HAVE WE ALL GONE TO THE DOGS?

Bichon Frise

This country is long overdue for a serious conversation about dogs. You know what I'm talking about. Carnac the Alsatian, who busts loose from his leash, bounds across the field and flattens Grandma. Pendleton the remorseless Bichon Frise, who saunters down the sidewalk on his 12-foot leash and then clotheslines you ankle-high. While you're clutching your shattered patella, the dog tears loose from the retracting leash, and the handle jerks back, smacking some innocent passerby right in the kisser. Naturally, it's the victim's fault. "You must have scared him," the owner chides you. "Pendleton never bites unless he feels threatened." (click below to read more)

There's more. You go over to a friend's house to watch a football game and some sausage-shaped mutt howls and whines and goes hysterical every time you swear at the ref. When you get up to grab a handful of Doritos, he bounds across the room and rips a chunk out of your calf, then acts like you deserved it.
What's up with these dysfunctional quadrupeds? Why can't they get it through their heads: It's not about you. OK? Parakeets understand this. Turtles do, too. So why not dogs?
Dogs used to be fully integrated into the culture. They ate their disgusting food, slept 18 hours a day and kept their yaps shut. They understood that their mission in life was to go for long walks, kill squirrels, stick their tongue out for photo-ops with the kiddies and scare away intruders. But that was when dogs had names like Rover and Fido and Skippy. Dogs knew their place. They knew where they stood on the depth chart. They never mistook a fire engine or a bawling infant or a grunt from a geriatric house-guest for a Mongol invasion.
But now that dogs have names like Scheherazade and Mr. Bingley and Mingus, they think they own the joint. My sister has a couple of those yappy dogs that look like filthy dust mops, and I'm always getting in trouble for stepping on their paws or accidentally drop-kicking them across the living room. My feeling is: If you don't want to get stepped on, stop impersonating a bedroom slipper. Didn't you guys ever hear of Darwin? And get that hair out of your eyes and try shaking a tail feather every once in a while so the rest of us can tell you're still breathing.
The other day a friend was telling me that "Leo" inadvertently wandered directly into the path of a cow and got spooked. Leo is a dog. The cow didn't have a name. With the exception of Daisy, cows never have names, which is what I love about them. And they don't expect to have names. They're cows. You don't give goldfish, hyenas or future entrées at Smith & Wollensky names like Leo or Daphne or Barnabas. Once you start doing that, they forget pretty soon that they're animals.
People get all weepy when they tell you that their dog just died. They expect you to be compassionate and understanding, as if they'd just lost four sons at Bull Run. Not me. "Valjean did have 17 kinds of cancer and was deaf and blind before you finally had the common decency to put him down," I point out. "So get your chin up, buy another dog. It's not like the dog store's running low on inventory."
When I first moved to my cute little town, it was filled with big, stupid mongrels with loads of time on their hands. They would lie in the sun, snooze and mind their own business. Now my town is filled with Patagonian snow bitches and neurotic dogs that get carted around in iPad cases. Pretty soon you won't be able to live here anymore.
And don't get me started on people who talk about their dogs as if they were children. Nobody ever drove 400 miles round-trip in a single day just to have lunch with their dog on their birthday. And nobody ever spent $200,000 to send a Pekinese to Princeton.
My mom had a cat that lived 15 years. I loved that cat because for 15 solid years it stayed out of my way. We had a good working relationship: You're a pet; I'm a human. Let's keep it that way. Cats get the big picture. Cats stick to the agenda. Cats keep a low profile. To paraphrase Bob Dylan: Cats don't need you and, man, they expect the same.
Just for the record, my mom's cat was named Tom.