So M’hijito and his buddy drove to the wealthy northside suburbs halfway to Alaska, there to view the golden retriever said Buddy had heard about. They were pretty excited about the possibility of M’hijito finding the Dawg of His Dreams. He has wanted a dog for a long time but was waiting until the muddy back yard was desert-landscaped and his life was in order so he could care properly for a pet.
What they found was a harassed and weepy woman with a pair of four-year-old twins, a fourteen-year-old daughter, a McMansion way too big for one freshly impoverished divorcée to keep up when she’s not practicing medicine, and two large out-of-control dogs, one the alleged golden and the other something that looked like an American bulldog.
At the outset, M’hijito suspected the “golden” was a mix, probably containing some pit bull. The woman said she had the dog’s papers in a file but couldn’t find them (aren’t you glad she’s not your doctor!). Asked if she had vaccination records, she repeated the story and then said the reason she didn’t have a county rabies tag for the dog was that the dog ate its collar.
Ah. A new variant on “the dog ate my homework.” Good, very good.
Both dogs had been kept outdoors. Period. Neither was house-trained or even allowed inside the house. Neither was obedience-trained. The bulldog, M’hijito said, was completely berserk and hopelessly out of control. The retriever would not come to call, did not heel, and, though friendly and affable, clearly was not socialized to live with humans.
You understand what “never allowed to come inside” means… This summer we had day after day after searing day of 116-degree-plus heat. I would go outside at 10 o’clock at night and find the thermometer on the back porch resting at 100 degrees. Temperatures rarely dropped below 90 at any hour of the day or night between early June and the end of August.
Leaving a domestic dog, particularly one bred to swim in icy lakes, outside in that kind of extreme heat comes under the heading of “abuse.” And then…
Yes. And then the woman admitted that the 14-year-old whose pet this dog was supposed to be sat around the house all summer while her parents put in 12- to 14-hour workdays. The mother would come home in the evening to find the dogs outside with no water, because the kid couldn’t get off her duff long enough to turn on the hose and fill up a dog dish.
Considering that this child was 12 at the time Daddy brought the retriever home for her, I believe we’ve arrived at “criminal neglect.”
M’hijito is convinced that the dog is no purebred golden retriever. He thinks she has some pit bull in her. From the picture, it’s hard to tell. I’d say she’s a golden, but maybe an individual that a breeder would label “pet” quality. She may be the product of a puppy mill.
Something’s not quite right, that’s for sure… She looks too thin for a two-year-old dog—at 18 months, a golden starts to fill out. Her coat’s not great, though some goldens are less furry than others. And that slight crustiness around the eyes doesn’t bode well. Likely she’s showing the stress from two years of neglect that rises to the level of abuse. There’s also the possibility that, having been left outdoors in our dust storms, she’s picked up valley fever. Compare this dog with the ones on the rescue site, and she looks like one of the “before” photos.
At any rate, M’hijito decided to decline the opportunity, and so Buddy took the dog home. Mrs. Buddy was none too thrilled, she being heavily gravid with her own twins and already responsible for two other large dogs. So the dog ended up at M’hijito’s house overnight, while Mr. Buddy worked on Mrs. Buddy. By the following morning she had caved, and so they came by his house to retrieve the retriever.
M’hijito called the other evening to report that a friend of a friend wants to find a new home for a two-year-old golden retriever. M’hijito himself has craved to get a dog for a long time, and in particular he pines for a golden, the breed of his beloved childhood companion.
The story is that the pup’s family consists of a pair of divorcing doctors. The dog belongs to their fifteen-year-old daughter. Mom and Dad, in their unholy wisdom, have decided that in addition to depriving their child of a stable pair of parents (chances are she hasn’t had one of those in a long time), they’re also going to deprive her of her pet, neither parent wishing to take care of it in singlehood. To be fair, there’s a second pet dog, possibly one that’s more manageable in an apartment (read “doesn’t eat the furniture”). But there it is: the element of cruelty gives M’hijito pause. It has a whiff of coldness about it that makes one wonder what exactly is being offered and why.
