Ruffly Speaking

too far off. “Sound shyness,” I said to Rita, shying away from painful slaps of loud sound pitched too high for human ears but not too high for Ruffly’s.
    Not that I get off on diagnosing a veterinary problem that’s baffled Steve Delaney, D.V.M., but by the time Rita and I had worked it out, I was wired. Also, our friendship restored, we were drinking coffee, and although Rita had insisted on decaf, I was fine-tuning my nervous system with genuine Puerto Rican formula three-tablespoons-per-cup Bustelo, so I was eager to zip over to Stephanie Benson’s, where I’d modestly announce my diagnostic triumph and gracefully accept the eternal gratitude not only of the rector but of her Principal Employer, too, I assumed. I could see and hear it all. That Companion Dog Excellent title? Rowdy’s C.D.X.? Fair and square, no cheating, of course, and, yes, I know it by heart. Chapter 2, Section 7 of the Good Book, the ban on “any assistance, interference, or attempts to control a dog from outside the ring.” But if God is inside the ring? Preferably with a good grip on Rowdy’s collar and on his soul, too. Well, according to my reading of the regulations, divine intervention does not count as double handling. C.D.X., here we come!
    Rita interrupted this beatific vision. “Holly? Holly, there’s a hitch.”
    Naturally, I thought, coming to earth abruptly, there always is. For instance, take the time Rowdy ended up next to that Kees bitch on the sits and downs. The hitch? She absolutely must have been starting to come in season, or Rowdy’d never, ever have behaved like that. And the Retrieve on Flat? Rowdy never refuses the command. He retrieves anything, anytime, anywhere. The hitch? A silly technicality, an arbitrary rule. To qualify, the dumbbell he brings back has to be his own.
    “What hitch is that?”
    Rita picked up the Yap Zapper and fingered it lightly. “The maximum range is what? Twelve feet?
    “That’s—”
    “That’s not a hitch,” I said. “There must be a dozen of these things on the market, probably more, and they’re not all the same. The idea of this one is that you just put it in the dog’s kennel with him or else you put it in the room with him, and then when he barks, it goes off automatically; or else, if you’re there, you press the button yourself. But they’re all different. Some of them aren’t even all that high frequency. You can hear them; they’re perfectly audible to people; they’re just really loud. All they do is substitute for someone standing there and screaming at the dog whenever he barks. On some of them, you can adjust the sensitivity so that if the dog just whines or whatever, nothing happens. Some of them react only to barking, not to whining or howling. There’s a really big one that’s meant for kennels, which is really unfair, I think, because it blasts all the dogs even if it’s only one dog that barks. Some of them aren’t even for barking; they’re for any behavior you don’t want. They’re in all the catalogs. I’ll show you.”
    Which catalogs? Are you serious? No, not J. Crew and not L.L. Bean. Victoria’s Secret? Well, if your OFA excellent, CERF clear champion bitch is proving totally impossible to breed, anything’s worth a try, I guess, but if you honestly don’t know what I mean by the catalogs, I am now about to save you thousands of dollars in pet supplies. No kidding. R.C. Steele, color glossy catalog, fifty-dollar minimum order: 800-872-3773 or if you use a TDD, 800-468-8776. Cherrybrook, no illustrations, just a price list, but no minimum order, and a portion of each sale is donated to the Morris Animal Foundation: 800-524-0820. Tell ’em Holly sent you. And, no, I don’t receive a commission. So why am I revealing the inner secrets of the Sacred Brotherhood and Sisterhood of The Fancy? So you’ll stay out of pet shops that sell dogs. Why do that? Puppy mills. But that’s a whole other story.
    The Cherrybrook and R.C. Steele catalogs are the essential First Books of the Kennel Supply Testament, our
    Deep Discount Torah, so to speak, but before long, Rita and I were also leafing through Foster & Smith, UPCO, Master Animal Care, New England Serum, and eight or ten others, including at least two apocrypha, which is to say, yuppie-targeted, reverse-discount (double-markup) catalogs. After Rita finally quit ridiculing such everyday items as plastic-lined polka-dot lace-trimmed canine sanitary panties and a