Guy comes into the shelter this last Thursday, a kid, really, maybe doing it for his dad, with a female golden/Labrador cross, two or three years old. He’s embarrassed, not ready for forms and questions, but we get dogs like this all the time, and I’m not letting him off the hook, not letting him out of here before I know he knows that we have to kill a lot of these dogs, dogs like his. Her name is Rita and he says, “Rita, sit!,” like being here is part of her ongoing training. Rita sits halfway and then stands again, and looks at him in that tuned-in way goldens have.
“So …” The kid looks at the forms I’ve got on the counter, like no one told him this was part of the deal. He looks up at the sampler that the sister of the regional boss did for our office: “A MAN KNOWS ONLY AS MUCH AS HE’S SUFFERED—ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI.” He has no answers whatsoever for the form. She’s two, he thinks. Housebroken. Some shots. His dad handled all that stuff. She’s spayed. Reason for Surrender: she plays too rough.
She smashed this huge lamp, the kid says. Of one of those mariners with the pipe and the yellow bad-weather outfit. His dad made it in a ceramics class.
Rita looks over at me with bright interest. The kid adds, “And she’s got this thing with her back legs, she limps pretty bad. The vet said she wouldn’t get any better.”
“What vet?” I ask. I’m not supposed to push too hard, it’s no better if they abandon them on highways, but we get sixty dogs a day here, and if I can talk any of them back into their houses, great. “The vet couldn’t do anything?”
“We don’t have the money,” the kid says.
I ask to see Rita’s limp. The kid’s vague, and Rita refuses to demonstrate. Her tail thumps the floor twice.
I explain the bottom of the form to the kid: when he signs it, he’s giving us permission to have the dog put down if it comes to that.
“She’s a good dog,” he says helpfully. “She’ll probably get someone to like her.”
So I do the animal-shelter Joe Friday, which never works: “Maybe. But we get ten goldens per week. And everybody wants puppies.”
“O.K., well, good luck,” the kid says. He signs something on the line that looks like “Fleen.” Rita looks at him. He takes the leash with him, wrapping it around his forearm. At the door he says, “You be a good girl, now.” Rita pants a little with a neutral expression, processing the information.
It used to be you would get owners all the time who were teary and broken up: they needed to know their dog was going to get a good home, you had to guarantee it, they needed to make their problem yours, so that they could say, Hey, when I left the dog it was fine.
Their dog would always make a great pet for somebody, their dog was always great with kids, their dog always needed A Good Home and Plenty of Room to Run. Their dog, they were pretty sure, would always be the one we’d have no trouble placing in a nice family. And when they got to the part about signing the release form for euthanasia, only once did someone, a little girl, suggest that if it came to that they should be called back, and they’d retrieve the dog. Her mother had asked me if I had any ideas, and the girl suggested that. Her mother said, “I asked him if he had any ideas.”
Now you get kids; the parents don’t even bring the dogs in. Behind the kid with the golden/Lab mix there’s a girl who’s maybe seventeen or eighteen. Benetton top, Benetton skirt, straw-blond hair, tennis tan, she’s got a Doberman puppy. Bizarre dog for a girl like that. Chews everything, she says. She holds the puppy like a baby. As if to cooperate, the dog twists and squirms around in her arms trying to get at the penholder to show what it can do.
Puppies chew things, I tell her, and she rolls her eyes like she knows that. I tell her how many dogs come in every day. I lie. I say we’ve had four Doberman puppies for weeks now. She says, “There’re forms or something, or I just leave him?” She slides him on his back gently across the counter. His paws are in the air and he looks a little bewildered.
“If I showed you how to make him stop chewing things, would you take him back?” I ask her. The Doberman has sprawled around and got to his feet, taller now than we are, nails clicking tentatively on the counter.
“No,” she says. She signs the form, annoyed by a sweep of hair that keeps falling forward. “We’re moving, anyhow.” She pats the dog on the muzzle as a goodbye and he nips at her, his feet slipping and sliding like a skater’s. “God,” she says. She’s mad at me now, too, the way people get mad at those pictures that come in the mail of dogs and cats looking at you with their noses through the chain-link fences: Help Skipper, who lived on leather for three weeks.
When I come back from taking the Doberman downstairs there’s a middle-aged guy at the counter in a wheelchair. An Irish setter circles back and forth around the chair, winding and unwinding the black nylon leash across the guy’s chest. Somebody’s put some time into grooming this dog, and when the sun hits that red coat just right he looks like a million dollars.
