A SHAGGY STORY ABOUT A DOG

The only time when I do not tell the truth is when I can tell a harmless joke.

So it was when my girlfriend at the time and I decided that we wanted to elevate a beautiful blend—female Border Collie/Spaniel—with a hi-falutin’ “breed” name.  Marianne was fascinated both by Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Albigensian Crusade against Aquitainian heretics.  So we hit upon the name “Ellie” and a breed “Aquitanian Hunter.”  That was the easy part.

The harder part was making up a history of the breed and an account of my having such an exotic breed.  It went like this:  Most of the breed were wiped out in the Albigensian Crusade, but a few survived and are closely held in remote mountain villages where Albigensian descendants still use them for sheepherding.  Ellie came to me as a “reverse” dowry gift from my future son-in-law, with distant relatives in the area.  I was required to have her spayed so that the breed would remain an exclusively French one.

The lie worked the first time tried.  In a Potomac riverside park in Alexandria, VA, two women with French poodles ran up to us as we walked Ellie, who they said was simply beautiful.  When they asked about her breed, I told the story.  One woman said that she had never heard of it.  In the Washington tradition of one-upmanship, the other said that she had.  When they left, Marianne turned to me and said, “You are a caution!”

And it kept on working.  A few years later, walking with Ellie by Horseshoe Lake in Cleveland Heights, OH, I met a woman walking a Vizsla.  I praised her beautiful dog, then asked why she had such an unusual breed.  She said that her husband wanted a breed few people had.  After a pause, embarrassed to have said nothing about Ellie but afraid to prompt an admission about a dog whom she probably deemed a mongrel, she hesitantly asked about her breed.  I told my story.  Her reaction was priceless: she couldn’t wait to tell her husband; it would just kill him!

A HORSE STORY ABOUT A GOOD SPORT

I have always had a special way with animals, and communing with them is part of it.  My mother told a story from the summer of 1943, when I was half way to 4 years old.  A neighbor across the street phoned to ask whether she knew that I was sitting on the sill of an open, second-floor window and dangling my legs over the side.  My mother came to the master bedroom door, found it closed, and paused, worried that opening it might startle me into falling.  She assumed casualness when she opened the door and calm when she asked me what I was doing.  My answer: “I’m talking with the birds.”  I quote her accurately and believe that she quoted me accurately because I claimed to be talking “with,” not “to,” the birds.  A nice story from my childhood.

You can easily accept that I talk to my pets—anyone can, and most do—but you can also easily doubt any suggestion that they know what I am saying, much less “talk” with me.  You would be so wrong.  Fast forward 65 years to a stunning exchange with Edgar, at the time, my favorite cat.  In his early years, he and my other cat slept in the garage.  Before bedtime, I would cuddle him on his back, rock him in my arms as if he were a baby, and tell him what a good cat he was and how much I loved him.  One night, carrying him to the garage in this way and without altering my voice, I asked whether he had any idea of what I was saying about loving him.  On hearing my question, he, who had been looking toward the garage door, snapped his head to stare directly, intently, into my eyes, with a look which answered, “Are you crazy; do you think for one minute that I do not know?”  To say that I was stunned understates the effect of his uncanny response.  I put him in the garage, fixed myself my one evening drink, and collapsed into my reading chair to recover.

I had not known that there was a name for someone like me until about 10 years earlier.  While Marianne and I were watching Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998), she labeled me.  In a particularly poignant scene, the protagonist Tom Booker waits patiently in a field until runaway Pilgrim, physically damaged, psychologically wounded, returns to him.  She elbowed me and whispered, “That’s you.”  I am pretty sure that she referred to the man, not the horse, because she knew about me from watching me with some partly trained horses on her parents’ place in Tennessee.

Now is the time to tell my one and only horse story.  In the summer of 1960, I was a 20-year-old counselor at a camp which I had attended for three summers in my mid-teens.  (Allow me to put in a plug for The Prairie Trek Expedition of the Cottonwood Gulch Foundation, which my son also attended.)  In those years, the camp had paid a wrangler and rented horses from the nearby Elkins ranch, near Grants, NM.  About that time, Mike Todd, Elizabeth Taylor’s third husband, died in a plane crash on the ranch; as a result, the discovery of a large uranium deposit led to a change in its business.  The camp hired another ranch to provide a wrangler and horses.  When its horses, variably tamed and trained, arrived, I sat on the corral fence and watched them bite, bump, and kick their way to a social structure.  I wanted to ride the top horse (I do not like lines).

