Black Ribbon

Paul’s, the bag held his nonrecyclable white nylon dumbbell, his flex lead with its plastic handle, and a generous supply of plastic clean-up bags, cheap clear ones for when no one was looking, expensive opaque white for public use. The world of obedience is such an ecological disaster area that I was surprised to see in the canvas bag one item made of a readily compostable substance, paper, glossy paper bright with the colors of hate-the-planet dyes, I suppose, but paper nonetheless. It proved to be a clipping from Dog’s Life, an item from what I recognized as our answer to DOGworld’s “Science and the Dog” and the Gazette’s “Veterinary News.” On one side of the clipping was a report about the near impossibility of accurately diagnosing Lyme disease; on the other, yet another warning about the hazards on giving human medications like acetaminophen to dogs. I read and even write those warnings all the time; they didn’t really worry me. I merely wondered what the clipping was doing in Rowdy’s bag.
    Popping a bit of cheddar in my mouth, I summoned Rowdy to my left side, joined Chuck’s group, and spent a happy fifteen minutes or so perfecting my aim and Rowdy’s attention. The first time I ever saw a handler spit food from her mouth to her dog’s, I was totally disgusted. Before that, I’d always imagined that I’d do absolutely anything to get good scores. But spit? Spit in public? Well, I felt suddenly liberated, relaxed, relieved to have discovered that there was, after all, a limit to what I’d do to keep a few of those precious 200 points with which every dog-handier team walks into the obedience ring. Shortly thereafter, I happened to be at ringside when that same handler and her standard poodle scored a 199 in Open B, and lost that one point only because the judge lacked the self-confidence to give a 200. As Chuck Siegel told us, “You show me some other way to get a dog’s eyes glued on my face and not on my hands and not my pockets, and I’ll give it a try, but until we get some kind of technological breakthrough, spitting’s the best we got, so we gotta learn to live with it.” Hear, hear!
    Then Chuck announced that he was going to work with people who were just getting started in Open, people who were introducing their dogs to the dumbbell and the jumps. He suggested that the rest of us either practice on our own or move to the opposite end of the tent, where a tiny little bright-faced woman named Irma was doing what was billed as a show-and-go, but turned out to be run-throughs, in other words, a very informal, for-practice-only version of a trial. Irma had score sheets fastened to her clipboard, but unless a handler-specifically requested a score, she just made comments and suggestions. Seated on a bench eyeing the run-throughs were Cam and Ginny. Nicky sat alertly at Cam’s feet. Wiz had half climbed into Ginny’s lap. Rowdy and I settled on the grass at the side of the bench. On the far side of the ring, Phyllis Abbott and three or four other people ex- I changed discontented-looking whispers. In the ring, a young woman called to her high-strung golden retriever. The dog dashed toward the handler and went directly to heel position. After Irma had uttered a few tactful words about the hazards of pattern training, Michael and pretty Jacob ran through the Novice routine.
    “Anyone else for Novice?” Irma called out.
    “What is this ‘Novice’?” Cam murmured. “This is supposed to be advanced, okay?”
    Advanced: Open and Utility.Cam was right. I stood up anyway. “Sure,” I said. With Rowdy, the level makes almost no difference; the problem is getting him to behave at all. Recognizing the run-through for what it was, he didn’t do too badly. He crabbed out a little, and his sits could have been straighter, but when I said, “Heel,” he didn’t gaze into space and pretend that he’d never heard the word before; and on the Recall, he acted as if he’d never once in his life contemplated the possibility of charging in at ninety miles an hour, hitting
    me full on, and knocking the wind out of me. Rowdy treats his creativity like money in the bank. Instead of squandering it on run-throughs and matches, he lets it sit there collecting interest. At the moment, he was saving up for a splurge at our national specialty, where we’d be up against Anna Morelli and Tundra, in whose presence, I felt certain, he intended to blow the whole fortune at once.
    “Good