All Shots

carts, guarding monasteries, or sitting in laps looking cute, this obscure breed had once specialized in doing a job so disgusting that I spent a half hour trying to come up with a suitable euphemism for it. So, you see? I don’t exactly have a real job, but I certainly do work.
    I finished the profile, e-mailed it to my editor, and went to Steve’s clinic to check up on Miss Blue. The staff would reliably take excellent care of her, but I wanted to get to know her, in part to see whether her behavior had anything to tell me about her otherwise unknown owner and in part to help me think about the kind of home that would be best if she ended up as a rescue dog in need of an adopter. By two thirty, Miss Blue and I were in the park behind Loaves and Fishes, an area where the owners of dog-aggressive dogs sometimes cause problems by deciding that the therapy their dogs need is “socialization,” meaning the chance to bound around off leash while perfecting their prowess in attacking other dogs. The advantage of the park behind Loaves and Fishes is that it’s open, so you can at least watch for potential troublemakers instead of getting taken by surprise. Fortunately, the fields were uncrowded that afternoon, which was overcast and chilly, so I felt hopeful that I wouldn’t need the aerosol boat horn and the citronella spray I was carrying in case I had to defend Miss Blue.
    So far, she’d ignored a golden retriever running at his owner’s side and a wonderfully assorted trio of terrier mixes all trotting together in front of an elderly woman who had the brisk gait of a teenager. In the middle of a field, I repeated my previous experiment of baiting Miss Blue and got the same result I’d had the previous day: she had no idea what I wanted. When I said, “Miss Blue, sit!” in my most thrilling dog-trainer tones—well, dogs are thrilled, anyway—she looked utterly delighted with herself as she slowly lowered her hindquarters to the grass and then immediately stood up again. My “Down!” did nothing except make her look vaguely puzzled. Translation: “But I wasn’t up on anything! Why are you telling me to get down?” Obedience trainers use down exclusively to tell the dog to lie down. If the dog is countersurfing or, doG forbid, jumping on someone, we use off or some other command that doesn’t confuse the dog. Heel? To her ears, the word came from a foreign language she didn’t speak. So, as I expected, Miss Blue hadn’t been trained for the show ring or the obedience ring.
    But was she ever a great pet! When she made eye contact, as she did all the time, her eyes sparkled. Affectionate? She rubbed against me without shoving, and she had the delightful habit of raising her paw as if asking to hold hands. As she’d done the previous day, she dropped to the ground and rolled over to present her white tummy for rubbing-And someone had taught her to walk on leash without mistaking the activity for a weight-pull competition and without trying to dislocate the shoulder of the person at the other end of the leash. Feeling like a monster, I checked for hand shyness: I raised my hand and jerked it sharply toward her hindquarters and then toward her head. It goes without saying, I hope, that I hit nothing but air. Miss Blue didn’t flinch. Steve’s staff had seen no indication of what’s called “resource guarding,” in other words, growling and otherwise turning possessive in response to an effort to take away toys or treats. In a formal temperament test, the evaluator would’ve pushed Miss Blue hard to assess resource guarding. I’m not trained to do temperament tests, and I saw no reason to stress her. If she’d suddenly become my dog, I’d have played it safe by assuming that she’d guard her food and toys; I’d have taught her that an approaching hand meant food; and I’d have taught her to trade toys for treats. She wasn’t going to become my dog, of course, and I’d been finding homes for homeless malamutes for too long to confuse my rescue dogs with my personal dogs. What enabled me to love the rescue dogs yet let them go was the joy they brought to the people who adopted them and the happiness the dogs felt in being home at last.
    As Miss Blue and I began to move again, I glanced across the field and spotted a short woman in a bright yellow jacket who was walking a smooth fox terrier. Smooth. I should perhaps explain that in the parlance of purebred dogs, smooth describes the short coat