That evening, a sliced apple in hand, I walked to the corral to meet my horse, whom I named “Sport.”  As I entered the corral, all the horses ran to its opposite side and, with their heads together over the railing, showed me their backsides.  “Sport,” I commanded, “come here”; no movement.  Again: “Sport, come here”; again, no movement.  And again: “Sport, come here”; third-time charm.  Sport had no idea that he had a name, much less that one, but he either responded as the top horse or knew (“vibes”) that I was calling him.  He raised and turned his head, his eyes pop-eyed, to look at me.  Then he ducked it again among the heads at the rail.  When I called his name and gave the command a fourth time, he backed out, walked over to me, and took the first half of the apple from my hand.  When he started to turn back, I commanded him to stay for the second half.  He took it, whirled, and returned to the herd.  Day one.

Days two and three were quite different, though their pattern was the same.  After breakfast and after lunch, I went to the corral.  I called Sport, he came over to me, and the wrangler and I saddled him.  I mounted him, the wrangler opened the gate, and off we went.  For what seemed like the entire morning or afternoon, but was probably about half an hour, Sport did everything he could think of doing (and probably a few things which he did not have to think of doing) to get me off his back.  I had ridden Eastern as a child and Western as a camper, but breaking a semi-wild horse was, as they say in the military, above my pay grade.  Still, I managed.  Suddenly, in our fourth session, Sport stopped; he did not surrender but accepted me as a worthy rider.  We were inseparable thereafter.  We enjoyed each other’s company on morning and afternoon rides with the campers—the wrangler allowed me to lead on the top horse, and he brought up the rear—and by ourselves on twilight rides under moon and stars.

When the corral gate broke open one night, all of the horses but two departed for the ridge above the camp; Sport and the wrangler’s horse stayed.  When the wrangler and I discovered the breakout, we saddled up for the round up.  Sport knew what needed to be done with or without any suggestion from me.  When he leapt over logs or cut around trees, he took care—I know that I took make-sure care—that I did not hit my head against an overhanging branch or smash my knee against a tree.

The bond between Sport and me was strong, and, as it turned out, his feelings for me were exclusive.  When I left Sport to take a group of campers on a three-week hiking and camping trip in the Four Corners area, the arts-and-crafts counselor told the wrangler that she wanted to ride him.  The wrangler advised against it; she insisted.  He explained that he thought that Sport would not let anyone but me ride him, that he himself would not try; she persisted.  So he saddled Sport, helped her up, and opened the gate.  It took him only a few seconds and a few steps to throw her into a tree, break her arm, and give her a concussion.  No one rode Sport until I returned.  I pondered how I could keep him, but, as a rising junior in college and the son in a family with no horse experience after the automobile came into use, there was no possibility.  For more than 60 years, I have often thought fondly of Sport, wondered what kind of life he had after that summer, and hoped that he found another rider whose company he could enjoy.

This story relates an example of the kind of bonding which can develop between man and beast.  It began with my setting up what I call leadership of a domestic animal, an approach mixing firmness of purpose with gentleness of manner, but it settled into a reciprocal relationship of trust, respect, and affection.  I knew what I wanted in a horse, found it in Sport, and liked him; he found what he wanted in a rider and liked me.

A CHANGE OF PACE: A DOG STORY--MEETING MIRANDA

 After last week’s scolding, I think that a change of pace is in order.  I believe that most of you are almost as tired of reading (or discarding) my blogs on varieties of police force and legal community deficiencies in Las Cruces as I am of writing them.  At the risk of offending some, I am going to prune future distributions to those, public officials excepted, who I guess can accept the moral as well as the mellow of this and future dog stories.  If I guess wrongly, correct me, and accept my apologies.  All stories--some about cats, horses, and parakeets--I  take from my forthcoming book On the Same Team: Dog Owners Coaching Their Best Friends.

