No Bad Dogs

Our book today is "No Bad Dogs" by Barbara Woodhouse, a bestseller from the early '80s that puts us in mind of the great Renaissance painter who sent home apprentice after frustrated apprentice because, when they asked his advice on how to paint, he'd spend three days creating a little masterpiece in front of them and then say, "Do that."

Some people have a 'knack' with dogs. We've all seen it: dogs act differently around these people, show an almost immediate acceptance of them while still being wary around all others. Dogs have not been forthcoming on the reason for this; it's the single way in which they are inscrutable (although it almost certainly has its ultimate roots in smell, as does virtually everything else in their world).

This 'knack' very probably derives from a lack of fear. Almost all human beings retain just enough contact with their prehistoric cell-memories to feel just the slightest hitch of fear, just the slightest internal pause, when confronted with even the most benign of dogs. This is on one level understandable, since dogs - even in their current profusion of eugenically engineered shapes and sizes - are quite obviously predators (cat people will talk your ear off about how cats are still 'feral,' but nevertheless, cats all bear the most important genetic modification of all: they're all small). Their muzzles are full of teeth - both fangs and great grinders - their bodies are covered in quite visible muscle, and they display every day the vastly superior span of their senses, senses fitted for hunting.

It stands to reason, then, that dogs - even those most pathetically beset by overbred domesticity - would retain the essential hunter's ability to sense fear. In the wild, after all, fear engenders mistakes, and mistakes are invaluable to a hunter: the antelope whose fear prompts it to separate from the herd is the antelope who merits the pack's attention. Even attenuated by generations of interbreeding, that instinct lives in every dog.

People with a 'knack' for dogs have either never had that essential tic of fear or have unlearned it through a lifetime of dogs liking them, obeying them. In any case, they approach dogs differently from the vast majority of mankind, and this is a singular joy for them.

Unless of course they decide to write a dog-training book. A book in which they inevitably end up saying, "Do that" to people who can't possibly do so.

Barbara Woodhouse had a 'knack' with dogs. We here at Stevereads had the pleasure of meeting her, during a book-tour of hers in the mid-'80s. She was a proper, earthy, thatcherite British lady, sure of herself to an extent ungiven to unlanded peoples, and it was clear at once: she had an amazing connection with dogs. They loved her on sight, saw her instinctively as pack-mother, and wanted nothing more than to do what she requested, no matter what.

The 'no matter what' here encompasses a great deal, since if asked Mrs. Woodhouse would sum up her success in dog-training with one word: choke-chains.

Mrs. Woodhouse never met a dog-problem a choke-chain wouldn't help. Oh, not the small-link choke-chains, she quickly assures her readers, no: the large-link versions, which 'cause the dog no discomfort.' Only sayable by someone who's never had one around their own neck.

In truth, as we here at Stevereads can report, choke-chains of any diameter pinch like holy Hell. They are no different whatsoever from today's more popular electronic 'bark collars': in both cases, well-meaning young dog owners have spent their money on a device of torture.

Let's get this straight, for definition's sake: an implement of torture is any device that enables someone to compel another person's behavior or compliance by physically coercive means.

The lady likes choke-chains. She likes them just as our current nine-days-wonder Cesar Milan likes kicking dogs onto their backs and kneeling on them. In both cases, an individual with a genuine knack for dealing with dogs refuses to simply say that and instead push a product, an approach, as the secret of their success.

For Mrs. Woodhouse, the secret is the choke-chain, wide-linked and used with great discretion, mainly to startle the dog into knowing you mean business. In example after example, she's given a problem dog by the dog's owners, applies her choke chain approach and achieves nearly instantaneous results, much to the wonderment of her human clients.

Reading these stories now, thirty years and thirty fads later, it's clear what's happening in them: the dogs, frightened, stubborn, and disoriented, meet Mrs. Woodhouse, almost instantly attune to her (in her books, she refers to this as 'telepathy'), do what she's asking because it's suddenly important to them to do so, get the blissful reward of her thanks, and then get returned to their still-clueless owners. They get the same ill-behaved dog they started with, and Mrs. Woodhouse gets another statistic to pad her success-rate.

