Ruffly Speaking

your precious refuse!’ ”
    “Raccoons are more likely to carry rabies than a dog is,” I said. “And rabies actually is spreading in Massachusetts. The biggest problem is that people are getting panicky.”
    “Oh, Morris wanted to get the poor things all vaccinated,” Doug said. “He was reading about Alpine foxes. He had some grand plan about feeding the raccoons some kind of Swiss rabies vaccine....”
    Silence fell at our table. Leah had the tact not to break it. Doug and I shared what seemed to me a moment of mourning. For all Morris’s frivolity, he cared about other living creatures, and he acted on his concern. It sounds corny to say that he’d risked his life to save a stranger, but the time he’d plunged into the Charles, that’s precisely what he’d done. Lots of animal lovers were worried that public panic about the spread of rabies would result in senseless efforts to eradicate raccoons, opossums, bats, and even properly vaccinated cats and dogs. Morris hadn’t merely felt sorry for the wild animals; he’d intended to protect the helpless raccoons in his own neighborhood.
    Maybe the grief for Morris was more than Doug could tolerate. “My staff!” He shot to his feet. “I have to see what they’re up to. If I don’t keep an eye on them every second,” he confided to Leah, “they do the most unbelievable things. Last week I caught Fyodor exiting the kitchen with a tray, and something about it looked peculiar to me, and I reached out and flipped open one of the sandwiches, and you’ll never believe what was in it! I almost passed out. Garbage! Some stupid boy in the kitchen had mixed it up with the crab salad! And Fyodor has been told a hundred thousand times to check every order just as if he were going to consume it himself, but with Fyodor, everything goes in one ear and out the other without tarrying in between. A garbage sandwich!”
    “The customer might not even have noticed,” Leah pointed out. Entirely ignorant of the circumstances and stories surrounding Morris Lamb’s death, she added innocently, “Some people don’t even notice. They’ll eat absolutely anything.”
     

17
     
     Playing the dog show game without bragging is like passing Go without bothering to collect your two hundred dollars; if you give it a miss, you aren’t really playing at all. Everyone passes Go, of course, but not everyone has the good fortune to be the first to land on Boardwalk, and if you happen to be the lucky one, you’re not merely expected to snap it up, but considered a hopeless fool unless you promptly invest your all to up the rent from that token fifty dollars. If you’ve got a shot at Park Place? Buy! Add houses! Buy a hotel! Buy two! Monopoly is not some New Age game.
    Neither are dog shows. When American and Canadian Champion Malopoly’s Boardwalk Beauty, C.D-. T.T., W.P.D., goes Best of Breed at the Atlantic City Area Specialty, at a minimum you’re expected to send in the win to your area editor so it can appear in the “Something to Howl About” column of the Alaskan Malamute Club of America Newsletter. And when she’s linebred to
    Ch. Monolith’s Park Place? Or when you’re just so proud of her that a mere gratis newsletter howl won’t do? Well, what you do then is to take out a full-page ad in The Malamute Quarterly, which, like every other self-respecting breed-specific publication, provides its subscribers with an unparalleled opportunity to brag, brag, brag about their dogs in unbridled and endlessly satisfactory detail, an opportunity, I might add, completely denied to human parents.
    Really. Flip open an issue of The Malamute Quarterly, and what do you find? Right at the top of the page: Am/Can Ch. Malalong Cassidy, C.D.X., R.O.M., then a gorgeous show photo, and, underneath it, the dog’s OFA number and rating (excellent), CHD probability (almost zero), and the information that he’s CERF clear, then a four-generation pedigree, and maybe a list of his own impressive wins and achievements and those of his get, and then something like, “The foundation sire of Malalong Kennels, Cass is so ideal that he makes the standard look untypey. This dog has everything—beauty, brains, movement....” Brag, brag, brag! Check out The Borzoi Quarterly, The Irish Wolfhound Quarterly, Doberman World, The Corgi Cryer, any breed publication you like.
    With one exception. Which one? The one that doesn’t exist. Where, O where is The Human Being Quarterly ? Baby World ?