On March 6, 2015, Miranda and I met each other.  I was at the Animal Service Center of Mesilla Valley, the pound in Las Cruces, NM, to get a replacement license for another dog.  For a few years, I had had in the back of my mind a desire to get a female German Shepherd.  As on previous visits, while I waited for the staff to do the paperwork for the license, I went into the large-dog room with many pens to see if she was there.  She was not.  Instead, the dogs who were there either barked and whined for me to take them home or barked and growled for me to get away from their turf, with one exception.  One dog came to the front of her pen, sat, and looked at me with affectionate but appraising eyes which  unmistakably said, “you’ll do just fine.”  I looked at her and said, “I promise to try.”  While we waited on the additional paperwork, one member of the staff asked if she could take our picture; she told me that she could see something special between us.  I knelt on one knee with my arms holding Miranda snug against me; her tongue hung out—a sign of contentment—and her eyes had a different message: “I got my man.”  And I sometimes refer to her as my “girlfriend.”

 

It was love and bonding at first sight, but I checked my impulses against information in her jacket.  Miranda—I no longer recall her original name—was about a year-and-a-half old, weighed about 45 pounds, and labeled—wrongly, as I knew but kept silent—a Labrador/Shepherd mix.  She had been delivered to the pound by a middle-aged woman and her tween-age son two weeks earlier.  When I got her home, I accepted her age, knew that she was underweight, and rightly identified her breed.  At the pound, I recognized that she is a hound; at home, I identified her as an American Foxhound, a breed known in the horse-hound-hunt circles in Maryland and Virginia.  Breed characteristics are loving, sweet, gentle, energetic, and headstrong.  The word is that you do not give one of this breed a command; you make a request and hope for compliance.  Foxhounds are scenthounds (unlike Greyhounds and Whippets, who are sighthounds); when they fix on a smell, they disregard all else, commands or requests.  And, as my father would say, they can smell a small fart in a strong wind from a mile away.

From this information, I imagined Miranda’s life story to that date.  As a puppy, she was adorable and oh-mommy-please! irresistible.  Mommy was a divorcee and wanted a distraction for her son when she relocated from the Mid-Atlantic states.  Mommy went to work, sonny went to school, Miranda grew up and went to work on the apartment.  Thus, she was deposited at the pound.

Miranda was bonded to me—after all, she picked me out—and fit right into the pack at home.  To its credit, the pound had me fetch my other dogs, introduce them to her, and ensure compatibility, but I knew that all would be well.  That Friday evening and Saturday morning and evening, I walked her on a retractable leash with my off-leash dogs on the shorter loop around the floodplain and farm fields below my house.  For a moment on Sunday morning, I had her on leash until I realized that, though she did not know her new name, she would not run away off leash.  I was right and wrong.  When I unleashed her, she immediately raced off about 80 yards along the flood containment berm at the western edge of the floodplain.  There she stopped, turned to see where I was, and waited for me and the rest of the pack to continue the loop walk home.  To this day, she has her ways on walks.  Sometimes, she stays with me and the pack; sometimes, she goes off on jaunts.  Sometimes, if I sense her wanderlust, I call her to come with us; it is fifty-fifty whether she will.  Half the time, she comes along; half the time, she stops, makes it clear by look and body language that she knows what she is supposed to do but is not ready to go home, and goes off “mall shopping,” as I put it.  To save trouble for anyone who might catch her and call me, I put a tag on her collar which reads, “Let me be/Let me roam/Set me free/I’ll go home.”  She always does.

This story of Miranda and Michael has many messages and morals, but one message/moral should be clear above all others: our relationship of trust, respect, and love enables our arrangements.  I go easy on command and control, rely instead on coaching and, in her case, a bit of coaxing, and negotiate.  Within the limits of her headstrong nature, she seeks to please and comply .  We accommodate each other.  I would not change a thing about her, even if I could.

THE NEW NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH

A number of years ago, I wrote a blog “The Second American Civil War” (2013-02-16).*  It is a dystopian vision, more military than political, of an America divided into not only hostile camps, but also belligerent combatants.  The 6 January assault on the U.S. Congress is a fine scenario add-on.  But, like all such visions, it had its astigmatisms, most notably, an omission filled in by an autocratic Trump.  Neither I nor anyone else imagined that a former president would urge, and continue to urge, intimidated minions and deranged followers in the Republican Party to believe his lie that the election was stolen from him.  Although I saw state governments under its control enacting legislation crippling the right and the means to vote—nothing new here—I did not foresee federal and state Republican officials legislating to overturn elections of Democrats receiving a majority of the votes.

