The Dog House

Beau was a boon to Daniele because she wanted a dog and now she had one. He was a boon to Jon because now the dog was the inept, youngest member of the family. I liked him because he provided easy, continuous company - a free lancer's dream friendship. Rachel liked him because he was cute.

The main thing about him was that he made us all laugh. It was like living with Stan Laurel - every single thing he did was hilarious in some way. Climbing onto his beanbag to nap was funny - it might take thirty seconds at the minimum, as he circles, crisscrosses, tries one posture, them another, then finally settles on one that seems far and away the least comfortable-looking of those he tried, with his head on the floor and his butt sticking way up in the air.

Beau's humor is usually physical. Unlike outwardly muscular breeds like a boxer or a beagle, whose parts fit together fairly tightly, the poodle is slack and loose. Beau can lie on the floor in such a way that his back legs can be pointing west, his forelegs can be pointing south and east, and his head points true north. His legs are so long that just the act of crossing or uncrossing them following a long, tongue-splayed yawn seems impossible, like watching a very tall ballerina do a pas de deux, or a magician with extra-long sleeves produce an ace in hand.

The simplest thing can amuse. When Beau sits normally it is like a long-legged Sphinx. It seems impossible his legs could fold up so neatly in the rear, and his arms could stretch so far into the room.

Or he can sleep on his side, no part of him rising more than five inches from the floor. If a person enters the room, he will lift his head like a periscope. The body remains collapsed in a horizontal heap while the head swivels in a slow vertical to see what's going on. The head does not seem to belong to the body.

Yet another posture is his supplicant's position. The Sphinx lowers his head so that his chin rests on the floor, while tucking his forearms in. Now he is in perfect three-point alignment - paw, chin, paw. It is a humble pose, all the funnier because the dog is so often so haughty and disdainful.

The funniest thing about Beau, though, is not physical, but the attitude that he projects. There is no possibility that he understands very much about the world he lives in. Yet he takes it all in colossal stride, as if it were his due. He is vain not about his looks, which can be regal one moment and ridiculous the next, but about his perceived station. He has no self-esteem problems. Indeed, he thinks so wonderfully well of himself that comeuppance is never more than a eyeblink away - a head bumped on a tabletop, a newly-dryered sock statically stuck to his hindquarters, the sight of him proudly wearing a life vest before stepping into, and over the side of, a canoe.

And he has his own humor. He loves the sound of laughter around him. Hearing human laughter prompts his own version of laugher - a grin, even in cold weather, and a vigorous flailing of tail.

But what is important is that he is funny to all of us. Jonnie and Daniele, so often at odds, are laughing hysterically at the same thing. Rachel is finding the dog the perfect comic relief after a long day helping people at her clinic. I, who spent the whole day with the dog asleep beside me, am laughing at what looks like the performance of a lifetime - but is just him going back to sleep.

She stressed even temper, good looks, structural solidity. She never told me what a high-maintenance creature a poodle is.

I am someone who cannot own clothes that need ironing, or cook the kind of oatmeal that takes five full minutes.

And I bought a dog who needs so many things. He needs exercise and stimulation, so I take him for daily two-mile walks along the Mississippi. He needs about $1,000 worth of veterinary care every year, in shots and various interventions. He needs attention, so I am forever chatting him up, telling him what a good boy he is, and what a good dog, and so forth. He needs frequent correction for doing the wrong thing, after which he needs frequent reassurance that just because he did a bad thing doesn't mean he's a bad dog. Hate the sin, love the sinner, is our motto.

I bought him thinking I could feed him dog food - wrong. In the first nine months of his life I bought every imaginable brand of dog and puppy chow, in bags and in cans. He wouldn't eat any of it.

I would estimate that over that period he ate no more than 30 pounds of dog food. It does not take a mathematician to see that there must have been a secondary food source over that period. By now you must have a clue who that second source was. The kids, of course.

Against all the classic warnings -- don't go into the woodshed in a slasher movie, don't be the anonymous crewman in a Star Trek beamdown party, don't get the gremlins wet -- none is more potent than don't feed the dog at the table.

When the kids do this, at family dinner, I get very cross. I have warned them of the seriousness of inculcating bad habits in the dog. He will get addicted to human food and abandon his own food, and spend the rest of his life on a feckless quest for spaghetti, salami sandwich crusts, and French crullers. The way to enforce good eating habits is through rigorous discipline.

What I don't tell the kids is that every meal I have with the dog at home alone, when they are off at school mastering the requirements for the 21st century, I share everything I eat with Beau fifty-fifty. Sandwiches. Scrambled eggs. Pastries.

In the early months, I fed him the wrong things, and too soon for his growing digestive system. I ate yogurt as a midmorning snack in my office, and I gave him the cups to lick clean. He no only licked them clean, but he methodically crunched them into unrecognizable tatters. The only sign of his crime was the constant crust of something that looked like Elmer's Glue-All on his six hundred dollar nose.

