Black Ribbon

done.”
    I found my eyes fixed on Don Abbott, who was alternately pouring down wine and picking at a big helping of pot roast.
    Eric spoke up. “You’re born with it or not. So I’ve always claimed. Genetic. You have it or you don’t.”
    Maxine nodded. “Just wait till they finally finish cracking this DNA code. You’ll see! It’ll be right there next to eye color or whatever, just like color blindness—dog blindness! So it really all depends on the roll of the dice. You luck out, you love dogs; you don’t, you don’t.”
    In other company, I’d have spoken up as Nurture’s lone defender, albeit a rather weak one, because I certainly agreed with the proposition that loving dogs had a strong genetic basis. I disagreed only in believing that the potential was universal, waiting there in every human infant’s DNA, but activated only in the fortunate by a powerful environmental trigger, a crucial childhood experience that allowed the genes to express their full potential, a sort of all-determining Primal Woof. Think of the implications for therapy. So you see? There’s hope for everyone.
    Or almost everyone. Events at my own table and at the one in back of me suggested two exceptions. The first, the subject of discussion amongst Phyllis, Don, Eric, and Cam, was a woman I’ll call Lizzie Nopet, who was the head of a certain animal-rights group and the person whom the fancy most loved to hate. If we’d held an election for a sort of un-president—the last person on earth we’d have chosen as our leader —Lizzie, as everyone called her, would’ve been assured a unanimous victory. I was as sickened as everyone else by what the fancy viewed as Lizzie’s twisted vision of a dogless, catless, loveless future, a sort of Black Mass utopia in which domestic animals would return to the disease-ridden wild, thus abandoning us with nothing to pat and train except one another. At the risk of jeopardizing my own position in the fancy by suggesting that I was soft on Lizzie, I’ll argue, however, that as the ultimate outcast, Lizzie did a spectacular job of bringing us together.
    Unfortunately, though, almost everything to be said about Lizzie had already been said so many times that, as a topic of conversation, she soon left our table in a silence that was filled by the second exception to my hope-for-everyone credo, namely, Eva Spitteler, who could be overheard loudly lecturing to her tablemates, that is, the people on whom she’d man- I aged to force herself. A glance over my shoulder revealed Myrna, Marie, and Kathy, the women from New York; Michael; and Joy and Craig, none of whom, I thought, would have chosen Eva’s company. The object of Eva’s present pontification, the eighth person at the table, was a pleasant-looking midfiftyish woman I’d seen here and there around camp with a big tan shaggy dog, a bouncy fellow of unguessable but obviously amiable parentage.
    “Nothing to it!” Eva bellowed. “All you do is get an ILP on him as an otter hound, and who’s going to know?”
    I turned my head, the better to listen in.
    “Well, I am, for one!” the woman replied.
    Undaunted, Eva jabbed a thumb toward Michael. “Well, yours looks as much like an otter hound as this guy’s looks like an Akita.” After a moment’s pause evidently devoted to gathering her thoughtlessness, she added, “And these people here’ve got what’s supposed to be a Cairn, came from a pet shop, and it’s got papers, but ask anyone! It’s no Cairn; it’s nothing. It’d no more get an ILP as a Cairn than... than I would!”
    As a bulldog, she might’ve stood a chance. The AKC grants ILP—Indefinite Listing Privilege—registration to dogs of unknown origin that are obviously specimens of AKC-recognized breeds. In other words, if you adopt what’s obviously a Lab, a malamute, a Gordon setter, or whatever from a breed-rescue group or a shelter, and if you do what you should do
    anyway, namely spay or neuter your pet, you can apply for an ILP number. Why bother? To show in AKC obedience trials, among other things. And that’s what Eva had in mind.
    “I don’t know how else to say this,” the woman told Eva, “but I just don’t believe in it. If I wanted a purebred dog, I’d get one! Buddy isn’t, and I have no intention of saying that he is.”
    As soon as the woman finished her dignified defense of her own integrity and her dog’s, too, everyone at both table?broke into cheers. Everyone, that is, except Eva