Since my familiars have always been dogs (preferably large ones) rather than the tediously conventional black cats, he wanted to know what questions I would ask about this animal and its background, by way of guessing what he was getting into. So, late at night while Cassie the Corgi took the broom for a spin beneath the new moon in the old moon’s arms, I came up with a few things a person might want to know. If you’re interested in adopting an adult dog, especially one that comes from a private home (as opposed to a shelter), you might consider a few of these, too:
1. Where did they get the dog? If it came from a breeder, what breeder? Where? Do they have the dog’s pedigree? Will they let you see it?
2. If you do examine the pedigree, look for forebears that were bred back to a prior generation (for example, the dam to an “uncle.”) This is difficult to figure out, because some degree of inbreeding is considered OK and all breeders do it. But too much? Bad sign.
3. Is the dog OFA-certified? If not, why not? Were both parents OFA-certified? Can the seller prove it? OFA-certified means the dog’s hips were X-rayed at around 18 months and found to be free of hip dysplasia, a painful and crippling inherited defect. Large dogs, in particular, should not be bred without OFA certification. OFA stands for “Orthopedic Foundation for Animals.”
4. Is the dog house-trained?
5. Is it accustomed to using a dog door?
6. Is it crate-trained? If so, do they have a crate they will give you or sell to you?
7. Does the dog like to ride in a car?
8. Has the dog been obedience trained? When, where, and by whom?
9. Will the seller let you take the dog for a walk on a leash, to see how well it heels?
A dog should walk on your left side without pulling on the lead or trying to drag you. Do not pull or drag on the lead yourself. Communicate with the dog with a quick, short jerk on the lead, not by trying to haul the dog in. The best word to tell the dog to walk beside you is “HUP!”
The dog should track beside you as you are walking forward and as you make a U-turn to your right. Do this, walk a ways, do another rightwise U-turn, walk a ways, and then with the dog at your side make a U-turn to your left, so the dog effectively has to pivot or nearly pivot to follow. Walk a ways. Stop. A fully trained obedience dog will sit when you come to a full stop.
If the dog does not sit, quietly tell it to sit. If it doesn’t know to do this, you’ll need to work with it. Gently guide the dog into the “sit” position by holding the lead firmly but gently vertical and pushing the hindquarters to ease the dog into “sit.”
Once you get here, put the lead down (assuming you’re in an enclosed space), tell the dog to “stay”—do not raise your voice but try to sound convincing—and accompany this command with a gesture that places your palm toward the dog’s face. The classic “stop” gesture usually will do it. Step away from the dog, repeating the gesture. Stop. Wait a second. Then call the dog to you.
If the dog will do all these things, then it is respectably trained. Some dogs will not do these things for strangers, especially if they sense any inexperience or unsureness.
10. Are its vaccinations up to date? Do they have a vaccination record that you can take to your vet?
11. Will they let you have the dog examined by your vet before making a final decision? Be prepared to tell a concerned owner your veterinarian’s name and telephone number.
12. Has the dog experienced any health problems? Does it have any known allergies? Ear infections? Digestive issues? Skin problems? How are its teeth?
13. What do they feed the dog? If it’s anything unusual (such as the BARF diet of raw meat and bones), ask them why.
14. How often is the dog used to eating, and how much?
15. How does the dog behave around other dogs? Around small dogs?
16. Is the dog nervous in storms or frightened of lightning and thunder?
17. Does the dog dig in the yard?
18. Does it try to break out of gates or dig under fences, or jump fences?
19. Does it bark, cry, or get into mischief when left alone for a few hours?
20. Observe the dog and see if it appears to be over- or underweight, if it limps, if it’s nervous or jumpy, etc. You might also consider asking if it still chews the furniture.
How is this a money story?How can we count the ways that it isn’t? A full-grown dog that is poorly trained, unsocialized, or psychologically damaged can and will destroy your home, all the furniture and carpets in it, and all the clothing it can get its teeth on. It will excavate your back yard, leaving you with an open-pit mine where your garden was. It will drive your neighbors to the police with complaints about barking and other nuisances. If its health is unsound, the veterinary bills will quickly outstrip the house, furniture, and landscaping repair bills. And if its breeding is faulty, its personality may curdle without warning, leading it to bite you, your children, and your neighbors’ kids.
How much do you figure your neighbor’s dog (cat, parrot, boa constrictor, tame alligator) costs you? LOL! I have to say, I expect my own pets to be destructive and figure the repair bills to be part of the cost of doing business. But one thing we tend not to budget for is the depredations of other people’s critters.