The ironic thing, of course, is that her books - especially "No Bad Dogs" -make it clear that she deeply, personally loves dogs (not a claim we'd say is really tenable with Cesar Milan). And not only does she love them, she revels in her connection with them, clearly sensing on some level that this connection is extremely rare:

"I find the chattering that goes on in class by those people who don't concentrate very hampering to this mind communication. It is like constant interference on the radio. But then I don't suppose many people know what a thrill it is to be on the same wavelength as a dog."

This is simply put and undoubtedly true. It isn't a particularly exalted wavelength, it must be admitted - it's mostly about poop and food and endless, endless sleeping, but shot through it all is a talent for affection so strong and pure it puts almost every other species on Earth to shame, and it IS thrilling when you feel it instead of only guessing at it.

That Mrs. Woodhouse could feel all that - that she could sense on some level how rare it is to feel all that - and still champion something as barbaric as a choke-chain is ... well, it's a serious indictment. Who knows, who can count, how many dogs over the last thirty years have been choke-chained into absolute misery because of Mrs. Woodhouse's wrongheaded teachings? We hold the suffering of every single one of them against her.

And yet, as her writings clearly show, she's one of us. Catch her when she's not talking about torture devices, and this couldn't be clearer:

"Why do hundreds of us give up our holidays to stay with them, cry our eyes out when we lose them, defend them against all those horrid people who don't love them and on our deathbeds make provisions for them in preference to our needy families? It is because there is something about a dog that gets to you. Even if you own a problem dog imbued with all the evil the devil himself invented, you still know that, inside that dog, there is something very lovable - a dog that will never criticize you, a dog that doesn't care whether you are from the top or bottom drawer, a dog that doesn't care whether you are clever or stupid, beautiful or hideous, rich or poor. He is yours and you are his."

And there's quite a bit of good old-fashioned rock-solid advice about dog ownership hidden in Mrs. Woodhouse's books, especially "No Bad Dogs." It's just the central theme we must discard, and we must discard it for the same reason we discard 'bark collars' and 'alpha male' nonsense and Cesar Milan's weird attempts to establish physical dominance over a species who could, to an individual, eviscerate him in an instant if they wished to.

It's not that there aren't biologically incorrigible dogs; there are, we've loved more than a few of them and seen them to their tragic ends. But they are not the same as the non-biologically incorrigible dogs, the willful ones, the stupid ones, the stubborn ones, the impossibly entitled ones. These dogs can be argued with, pleaded with, negotiated with ... but at the end of the day, they love us and should be given their way. Victories over the indisciplines of such dear, pigheaded creatures are paltry victories indeed; only a species as neurotic as man would seek them in the first place.

Mrs. Woodhouse's title is entirely right: there are no bad dogs. And since that's true, surely there's no need for choke-chains?

In the Penny Press! ME ME ME

Obviously, INCREDIBLY obviously, the most interesting thing in the latest Atlantic is ME. Specifically, my letter in the letters page:

In his reply to Alecia Flores, who chided him for taking a gratuitous potshot at President Kennedy, Christopher Hitchens - apparently riding is one-trick pony into the ground - takes yet more potshots at a man who can't fire back!

For instance, he refers to JFK as 'the boy president' - a potshot that also has the virtue of being incomprehensible, since Kennedy was forty-three when he was elected president and had already been a congressman, a father, and a combat veteran. How much, one wonders, had Mr. Hitchens done by that age? How would he have liked being called a boy?

And then there's the old favorite: the smirking insinuation that Ted Sorensen, not JFK, wrote 'Profiles in Courage.' We have mountains of sworn statements; we have eyewitness testimony to the actual act of writing (JFK was in the hospital during part of the book's composition, and, predictably, he was a great favorite of the nurses); we have handwritten and annotated drafts of every single page of the book. But does any of that matter? No! Not when a nod and a wink can pass for knowledge of a subject.

And how many witnesses, how many long-suffering dinner guests trapped in mini-lectures by the commander in chief, how many subsequent references and remarks made by JFK himself, does Mr. Hitchens need before he can refrain from implying that Kennedy wouldn't have read such books as Cecil's 'Melbourne' or Agar's 'Price of Union'?

Finally, Mr. Hitchens gets his dramatis personae wrong. JFK wouldn't have been 'the Galahad of Camelot' - of course, he'd have been the king. One wonders how much patience he'd have had with bargain-basement Mordreds.