What do these neo-fascist Republicans imagine the response will be?  What can we imagine their response to our response will be?  Will Democrats and others quietly accept second-class political status?  Probably, but who knows?  My revised vision of the civil war would also pitch neighborhood against neighborhood and neighbor against neighbor strife.  Such conflicts in urban areas have been commonplaces in American urban history, especially in cities which have experienced large influxes of “others” by immigration or relocation.  For instance, fights between Irish ruffians and Jewish thugs on the streets of New York were almost daily occurrences in New York in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries.  They can be discounted as merely the energetic expressions of adjustments by newcomers in urban ethnic enclaves and minority groups.

But in this Second American Civil War, the battlefields will extend to the suburbs.  It will involve house-to-house hostilities, with many neighbors silently accepting attacks on the targets of the White Christian Republicans, even in Las Cruces.  A few doors down lives a couple of Trump-supporting bigots who do not like Jews.  Fine: I pass them by in contemptuous silence; they angrily berate me as an “arrogant shit.”  What they do not know is that I know that they are the anonymous callers who summoned police because, so they lied, I let my dogs out to run loose and let their feces pile up in my yard and stink up the neighborhood.  They represent the New Neighborhood Watch.

I am not going to regurgitate the details of the history of my case.  Instead, I relate the responses of my “neighborhood.”  Within a week of five false charges by a 10-year LCPD veteran who saw a Star of David over my garage door before he began his investigation, I did two things.  I filed a formal complaint with IA and sent an email suggesting an antisemitic motive to Councilor Gandara, Police Chief Gallagher, and two others.  I got no response.  In 21 blogs in the 22 months since, I mentioned antisemitism once and otherwise left this suggested motive to the LCPD to deal with by counseling.  So I pursued my complaint by challenging only the false charges to expose the LCPD for its shortcomings and trying to get them retracted and purged from my record.  To no avail.  Although an internal IA memorandum states that the charges lack evidence or proof of violations, the LCPD refuses to come clean and clear my record.  Instead, it uses specious rationales to justify spurious charges, to maintain them as if true, to keep them on file for some future opportunity to smear me.  The IA close-out letter says nothing about the false charges.  Meanwhile, I used blogs to keep my “neighborhood” informed.

An admission that the five charges are false would raise the question of motive, and, given concerted resistance to an admission, the answer of antisemitism looks irrefutable and looms large, ugly, and damaging to the reputation of the city.  Rather than deal with one antisemitic officer and isolate the stain, the LCPD, City Hall, and City Council, with the local media in cahoots, chose to resist or ignore the obvious and thereby strengthen suspicion of antisemitism.  In a meeting with the new City Manager (Councilor Bencomo and commentator Peter Goodman by Zoom), Pili said that I deserved a detailed apology, but, afterwards, Law Director Vega-Brown got him back in line and put the kibosh on it.  Bencomo and Goodman said and did nothing.

The “neighborhood” response supports this silence.  Neither the Mayor, Gandara, Bencomo nor other member of City Council has asked appropriate questions or taken appropriate action.  Peter Goodman, though he toyed with the idea of my appearing on his radio show to discuss my complaint and case in the context of police reform, did a bait-and-switch program to discuss dogs.  Only two of my “neighbors” have spoken to me; only one has spoken to Council, and it ignored him.  No one else wants to address what has evolved as a police cover-up and a “neighborhood” stone-walling.  This silent tolerance of likely antisemitism signifies its widespread support by my “neighbors” in the city of three crosses.

Now imagine those same neighbors—a new Neighborhood Watch—some time hence, when Republican neo-fascists are suppressing opposition, phoning in a complaint that I possess bomb-making materials.  You know what the ATF or FBI agents will do.  I shall let you finish the scenario.  Now imagine similar scenarios involving unreformed, even more politicized police targeting not only Jews, but also Muslims, blacks, Asian-Americans, LGBTQs, Hispanic immigrants; then “antifas,” Greens, Progressives; then members of ACLU, NAACP, NARAL, NOW, SPLC; and other “terrorist” or “un-American” groups, throughout the country.  These scenarios predict and depict local skirmishes in the Second American Civil War, the demise of democracy, and the death of the dream.

* Anyone wanting a copy of this blog should request one.