Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

been thinking, pally, telling all those people that taking the dog away from the owner and ISSI correcting the hell out of it is the only way to begin a consultation?” Bucky was pointing a fat finger at Boris. “You’re one of the reasons why this profession has a bad name,” he shouted.
    “Boris is only one here who is honest.” He drained his third glass of merlot, stabbed his tofu steak with his fork, and then let go. The fork he’d been holding in his bandaged hand fell over sideways, taking the tofu with it and making a jarring sound as it hit the edge of the plate. “You like to put on kind face for owners, train with treats, handkerchiefs, toys. Boris tells it like it is.“
    “You mean like it was ,” Bucky said. “Yank ’em, spank ’em. Jesus. Hasn’t anything that’s happened in the last fifty years touched you?”
    “Boris can’t respond to stupid questions.”
    “And will you stop referring to yourself in the third person. Who are you supposed to be, the king?”
    “You should talk What is Bucky’s motto?” he asked, looking from face to face around the table. “The King of Dog Trainers.” Boris began to nod. “The King,” he repeated.
    “It’s my name" Bucky said between his teeth. “It’s a play on my name. I have every right—”
    “Your name, Baron?” Boris said, again looking around for approval.
    “Who?Who?” Bucky turned to look at Sam, who was deep into her cold poached salmon, the choice for those of us who preferred something in between a slab of bleeding meat and a dead white square of soy product with a side of roughage.
    We all waited as Sam put down her fork, patted her lips with the napkin, and looked up at Bucky. “You sound like a damn owl,” she said. “Now will both of you please contain yourselves. It’s perfectly fine that there are a variety of methods from which both professionals and the pet-owning public can choose. Just leave it alone. Everyone here is earning a living. Doesn’t that tell you something? Doesn’t that show you that the public—”
    “The public is naive,” Bucky said. ‘They hire Boris not understanding that—”
    “Gentlemen,” Sam said, tapping her spoon on her water glass the way the guests at weddings do when they want the bride and groom to kiss. “Please.”
    “Bucky’s right,” Tracy said, looking down into her lap as she spoke. ‘Telling people who are trying to learn how to be better dog trainers that you have to take a dog apart and put him back together, why, that’s so barbaric I—”
    “Did anyone get up and walk out?” Woody asked. But he didn’t wait for an answer. “You don’t give the students enough credit. Shouldn’t they hear it all, every possible way of working with dogs, and be given the chance to make up their own minds? After all, there are lots of ways to train, variations on a theme. In certain situations you need to be firmer. Don’t you think people ought to know this?”
    “Firmer?” Bucky shouted, his face red and sweating. “His methods are downright cruel. They’re antiquated. Weren’t you there? Didn’t you see what he did to that chow?”
    “Weren’t you there? Didn’t you see what that chow did to Boris? He was only defending himself against further injury. Look, Bucky, those people who agree with you will ignore what Boris has to tell them. Or they’ll find, in all he said, a couple of points they can add to their own spin on training. No one’s going to sit out there and swallow anyone else’s method whole. If they did, they’d choke on it.”
    For the next few minutes, no one spoke. We all poked at our food, moving things around but not actually picking anything up and eating it.
    “I apologize. I didn’t mean to—” Woody sighed. “It’s been a rough week,” he said, as much to himself as to any of us.
    “We need to do something positive together,” Cathy said. “Something fun. We can’t just sit around brooding and fighting. Perhaps we can agree to disagree about our training methods. Just leave that alone, as Sam suggested. Let’s get the dogs out to the park this evening. It’s a beautiful night. There’s a moon, so it won’t be completely dark. And if we’re together, we’ll be safe. What do you say? We can set up some easy agility games. We can use whatever we can find in the park, branches, low walls, ourselves instead of weave poles. We can have the dogs jump over each other. We can—”
    “Super,” Sam said. “This is the