Why did I go against the universal admonition against sharing food with a dog?

I blame my status as home worker. If you see your dog only for a few hours a day, you can get away with acting like Captain Bligh. But when he is right beside you the entire day, waking and sleeping, it is hard to pull such an act off.

Our days were an interweaving of one another's needs. First we would meet his need for a short walk. Then we would meet my need for two hours of work time. Then we would meet a mutual need for a ten o'clock snack.

We would stand in front of the cupboard, each of us looking in it for something good. It would begin innocently enough, with me offering him a dog biscuit while I ate a graham cracker. But soon it became apparent that he liked graham crackers better than dog biscuits. Hold them up to the light, and they seem similar enough. Soon you are enjoying everything together, and rationalizing it all. Pumpkin pie counts as a vegetable, right?

It just doesn't seem right that I should have an entire peanut butter and jelly sandwich and Beau, looking up at me with the eyes of desire, should have none. And it made me feel like a big man to rip off half of whatever I was having and handing it to him. Is that lese majeste or noblesse oblige? I could never get them straight. I know it's not droit du seigneur, because I waived mine.

It was worse when we went out. When I went through the drive-in bank window, Beau would get all excited, jump from the back seat to the front and back, and bark crazily into the teller's microphone. I think he was ordering a burger.

Worst of all, giving a 52-pound dog half of everything I eat, meant he gobbled up his half in an eighteenth of a second and comes back for more. Many's the time he got the lion's share of a Big Boy, and I could only curse the dying of the light.

When I spoke to conventional veterinarians about diet, they seemed to have no knowledge of poodle tastes. They told me, essentially, "Feed him the tried and true. It's been tested for years and we know it sustains life."

I would have fed him the tried and true if he had eaten more than a crumb of it. When I put that stuff in front of him, he would look at it, then at me, then give me a typical poodle expression. Translation: "You've got to be kidding." I didn't just suspect he would rather eat what's inside the vacuum cleaner bag than what's inside his dog bowl; I had proof.

I also suspected that maybe the "tried and true" was all a ruse. Stuffies, or whatever other brand you buy, is just baked soybean crud. The reason we feed it to dogs may have more to do with the fact that soybean farmers need markets, and it's damn cheap, at $12 for a 50 pound bag.

Things finally came to a head, when I took Beau to the alternative healing veterinarian Brigitte recommended to me months before. The reason I had not visited before, besides its being located in Uptown, a chi-chi neighborhood in south Minneapolis, was my discomfort with the gnostic arts. But I was worried about Beau, and decided to make an exception.

An attractive veterinary assistant named Les interviewed me. After we made the usual pleasantries, and filled in a medical questionnaire, she eyed me up and down, and eyed Beau, who was lying on a braid rug, up and down. Then she tapped her pencil against her lip and said. "I'll bet I understand your problem."

"About my dog eating?" I asked.

"No, the larger problem," she told me. "Let me describe what kind of owner I think you are, and you tell me if I'm wrong."

"OK," I said. I like games.

"You are a really nice guy. [Yes.] You're very sensitive to your dog's emotions. [Yes!] You seek closeness to him above compliance with your rules. [That's exactly right!] And you're lots of fun to be with." [By George she's got it!]

"Well," I said, carefully, "You're warm."

"Poor Beau," she said rather sadly, and stroked his ear. "We'll let Dr. Sommers devise a new routine for you."

"What is he eating?" he wanted to know.

I made a clean breast of it. Eggs, chicken, crackers, yogurt, rice, spaghetti, breakfast cereal - everything I ate.

"Excellent," said the doctor. "There are much worse diets than that."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Think about it," he said. "Your dog is eating almost the things it would get if it were in the wild, scavenging to survive. Eggs, meat, grains, and whatever else it can find. There are better diets, but this contains vitamins and variety."

"Wow," I said.

Dr. Sommers handed me a chart showing the relative moral worth of different dog diets. The top moral value is eating prey, and the lowest moral value is buying from Ken-l-Ration, which is made by an evil corporation that may be linked via directorateships to tobacco and arms dealers. By feeding your dog Friskies, or Stuffies, you are contributing to imperialism and poor nutrition. The second highest moral value, after eating prey, was his own ready-mix.

"I'm going to put Beau on a diet we created here at the clinic," he said. "It uses a mix we make out of oatmeal and other grains. You mix it with fresh, raw meat - hamburger, turkey, horsemeat, whatever you like - and that's it."

Dr. Sommers sold me many hundreds of dollars worth of remedies that had no effect, including ear treatments and stomach purgatives. But I will swear by his meat-and-cereal diet. Beau has been on it for almost a year, and he likes it. It's more trouble than most dog foods, because you have to have red meat handy. But because he likes it, he isn't always hungry for other food. Because he filled up on it, we were able to stop feeding him from our plates.

It is an anxiety of infinite regression. You are anxious about the dog's anxiety. The dog may be anxious on the merits, but its anxiety is magnified by your anxiety. And so on. Whose anxiety came first, is a matter for psychiatrists, human and canine, to resolve. And that will be costly.

