Paws before dying

dog training teaches you is that you never know it all.
    “Electronics,” she said. “Give him a good zap, and that’s one problem you won’t have anymore.”
    “Yeah, I’ve heard.” I tried to sound neutral. How other people train their dogs is none of my business, and there’s nothing I can do about it, anyway.
    On the way home, though, I lost it, and Leah got the full diatribe.
    “You mean they give electric shocks to their dogs?” Leah was properly horrified. “Isn’t that illegal or anything?”
    “No, but it ought to be,” I said. “That’s what I think.” Okay, so once in a while, there’s some desperate problem, and nothing else works. Suppose you’ve got a lot of dogs, and one of them keeps attacking one of the others, and you’ve tried everything else. You do obedience with both of the dogs. You keep them separate. You do everything right. And it happens again. And you know, you just know, that what’s coming next is that the dog that’s getting attacked is going to get torn up or killed one of these days, and probably you’ve already been bitten separating them because you didn’t want to see the victim get hurt again. Okay, maybe then. Maybe. But for another couple of Points in the ring? Come on.
    “And,” I went on, “the companies that sell these things are big business. You should see the brochures. I’ve got some at home. I’ll show you one I really hate. It makes me so furious: There’s a malamute on the cover. A malamute!”
    “God!” Leah said.
    Demi, at the very least. She was learning fast.
    ‘You won’t believe the ads and the brochures! I mean, they’re totally professional, obviously done by some Madison Avenue outfit. I just hate them.”
    They never, ever use the words electric or shock. They sell remote trainers,” not shock collars. They really are remote. Some of the expensive new ones have a range of up to a mile. You can be a mile away from the dog, and when you press that button on the transmitter, he still gets a shock, and it can last for ten seconds, which is a long time for pain. That’s another word they don’t use. And when you up the voltage, you’re “changing the level of stimulation.” I’d like to stimulate whoever invented those damned things.
     

Chapter 9

     
    LEAH was sitting opposite me at the kitchen table in the chair that’s supposed to be empty when I’m working. She looked up from Sense and Sensibility. “What are you writing about?”
    “Tail spraining.” Wanna make something of it, kid?
    She blinked.
    “I know it wasn’t a favorite subject of Jane Austen’s,” I said, “but she probably didn’t have a mortgage and two dogs.”
    “She probably just didn’t know about it,” Leah said politely. “What do you have against Jane Austen?”
    “Nothing. I like her.” Of course, she wasn’t Jack London, but not everyone hears the call of the wild.
    It was Wednesday morning, and although the column wasn’t due for a week, I was behind on my self-imposed beat-the-deadline schedule. Since Leah’s arrival, I hadn’t touched any of the articles I was working on, either, including a promising one about a computerized dating service for single dog-owners and an evaluation I’d promised to do of an apartment dwellers’ device called the Doodoo Voodoo Box. Part of the problem was that Rita, my friend and tenant, had refused to fill out the dating service questionnaire, and Groucho, her dachshund, had started digging in the box instead of fouling it. Leah was another part of the problem.
    “Not to mention your own part,” Rita said later. I have told you that she’s a psychologist, haven’t I? “Consisting,” she went °n. “of your favorite transference relationship, namely, a tendency to shape your experiential reality in your mother’s image, compounded in this instance by acute, self-generated sibling rivalry. In other words, you convinced yourself that Leah was more your own mother’s daughter than you are and, furthermore, that your dogs knew it. For example, consider your perception of her supposedly special relationship with Jack Engleman, who, not incidentally, had just become a widower— in other words, more and more like your father—plus, of course, your readiness to blame her for interrupting your intimate relationship with Steve. The less transferential option open to you was to go to her and say, ‘Look, Leah, I can’t write when you’re around, so go take a walk. And when you get back,