The Barker Street Regulars

rouse himself from his silent stoicism to tend to one of my dogs. As it was, he remained in the emotional cocoon he’d spun around himself in response to what I correctly insisted was outrageous harassment.
    When I pressed the matter, he pointed out through locked jaws that I, too, received occasional letters of complaint. Our situations were comparable, Steve stated flatly; consumer dissatisfaction was an inevitable hazard of becoming a vet or a writer. As I told him, our situations weren’t comparable at all. Yes, of course there were readers who didn’t like my column or took objection to articles I published, but Gloria was plaguing him with persistent phone calls, letters, and E-mail. Furthermore, she was making slanderous public accusations of malpractice. In contrast, the typical letter of complaint from one of my readers did nothing more than politely chastise me for slighting the Samoyed, the otterhound, the Gordon setter, or some other splendid breed I hadn’t mentioned lately. Once in a while, Dog’s Life heard from someone who gleefully pounced on my mistakes: “In her article on the Transylvanian Bludhund in the June issue, Holly Winter makes the egregious error of stating that this noble breed originated in Transylvania. Wrong! Had Miss Winter researched her subject in a professional manner by consulting the Transylvanian Bludhund Club of America, she would soon have been set straight!” On rare occasions, my editor got the bizarre complaint that my column in particular and the magazine as a whole had entirely too much to say about dogs. In other words, my readers’ grievances were perfectly justified.
    Gloria and Scott, however, blamed Steve for ruining their wonderful show dog and excellent brood bitch when, in fact, he’d saved her life. Lest I trigger a volley of the kinds of breed-loyal complaints I’ve just described, I’ll leave Gigi’s breed unspecified, but I will tell you that Gigi was short for Gloria, and I’ll refrain from commenting on the kind of woman who names a bitch after herself. Anyway, two years earlier, Gigi began to have seizures, and Steve advised Scott and Gloria to spay her. They not only refused, but went ahead and bred her not just once but twice. When she developed pyometra, they finally agreed. Pyometra is a serious uterine disorder of bitches that begins as a hormonal problem and turns into a bacterial infection. Spaying is standard practice for an animal with seizures, and it’s the treatment of choice for a bitch with pyometra. Indeed, Scott and Gloria thanked Steve for saving Gigi. Now, four months later, they were claiming that Gigi’s surgery had been unnecessary. They didn’t just blame Steve in private: They also did it in public, outside the show ring, in the grooming areas, wherever dog people gathered. If you show your dogs, you’ll probably recognize Scott and Gloria.
    And how did Steve respond to Gloria and Scott? Did he copy their tactics and stand around at shows to announce out loud that they’d knowingly bred a bitch with seizures? That out of greed and laziness they’d sold Gigi’s puppies at six weeks instead of waiting until eight weeks? He did not. He did nothing except spend all his free time holed up in his apartment with his dogs. Furthermore, he forbade me to violate his clients’ confi-dentiality by so much as whispering a discreet word about Gloria, Scott, or Gigi to anyone in dogs.
    What really got to Steve, I must mention, was something I haven’t touched on yet. Steve would have welcomed a second, third, or fourth opinion, which is to say, the opinion of a second, third, or fourth veterinarian. So, what got to Steve wasn’t that Gloria and Scott had taken Gigi to someone else. No, what ate at him was that the second opinion they’d sought, accepted, and used to attack his reputation was the pronouncement of an animal psychic who hadn’t even seen Gigi, if you can believe it, but had studied a photograph and, on the basis of telepathic communication, deemed the spaying unnecessary.
    So I spent Sunday afternoon at the Gateway instead of with Steve Delaney, who sought only the company of his dogs. As I began to report, just after Rowdy and I entered Althea’s room, her sister, Ceci Love, swept in and pulled a fast one by falling all over Rowdy while excluding and ignoring Althea. Thus she filched both her sister’s therapy dog and the attention of someone who’d talk to her sister about Sherlock Holmes. How was Rowdy