While M’hijito’s roommate was in Singapore visiting his relatives and hustling for a job, he left his brand-new Infiniti parked in the driveway (Roommate is the scion of a ridiculously wealthy family).
Quick backstory: Some time back, Roommate became enamored of a cat belonging to the old guy who lives in the house behind M’hijito’s place. He took to feeding and watering the beast, much to M’hijito’s disgust (it uses the vegetable garden as its litterbox), and he has thought of it as “his” cat. In his absence, the cat has taken up residence on top of the Infiniti, where it sleeps at night, out of reach of hunting coyotes and stray pit bulls.
So the other day as M’hijito was headed out to work, he noticed a couple of brown mounds on top of the Infiniti. On closer inspection…oops! Cat mounds!
The cat had deposited two large piles of cat poop on the brand-new silver Infiniti’s roof. Unknown how long they’d been there, but in 115-degree heat, it doesn’t take long for such a substance to bake to perfection. With Roommate due to surface yesterday, M’hijito drove the car to a commercial car wash. This removed the mound, but…well, the paint beneath it was etched and permanently stained.
So, that brand-new car is going to need a paint job. Hope Roommate’s insurance will cover it. Meow!
As I write this, Inez and Carlos the Knife‘s demented dog is running loose in their front yard, once again threatening to eviscerate all comers. I see their new next-door neighbors, the present and blessed occupants of the former Dave’s Used Car Lot, Marina, and Weed Arboretum, managed to dodge inside the house before the dog could catch them between their car and their front door.
Carlos, who is coming onto 90, has a little senility problem. Whenever Inez, who still has all her marbles, turns her back, Carlos sneaks over to the front door and lets the dog out. Once free, it lurks around their front yard but refuses to be caught—reasonably so, since Carlos is given to whacking it with his belt. From the front yard, it chases young children, bicyclists, and postal carriers up and down the street. Fortunately, the mail came before this afternoon’s fugue.
This antic, too, has its expenses. In addition to the potential for medical bills and lawsuits, the last time the hound got out, the post office declared our entire block terra incognita. They refused to deliver the mail to anyone until the dog was locked up or hauled off to the pound (whence it came). And they challenged us all to call the county animal control officers. It took about a week to get our mail delivery restarted, by which time my AMEX bill was running late. I had to pay American Express for the privilege of paying my bill electronically, something that made me stabby, very stabby.
But maybe I have no sense of humor.
One of my students suffered permanent injurieswhen an idiot’s dog, allowed to run free by the idiot, attacked her as she was jogging down the street in front of her house. She managed to fight it off with several hard, well-aimed kicks (she was a tall, athletic young woman), but it ripped a tendon in her leg and damaged a nerve, which never healed properly. And neighbor Al carries a shillelagh around with him when he walks his little dog, after the moron 125-pound lady who owns three pit bulls and a retrieveroid had one of her “pets” dig out from under her fence and attack him and his little pooch. She paid the vet bill occasioned by sewing the small dog’s throat back together. Generous of her, eh? Same cur gives Cassie the evil eye every time we encounter the woman and her Iditarod team dragging her down the road.
Sometimes I wonder what possesses people who think their animals are their kiddies, and who imagine the rest of us don’t mind dodging their free-roaming dogs and having their cats defecate and urinate all over our homes (and cars!).
How much has your neighbor’s pet cost you? Can you beat a new automotive paint job?
As regular readers know, I feed Cassie the Corgi real food: a carefully calibrated combination of starch, vegetables, and cooked meat plus canine vitamins. Easy to fix and unlikely to be contaminated with adulterants such as melamine.
It being summer, we’re both developing cabin fever: when it’s 105-degrees plus, the pavement is too hot for her feet after dawn and before sunset. In her doggy boredom, she’s been working on creating a fine lick granuloma on one leg. Because she doesn’t pull off bandaids (what kind of a dog is she, anyway?), it’s pretty easy to block her from chewing the incipient wound she’s already built, but all that means is she finds another spot to lick.
No one really knows what leads a dog to lick itself raw, but some veterinarians speculate that one cause is boredom. So I decided she needs something to keep her busy with chewing: let her chew an object instead of her foot.