I’m not used to wheelchair people. The guy says, “I gotta get rid of the dog.”
What do you say to a guy like that: Can’t you take care of him? Too much trouble? The setter’s got to be eight years old.
“Is he healthy?” I ask.
“She,” he says. “She’s in good shape.”
“Landlord problem?” I say. The guy says nothing.
“What’s her name?” I ask.
“We gotta have a discussion?” the guy says. I think, This is what wheelchair people are like. The setter whines and stands her front paws on the arm of the guy’s chair.
“We got forms,” I say. I put them on the counter, not so close that he doesn’t have to reach. He starts to sit up higher and then leans back.
“What’s it say?” he says.
“Sex,” I say.
“Female,” he says.
Breed? Irish setter. Age? Eleven.
Eleven! I can feel this dog on the back of my neck. On my forehead. I can just see myself selling this eleven-year-old dog to the families that come in looking. And how long has she been with him?
I walk back and forth behind the counter, hoist myself up, flex my legs.
The guy goes, like he hasn’t noticed any of that, “She does tricks.”
“Tricks?” I say.
“Ellie,” he says. He mimes a gun with his forefinger and thumb and points it at her. “Ellie. Reach for the sky.”
Ellie is all attention. Ellie sits, and then rears up, lifting her front paws as high as a dog can lift them, edging forward in little hops from the exertion.
“Reach for the sky, Ellie,” he says.
Ellie holds it for a second longer, like those old poodles on The Ed Sullivan Show, and then falls back down and wags her tail at having pulled it off.
“I need a Reason for Surrender,” I say. “That’s what we call it.”
“Well, you’re not going to get one,” the guy says. He edges a wheel of his chair back and forth, turning it a little this way and that.
“Then I can’t take the dog,” I say.
“Then I’ll just let her go when I get out the door,” the guy says.
“If I were you I’d keep that dog,” I say.
“If you were me you would’ve wheeled this thing off a bridge eleven years ago,” the guy says. “If you were me you wouldn’t be such an asshole. If you were me you would’ve taken this dog, no questions asked.”
We’re at an impasse, this guy and me.
He’s let go of Ellie’s leash, and Ellie’s covering all the corners of the office, sniffing. There’s a woman in the waiting area behind him with a bull-terrier puppy on her lap and the puppy’s keeping a close eye on Ellie.
“Do you have any relatives or whatever who could take the dog?” I ask him.
The guy looks at me. “Do I sign something?” he says.
I can’t help it, when I’m showing him where to sign I can’t keep the words back, I keep thinking of Ellie reaching for the sky: “It’s better this way. We’ll try and find her a home with someone who’s equipped to handle her.”
The guy doesn’t come back at me. He signs the thing and hands me my pen, and says, “Hey Ellie, hey kid,” and Ellie comes right over. He picks up her trailing leash and flops the end onto the counter where I can grab it, and then hugs her around the neck until she twists a little and pulls away.
“She doesn’t know what’s going on,” I say.
He looks up at me and I point, as if to say, “Her.”
The guy wheels the chair around and heads for the door. The woman with the bull terrier watches him go by with big eyes. I can’t see his face, but it must be something. Ellie barks. There’s no way to fix this.
I’ve got A.S.P.C.A. pamphlets unboxed and all over the counter. I’ve got impound forms to finish by today.
“Nobody’s gonna want this dog,” I call after him. I can’t help it.
It’s just me now, at the counter. The woman stands up, holding the bull terrier against her chest, and stops, like she’s not going to turn him over, like whatever her reasons are, they may not be good enough.
| 1987 |
KATE JULIAN
The thinking used to be that a dog would provide security, not require it. But this was before Paris Hilton’s Chihuahua, Tinkerbell, went missing, in 2004. (“They’ll hold it for ransom,” Hilton said at the time. “Everyone knows I’m rich, so they’ll want millions.”) It was before Trouble, Leona Helmsley’s white Maltese, inherited, in quick succession, twelve million dollars, a series of death threats, and a six-figure bodyguard detail. It was before the former Post publisher Ken Chandler and his wife responded to the disappearance of their blond dachshund, Gus, by hiring a publicist and a private detective. And it was before the subject of the Secret Service’s future canine charge became a national fixation.