I have always been anxious about my dogs. I put my career on hold for a couple of years with Casi in my twenties, because I could not bear to leave her alone all day while I adjusted claims or whatever. The claims weren't worth the pain.

When Beau came into our lives, I wasn't much better. As a puppy, I felt he was a guest in our home, and it was my job as host to allay his fears. I was also afraid he would hold my house hostage if I left. If I wanted my Roger Maris-autographed baseball back, I better be back soon.

As you can see, I gave him the run of the house too soon. He should not have had that leverage over me. But he did.

What saved me was Beau. Yes, he hated me to go. But something civilized in him prevented him from wreaking revenge on my gathered goods. If I left him with Rachel, he would howl at the door I departed from, for ten minutes or more. But if I left him alone, he just shut up and went to sleep until I returned.

In other words, his histrionics were for our benefit. He had no personal use for them.

It is an anxiety of infinite regression. You are anxious about the dog's anxiety. The dog may be anxious on the merits, but its anxiety is magnified by your anxiety. And so on. Whose anxiety came first, is a matter for psychiatrists, human and canine, to resolve. And that will be costly.

I have always been anxious about my dogs. I put my career on hold for a couple of years with Casi in my twenties, because I could not bear to leave her alone all day while I adjusted claims or whatever. The claims weren't worth the pain.

When Beau came into our lives, I wasn't much better. As a puppy, I felt he was a guest in our home, and it was my job as host to allay his fears. I was also afraid he would hold my house hostage if I left. If I wanted my Roger Maris-autographed baseball back, I better be back soon.

As you can see, I gave him the run of the house too soon. He should not have had that leverage over me. But he did.

What saved me was Beau. Yes, he hated me to go. But something civilized in him prevented him from wreaking revenge on my gathered goods. If I left him with Rachel, he would howl at the door I departed from, for ten minutes or more. But if I left him alone, he just shut up and went to sleep until I returned.

In other words, his histrionics were for our benefit. He had no personal use for them.

I began writing this memoir during a weeklong family vacation in the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota in August, 1997. I was very concerned because we had left Beau for the first time ever with a third party, Brigitte's daughter Lorraine, who had actually bred Beau and his siblings.

Lorraine lived just east of Saint Paul's downtown, in a house in which many of the rooms had been converted to dog apartments. Each room has one breeding male, or two or three females, or a mother and a litter of however many pups. Instead of doors, the rooms have hardware-cloth gates, like chicken coops. All during my vacation, I visualized Beau sitting in this room, staring out the window, and across the prairie and forests of Minnesota, to me, sitting pining in my windswept cabin.

I missed him.

It happened so suddenly. He watched us pack for several hours, and his concern grew as he saw us haul our pet rats and guinea pigs in their aquarium tanks out to the car, and then off to a friend's house for safekeeping. He did not know whether to climb in the station wagon and come along, to experience whatever fate awaited the rodents, or to stay behind, and to experience the awful fate of not being with us.

After dumping the rats off, it was his turn. We grabbed a toy he liked -- a stuffed schnauzer with the bead-eyes chewed off -- a leash, a bag of dog food and a handful of snacks and rawhide chews -- and drove to Lorraine's. The good news is that his brother and sisters were there. The bad news is that Beau may have seen them, but I never did -- Lorraine kept her operations very hush-hush.

All week I wrote rapturously about my dog - it all got edited out later - and I planned to end the story with a dramatic reunion at Lorraine's door. But when the vacation ended and we drove back to Saint Paul, Beau departed from the script. Instead of jumping joyfully into my arms, he got into a fight with another poodle, envious that Beau had spent every night in Lorraine's bed with her.

Beau was bit. Lorraine was also bit, and bitterly reproached herself for not locking up the poodle in question before discharging Beau. She needed twelve stitches. Beau spent the night in fever and shock, and in the morning, he was himself again, and home.

She was right. I did leave him alone several times a week, and I know it did him no harm. But I could not find time in my life for swimming, which I don't enjoy, or for skiing, which is just walking anyway. I felt put-upon - what was so bad about getting exercise and giving the dog what he needed? Besides, I liked the time "alone," just me, my thoughts, and the dog sniffing alongside.

More ominous was the issue of me taking the dog away from Daniele. One night, Daniele had a sleepover at her friend Betsy's house. It was the first night she had been away since we got Beau. When it was time to turn out the lights that night, I opened the door to Rachel's and my bedroom, and Beau traipsed in and flopped down next to my side of the bed. I felt disloyal taking him in, yet he had to be someplace.

In the weeks ahead, whenever the door was left open to him, he found to his way to my bedside.

For many weeks, she was angry with me, thinking I had deliberately made away with the love of her life.

A free gift awaits visitors to Michael Finley's web site at http://mfinley.com. Mike is co-author of this spring's eagerly waited book Transcompetition.