I never feed my dogs bones, mostly because they’re messy indoors and attract ants and other insects outdoors. Smaller bones, as we all know, are very dangerous to domestic dogs: the risk for intestinal impaction and perforation is high. Some people, however, think you can get away with large knuckle bones, those round heavy things that are pretty hard for a dog to break apart. And many folks figure a dog, being a direct descendant of the wolf and genetically barely discernible from the wolf, should have at any raw bones you care to give it.
A dog, however, is not a wolf. Over tens of thousands of years, Canis lupus familiaris has adapted to live with humans, and it’s a rare domestic pooch that brings down dinner on the range. I did a little research and found this interesting e-mail discussion between a small-animal veterinarian and biologists and caretakers who manage captive wolves. The wolf experts point out that wild canids eat more than just a bone: when they ingest bones, they’re also eating skin and fur. The fur, in particular, tends to wrap itself around hard objects in the digestive tract, padding sharp bones and protecting the intestine.
Huh. Well, I don’t think I’ll be inviting Bugs Bunny to Cassie’s tea-time while she’s chewing some cow’s knuckles. So…hold the raw bones, waiter.
So what can I do to amuse this animal?
One reasonably safe strategy is to take a Kong-style toy and fill it with peanut butter or dog treats, so that the pooch has to fiddle with it for quite some time to extract the yummy stuff. Peanut butter, while probably harmless unless the dog is allergic to it, is fattening. You can substitute any number of fillers, including raw vegetables if your dog will eat them. Yogurt and cottage cheese can also be used. Ordinary dog treats work well. When using gooey or runny fillings, you can minimize leakage by freezing the filled Kong before giving it to the dog.
The other thing I’ll be trying is adding some omega-3 fatty acids to her food, lest she have a deficiency that’s giving her itchy skin. Easiest way to accomplish this is to include salmon in the diet. She likes salmon, but lately I’ve fallen into the habit of feeding hamburger most of the time. Dogs need a variety of protein sources. In addition to adding fish a couple times a week, I’ll dig some chicken out of the freezer for her, and also pick up some ground lamb the next time I see it on sale at Sprouts.
And finally, even though Cassie is pretty laid-back (she got over her apparent separation anxiety within a few weeks of taking over my house), to forestall any further neurotic behavior I’m going to have to get off my duff at 5:30 in the morning and take her for a walk, instead of plopping in front of the computer and spending an hour or two blogging. She already polices the neighborhood every evening; in the mornings it will be safe for us to invade the park (we don’t go there after dark). So that should give her (and me) a little more exercise.
So, as to the answer to the question of whether you should feed bones to your dog: in a word, nope.
As Cassie and I were walking home from an early evening stroll last night, a neighbor stopped me to report that a stray pit bull has been running loose in the neighborhood for the past week or so, and that he had just seen it go into my yard. The animal was gone by the time he and I talked, but it was a mildly disturbing exchange.
Dog fighting—which mostly involves “pit bull” type animals of indeterminate breed related to the Staffordshire terrier—has become a serious problem in Arizona. A common entertainment of toughs and hardened criminals, this lucrative gambling racket thrives on breeding aggressive dogs and abusing them to the point where they are truly dangerous. The problem is not so much in the dogs as in their sociopathic owners. Pit bulls have found favor among street gangs, who use them to protect their drug operations and intimidate citizens as well as in organized dog fighting. In fact, the pit bull has become emblematic of the Bloods, a widespread violent street gang. The interest in pit bulls among celebrity thugs like football star Michael Vick and rapper DMX does not help matters.
The dog shelter where I rescued Cassie was, like most shelters in Arizona, overrun with pit bull-type dogs. It is located in an area infested by gangs, and so the predominance of pit bulls there is not surprising. What is surprising is that I managed to retrieve her before she was “adopted” to be used as bait in training vicious fighting animals, a common practice among dog-fighting breeders and trainers.
The Centers for Disease Control caused quite a flap a few years ago when it released a report saying pit bulls are responsible for about a third of U.S. dog-bite deaths. Groups advocating bans on specific breeds succeeded in getting legislation passed in several states and cities. In fact, though, the CDC did not say the problem lies solely with pit-bull type dogs but that—given enough provocation—any breed will bite, and the study explicitly said the group does not support breed-specific controls. During the study’s period, Rottweilers were the most commonly reported breed in fatal dog attacks. Together, pit bulls and Rottweilers are responsible for more than half the fatalities from dog bites in the U.S.