Of course Hitchens offers no reply - honestly, how could he? Nevertheless, his silence bespeaks a maturity I thought he'd all but lost! That, plus the superb piece in this selfsame issue on Jessica Mitford - at once fervently enthusiastic and coolly appraising - prompts me to declare an end to our nascent blood-feud!

Also in this issue was yet another wonderful, funny article by Sandra Tsing Loh, this one about uber-parents and the grotesque lengths they go to in order to get their little kids into the right grade schools, high schools, and colleges. The whole thing is a delight, but one tasty quote should suffice:

On the one hand, I worry that unless they join some sort of MTV-sponsored witness-protection program, such children have no hope of ever getting laid. (One imagines [the kids and their parents] years down the road, sharing a lone Zima at a vast granite kitchen island as the pair of them nostaligically go through old torts). On the other hand, I have to admit to a grudging admiration for the sheer professionalism, the smoothly oiled Bonnie-and-Clyde teamwork of these academic parent-child hit squads. I too had insanely pushy parents, but in retrospect they seem like pikers. Yes, my Danzig-born mom wrote all my sister's school papers (which my sister then dutifully copied and presented as her own). However, the result was not Ivy League entry but instead, as my sister will joke, 'my strange German syntax, to shake, I have never been able.' When I was a senior at Caltech, my Shanghai-born scientist dad kept calling my dorm room to shout, over the thumping ZZ Top, 'Sandra! Apply to any grad school in any engineering major!' Sadly, thanks to the freedom of the EZ student loan the great cheapskate himself had helped me secure, I was already off dating a rock-bagpipe player and spectacularly bombing my physics GRE. (Out of a possible 99, my percentile was 7 - that's right, one digit - a number so low it inspires almost Talmudic awe in those who hear it uttered).

Hee.

The oddest thing in the issue was Virginia Postrel's piece on Superhero movies called "Superhero Worship" which, despite those two facts, seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with superheroes or superhero movies. Great topic idea, though...

Over in Esquire (the same issue in which Brad Pitt says he and Angelina Jolie will get married once everyone in the country can legally marry), there's a brief interview with a 21-year-old creature named "David Lehre" (apperently, he's a filmmaker who's 'exploding' ... but there's a picture, and he doesn't look old enough to NOCTURNALLY explode, if you catch my meaning) who at one point affirms that he, like all other right-thinking individuals, is a fan of "High School Musical."

There's also a page-long pan of Cesar Milan, the so-called "Dog Whisperer" during which several ACTUAL dog-experts speak up about what a fraud the guy is. I've read his book, but far more importantly I've now seen his show, and I can tell you one thing beyond any doubt: most of the dogs he 'fixes' are only badly surprised, not rethinking their lives.

Domesticated dogs aren't exactly the smartest species in the world, but they know perfectly well that a human isn't a dog. Milan's whole approach - establishing himself as 'alpha dog' and then claiming he gets results when a 'pack' structure then forms with him at the top - well, it just isn't happening on his show. Instead, time after time, you see a dog go blank-eyed and immobile when confronted with this human acting so weird.

Almost all domestic dogs WANT to please humans - they've been genetically engineered over thousands of years to do so. Importing this pack-leader crap is literally turning back the clock 8,000 years.

So if you're having problems with your dog, kindly DON'T bare your teeth and kneel on their chest. Patient conversation will do just fine (except in your case, Beepy ... sorry about that).

Elsewhere in the issue, Tom Junod writes a book review of the Koran that's just a few good sentences shy of being utterly imbecilic. If any of you should happen to read it (i.e. if any of you can teach me how to link directly to it), please disregard it entirely. Even a 'Dummies' book will give you a better introduction to what is, beyond doubt, the most important book in the world today.

But by far the weirdest thing in this issue was Chuck Klosterman's article on 'Survivor' and 'Lost.' Heck, not even the whole article, just one sentence:

" 'Lost' is probably the best network drama in the history of television (The only other candidate might be 'Twin Peaks')."

Even in this day and age of 24-hour inane commentary, that's got to be the single DUMBEST fucking sentence I've read in the month of September.

So we'll close out this edition of In the Penny Press on that note and hope for better sense next time.

'Lost' the best network drama in the history of television? Jesus Christ on a fucking cross.