One of my favorite shows on television these days is “The Dog Whisperer” with Cesar Millan. Millan is a dog trainer and psychologist who has an uncanny ability to get inside a dog’s head and figure out what’s making him or her dysfunctional. And once he figures it out, he instinctively knows how to fix the bad behaviors.
You can turn Cesar Millan loose with a dog that reminds you of Hannibal Lecter, and by the end of the show, that dog will be vacuuming its own hair off the living room rug, driving the car down to the corner store for a gallon of milk, and doing the family taxes.
I’m always amazed that Millan has never met a dog he couldn’t work with. I’m also always a little intimidated, because the fact is, I’m no Cesar Millan.
I am a dog person, however, not a cat person, and maybe that’s because the cats that came to live with me over the years were all reprobates. There was Muffin, who bit the babies and eventually went to “live on a farm.” There was Willys, a big, mangy tom named after the Jeep who was apparently the reincarnation of Boxcar Willie. He’d go on months-long rambles and was once spotted on the other side of town, hiding in a friend’s flower box and growling at the mailman. He once came home after a six-week walkabout with a paper ice cream cup stuck to his head, and a strand of fly paper on his tail. He didn’t say where he’d been, but he eventually hit the road on a trip and never came back. I think he went to California looking for the Joads.
And then there was Mick, named after Mick Jagger, a huge Maine coon who was the Genghis Khan of cats, in that his main business was killing. He killed rabbits, he killed birds by the flock, he left dead squirrels in the box that held the kids’ stuffed animals, and he once plucked a bat out with his claws that had flown down the shirt of my sleeping son and dispatched it without breaking a sweat.
None of these cats particularly liked me, or anyone else in the family. I’ve had better luck with dogs. I’m not the Dog Whisperer, but here are a few of the things I’ve learned about them after living with dogs for almost six decades:
• You are their world. They watch you like you watch the Super Bowl, the History Channel and “Dancing With the Stars” combined. They study you, your inflections and your body language. They know you’re going for a walk, or a ride in the car or out for a “Yappy Meal” at McDonald’s before you even know it yourself.
• They are loyal to the bitter end, and most of them would happily die in your defense, if it came to that. There’s an old story among certain arson investigators that cats leave if a fire breaks out in the family home. Dogs never leave. I think that pretty much says it all.
• A dog gives you unconditional love. There’s an old saying that if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. A dog will never complain if your house is untidy, if you’re late coming home from work or the movies, the walls need painting or the walks need shoveling. For that you need a husband, or a wife.
• Dogs will happily take your problems on their shoulders. There’s a reason why people bring dogs into senior citizen homes. It’s because dogs take some of the sadness and anxiety of those places onto themselves. A dog will help you through a time of grief by taking some of your burden. It will help you through a time of sickness. It will share your tears with the same loving acceptance that it will share your joy.
There’s an old saying that the first beings you meet in heaven are your favorite dogs. I’ve loved all of my dogs, but here are my favorites:
• Koona, a wolf/husky cross named after a dog in Jack London’s “Call of the Wild.” She was incredibly smart, but we were kicked out of obedience school because she tried to protect me from all the other dogs. She was crazy in the car and bad on a leash, but she was a dependable guardian to the members of her pack. On the day I saw her lying on the floor with my sleeping baby son between her huge paws, I knew that child was the safest baby in the United States.
• Nora, a black lab, what my friend Dave Simpson calls the “Cadillac of Dogs” because of their intelligence and gentle behavior around kids and families. A shelter dog, she tolerated my wife and me, but she was the boys’ dog in every fiber of her being. She slept by their beds to protect them through the night, and refused to leave them to go outside, even if they slept until noon. She pulled them uphill on their bikes all day, and once, jumped out a second-story window because she thought one of them was being threatened by someone they were wrestling with. She lived until 14 but passed on to the great Dog Park in the Sky in the spring of 2008.
• Molly, my current dog. A border collie and shelter dog, she’s sometimes a little prissy, but she’s the smartest and most affectionate of the bunch. Not only does she know a lot of words in English, she knows horse Latin, which few humans understand. In horse Latin, you put a bo between the first vowel and the first consonant in a word, and an ib between the vowels and consonants in the rest of the word. But as in English, there are exceptions, which you only learn by exposure. Molly understands when I say, “Obokibay Miboliby, yibou hibave tibo jibump dibown fribom mybi libap nibow,” which translates in English to “Okay, Molly, you have to jump down from my lap now.” When she hears that phrase in horse Latin, she wakes up and jumps down.
Eat your heart out, Mr. Dog Whisperer.
Gregory Bean is the former executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers. You can reach him at [email protected].