The sociopaths who breed pit bulls for dog fights use savagely brutal “training” techniques, and they will shoot dogs that lose or back down during a fight. The result, of course, is a dangerously mean-tempered animal, and over time, a breed that has been selected for aggression and viciousness. Anyone who thinks such an animal is not potentially dangerous is fooling himself. Fighting dogs that are not killed are often simply abandoned after a lifetime of horrendous abuse that inclines them to attack anything that comes their way—there’s a chance that’s how our visitor got here.
So, I wasn’t pleased. A street pit bull, which will not back down when confronted by a human and is usually impervious to pepper spray and blows from a well-aimed kick or stick, poses far more risk to Cassie than do our urban coyotes, which are fairly easy for an adult human to scare off.
And more to the personal finance point: I wasn’t pleased because this is yet another indicator of the encroaching slums.
Though my immediate neighborhood and the district just to the south and east are nice enough, these centrally located enclaves are surrounded by blight. One of the reasons that for years I felt a nagging sense that I should move someplace else is that when I worked on the West campus, I had to drive home and into the neighborhood from the north. Coming in from the north and the west takes you through miles of working-class neighborhoods and downright slums, which get crummier and more menacing as you approach our neighborhood. The northern fringe of our neighborhood has been dragged down by the noise and crime from a seedy shopping center, now mostly vacant after its anchor, a Fry’s grocery store, finally closed. The departure of the Fry’s, however, did nothing to help improve that area, mostly because as the real estate market deflated there was no way for the home values to go up. Values in that section of the neighborhood were already depressed, and as they have fallen further, a worse element has moved in and the properties’ deterioration has accelerated.
Driving in from the south and the east, as I’ve been doing since I started working on the Tempe campus, carries me through the middle-class and high-income neighborhoods that line north Central Avenue. These are pleasant areas, and so one tends to forget that everything to the west and the north is a dangerous slum. Out of sight, out of mind.
You can’t keep it out of mind forever, though, when the denizens’ rejected pit bulls are wandering through your front yard and when your neighborhood is under siege from burglars and home invaders.
My problem with moving, besides the fact that my property values are as depressed as anyone else’s, is that I happen to like living in the city’s central core. I don’t want to move out to the suburbs. I dislike Tempe, Mesa, and Chandler and don’t want to live there, and I have exactly zero desire to move to the only affordable middle-class venue I can find, which is Sun City. Except for my specific six-square-block neighborhood, which because of its status as a buffer zone between the rich folks and the gang-ridden slums to the west has always been underpriced relative to similar houses a block or two to the east or south, there is no other desirable part of the central city where I can afford to live. A one-bedroom apartment closer to the center of the city costs more than my four-bedroom house on a quarter of an acre with a pool.
Last night I crawled the online real estate listings and found three short sales or foreclosures over in the “good” part of my area. One potentially attractive house that was completely gutted many months ago is still on the market—the bank is asking $175,000 and entertaining any offer. My guess is the fix-up job will require about $100,000. You’d still end up with a nice house for about $100,000 less than the (former) value of surrounding properties. But it’s not livable—no kitchen, no bathrooms, no flooring, no nothin’—and so you’d have to live somewhere else for the several months required to rebuild the place.
Another house, about as far north as mine but only a block from swanky Central Avenue, is on the market for $230,000. It’s a short sale. This, too, is priced well below the value of neighboring homes, but it’s on the upper end of my price range.
The backyard is nowhere near as nice as mine, and heaven only knows what’s inside.
Deep in the heart of North Central—must be just one or two houses in from the coveted tree-lined boulevard—is this little gem:
It appears to have a nice kitchen. Two fireplaces, one of them in the master bedroom. What look like real wood beams in the family room. They want $289,900 for this, as is. In that part of town, they’re practically giving it away.
But that’s still way more than I can afford. I’d be surprised if I could get $230,000 for my house today, and that’s before I fork over Realtor’s fees and closing costs. The truth is, I can’t sell my house for enough to get into any better area that is not on the far-flung fringes of the Valley or in Sun City.