There are no reliable statistics about dog thefts, either citywide or nationwide, but a couple of years ago Lisa Peterson, of the American Kennel Club, took it upon herself to begin monitoring what she saw as a disturbing trend. Her list of the disappeared includes not only Samantha, a Maltese from Brooklyn; Misha, a bichon frise from Flushing; and Enzo, a Yorkie from Chappaqua (later returned to his owner, former Miss America Vanessa Williams), but also LeeLoo, a poodle from Sugar Land, Texas; Bean, a pit bull from Durham, North Carolina; Pixie, a pug from Bolingbrook, Illinois; and more than two hundred others in twenty-four states.
And then, several weeks ago, dog-napping terror hit the Upper West Side. E-mails began circulating (one subject line: “dognapping attempts in NYC with razor and ransom—get dogs on leashes—happening on West Side”), and flyers were posted at dog runs and veterinary offices and pet stores (“COMMUNITY ALERT: DOGNAPPING attempts on the West Side”). Dog owners, particularly women with small dogs—said to be the prime target—began to panic.
A survey of Upper West Side dog runs and pet stores turned up various versions of the same story. “There’s a two-man team, with one in a gray hoodie on a bicycle who comes by and slices the leash with a razor, then goes away with the dog. The other guy calls you up later on and says, ‘Hey, I found your dog! What’s it worth to you?’ ” said Charlie Allen, the owner of Gotham Pups pet services, who was glumly watching two of his charges (Beezus, a mutt, and Delta, a yellow Labrador) romp across the dog run on West Eighty-first Street the other day. “It’s completely unpleasant.”
Most people were saying that the dognappers made their ransom demands by calling the number on a stolen dog’s tags. Either that or they waited for a reward sign to be posted. “I think maybe in this neighborhood there would be more purebreds and more people who would pay a ransom,” Jason Frix (Billy Bob, bullmastiff) said. “Crime increases in tough times.” People said there’d been dognappings in other nice neighborhoods. “I heard Chelsea,” someone said. “Also Battery Park City.”
Marilyn Pasekoff (Hogan, German shepherd), who was walking in Riverside Park, said that the dognappers might be supplying research labs. “My vet gave me a book on what a burgeoning industry that is—collecting dogs and giving them to laboratories for experiments.” And Allison Rowey (Billy, Pomeranian) had heard that the dogs were being stolen for illegal dogfights. “They’ve been getting smaller dogs to practice the big dogs on,” she said.
The police hadn’t received a single dognapping report. “It’s been two weeks now, and no one’s come in,” Officer Clark Tiger, of the Twentieth Precinct, said. “Nothing like that’s ever happened in this neighborhood before.” But, still, local residents were focussing on preventive measures. Emily Emmett (Dahlia, Border terrier) said she’d heard people say, “Don’t leave your dog outside Starbucks. And don’t use leashes that people can slice through.” Emmett said that she hadn’t seen a dog left unattended anywhere on the Upper West Side in at least two weeks. She had bought a thick leather leash to replace her dog’s lightweight nylon one.
“I’m paranoid,” Becca Yuré (Hudson, mutt) said as she left the Pet Health Store on Amster-
dam, having just picked out a heavy new leash. “I almost bought two, so that if they cut one he’ll still be on one.” The store was selling lots of leashes. Meanwhile, back in Riverside Park, Penny Mandel (Becky and Polly, cockapoos) said, “I am aware when someone comes by on a bike—I keep an eye on them, and pull the leash tight.”
Taking pet dogs hostage is not a new idea. As the social reformer Henry Mayhew wrote, in 1861, it was a popular racket in Victorian London. Nappers used a piece of liver or a bitch in heat to lure dogs from their owners, whereupon financial negotiations would begin. “They steal fancy dogs ladies are fond of—spaniels, poodles, and terriers,” Mayhew wrote. Among them was Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cocker spaniel, Flush, who was snatched and ransomed no fewer than three times. Each time, Browning dutifully paid up.
But why, in the absence of a single documented case, had a whole neighborhood in contemporary Manhattan collectively fixated on dog thievery? Corey Robin, a political-science professor at Brooklyn College and the author of Fear: The History of a Political Idea, blamed the financial crisis. He suggested that the scare reflected “the displacement of economic anxiety.” “The class that’s been hit the hardest is the financial sector. And if it’s small dogs that are well cared for that are the targets—well, they’re a sort of boutiquey item,” he said. “A small dog creates a tremendous amount of emotional attachment, but at the same time it is a luxury item—and that’s being taken away.”
| 2009 |
“Of course, all the good ones are fixed.”