of the apartment smelled like its anal glands. And eventually it did. The cat was also too stupid to use the litter box with any regularity. It got it right maybe 75% of the time. The other 25% was up for grabs. It would crap anywhere. Once I walked into the room I kept as an office to find it delicately sniffing a steaming load it had just deposited on the rug. I screamed, which caused the cat to spring face-forward into the poo. It then ran around the apartment wearing what looked for all the world like a poo-beard.
Washing this cat was an exercise in masochism. Unless you were wearing a full suit of plate armor you could be sure of losing at least a quart of blood. The thing even attacked Karen. One day, for no reason, it jumped out from a doorway and sank its claws into her leg. After that we had it declawed. I lobbied to have it de-furred, de-meowed, and lobotomized too so that it would be, essentially, a pink hot water bottle, but K wouldn’t go for it.
Until we had a child. As soon as our first son was born, the shingles dropped from K’s eyes and she realized what a monster we had been living with for years. We put it in a crate on a plane to her parents in BC the next day. They picked it up at the airport, took it to their house, opened the crate, and it ran into the woods never to be seen again.
Live free, Sweeney.
In 1989 we moved to Vancouver. For several years we lived in East Van (see the blog entry on lawns for details) then finally moved to West Van thirteen years ago. With two small children there was no possibility of pets. Well, we threw some goldfish in the pond in the backyard, but that was mainly to feed the heron that lives in the park beside us. Our pond has become its personal sushi bar.
Eventually when the kids got a bit older they showed some interest in pets. We did the requisite goldfish. Pretty dull and short lived. So then we decided on a lizard. We got the kids a leopard gecko named Fred. It lived in a terrarium in our dining room. It didn’t move or anything, just lived. The only time your could even tell it was alive was when we fed it live crickets that had been dusted with lizard vitamins. At first I felt bad about dumping a bunch of live frosted bugs into the terrarium to be pecked off by Fred, but after a while I noticed that crickets are so stupid that they don’t notice when their best friend, who is sitting immediately beside them, is eaten. They don’t scream in panic, try to hide, or show any sign that they’ve even noticed that their buddy is now being chewed by a lizard one inch from their own faces. Dumb things, crickets.
Eventually we gave Fred to the son of a neighbor because we were leaving for Ireland for six months. Fred continues to prosper, slowly, in a larger terrarium down the street.
The boys, who were 10 and 13 at the time, did not want to go to Ireland for six months. What kid that age would want to leave his buddies and fly halfway around the world to go to school in a different country? So K decided to bribe them. She promised them a puppy when we got back to Canada.
Now, neither boy had every evinced the slightest interest in having a puppy. Neither was the sort of kid to go ga-ga over a dog on a street or a pup in a store window. Karen, on the other hand, broke into peals of delighted laughter whenever she something even vaguely dog-like a block away. The dog, then, was really for her.
So when we got back from Ireland K swung into action. The big question: what kind of dog? It couldn’t be too big because we have a very small house. Ideally it shouldn’t need too much exercise since, uh, that would mean exercising it. It should not shed. It should be hypo-allergenic. And finally, it should not bark too much. With these criteria K began her research, reading books, cruising the web, and dragging me to a dog show way out in Abbotsford. Finally she came to a choice: a breed of dog relatively new to Canada, the Havanese.
These lapdogs are related to that most macho of dog breeds, the Bichon Frisee. They were bred to be the playthings of the Cuban aristocracy and were, apparently, taught to dance. During the Cuban revolution Castro mounted a program against the breed because they were a symbol of upper class decadence. A few of them, however, escaped into the jungles of Cuba where they went feral and formed packs. They became the scourge of the countryside: flocks of what looked like miniature sheep, attacking stray ducks before blending back into the jungle to plan their next foraging mission. Wild and free, they became majestic if miniature symbols of nature’s refusal to bow to ideological rigidity.
Go to this website: http://www.geocities.com/havaneseclub/ . You'll find everything you need to know about this breed of Cuban lapdog except for this fact: Cubans refer to them as "big bugs."
So we drove out to Mission to visit a Havanese breeder.
Dog breeders are, well, a breed apart. They dedicate their lives to specific species of dogs, surround themselves with the mutts, supervise their sex lives, and raise their puppies. Then they sell them. It is not surprising that most dog breeders, even of miniature breeds, live in backwood Deliverance-like rural hell holes. They belong there.
Anyway, the breeder we met was an elderly women who lived in a country bungalow teeming with Havanese. They were everywhere: on the furniture, under foot, in the bathtub, swinging from chandeliers, poking their noses out of the microwave. K was besotted with the spectacle. I was frightened. More frightening was that fact that we weren’t just going to look at the dogs, we were being interviewed. The breeder was going to decide whether or not we were worthy of owning buying an animal whose crap I would have to pick up.
I put on a suit and got a haircut and, by keeping my mouth shut, we got one. It was so small and fluffy it looked like a four-legged bedroom slipper. It was a dog that was very hard to walk on the street while maintaining male dignity.
But guess who has to walk it? Twice every day?
Now, imagine what happens when a grown man walks down the street with a dog that looks like a prize from the ring-toss booth at the country fair? Old women come up to him and talk about how cute the dog is. Then they ask the name. A bad moment, for K allowed the boys to name this plush toy of an animal Godzilla. I’ve had old women try to hit me when I tell them.
To cut down slightly on the dog’s cuteness and to reduce the amount of time spent brushing it, K decided to give the dog dreadlocks, or "cords" as they are known in dog grooming circles. So the dog, now dreaded, looks like an ambulatory mop. A slightly more macho look than the original, but absurd none the less. But it got worse: a week ago I took it into the dog salon (right word?) for a wash and groom. This usually means they shave its butt so that poo doesn’t get caught in its hair, wash its dreads, and trim its toenails. But not this time. It seems that hair on the dog’s legs had become matted, so matted then couldn’t be combed or cleaned. So the dog barbers shaved its legs. Without hair those legs look ludicrously skinny. They’re also spotted white and black. The dog now looks like a rasta wig held up by pipe cleaners.
And it has a ponytail on the top of its head.
If all this were not bad enough, this absurd looking critter is incredibly dominant. She will attempt to attack any dog she sees, including Pit Bulls and Rottweilers. Hell, a Dachshund could probably make mincemeat of this walking fluff ball, but Godzilla doesn’t know that. So every day when I walk her I not only have to swallow the embarrassment of leading around the canine equivalent of a purse, but I have to scan the streets to make sure no other dogs are within sight because Godzilla will blow a head gasket and turn into a frothing, growling, howling ball of fluff. Other dogs are too busy laughing at the spectacle to feel threatened.
Oh, and about the howling. These dogs are supposed to be quiet. They are advertised as "nearly silent." Uh huh. Yeah. Silent like a Metallica concert. This dog doesn’t just bark, growl, and whine, it makes a "haroo-ing" noise that is as irritating as loud. When does it make this noise? When we leave the house. When we return to the house. When something walks by on the street. When something almost walks by on the street. When it sees a cat, squirrel, bird, leaf, tree, or shadow. All the time, all day long.
Someone once said, "Life begins when the children leave home and the dog is dead." That was a wise, wise man. And so was my father.
