from "HEARTBREAK BUTTE"

The Heart Butte town dogs were unknown to me, but the teacherage dogs had distinct personalities. When I first came, Shunka, which is Sioux for "dog," felt he was the alpha-male. A husky mix, he ran loose, making puppies and chasing off intruding males. Two other vaguely shepherd dogs were kept in their yards. One small cringing female, a black dog with brown eyebrows, attached herself to Mrs. Marlboro, who got her spayed and named her "Kiki." (I called her "Keeka," meaning "wait now" in Blackfeet, which annoyed Mrs. M.) A female blue kelpie, valuable for working cattle, raised a batch of pups under Mr. Z's trailer. The Lederhosens soon brought in a foolish female shepherd mix. At first the dogs didn't make as much trouble in my life as a big yellow tomcat who came visiting, unwanted by me or my spayed calico cat. But pretty soon the tomcat mysteriously died. 

Then a big white dog appeared. Maybe he had a little blood from the huge white Kuvasc dogs sometimes used around there to guard sheep from wolves. To get rid of him, he was given to Augie, a student who lived down in the village and unwisely remarked it would be nice to have a dog. But the big male, now named "Augie," refused to stay in town. Churchill, the athletic director, took a liking to him and began feeding him the scraps from the mail-order Omaha frozen steaks he favored. Churchill called the dog "King." 

One day King and Shunka engaged in an archetypal battle for dominance. All day they alternated between slashing at each other and taking short rests. Once they fought their way into and then back out of one of the garages, leaving long spatters of dog blood on the walls. Their snouts were bloodied and their sides were streaked. No one tried to intervene and anyway nothing short of shooting one of the dogs would have worked. We all, teachers and students, kept track of what was happening but didn't stand around watching. In the end King crunched Shunka's foot hard enough to break the bones. The loser went crying off with his foot held up. The kids were glad because Shunka was known to bite them. The men were secretly proud of the shining white King. The women were glad that Shunka would be staying home for a while because they liked to walk over the grassy hills and Shunka always insisted on coming, but chased cows which made the teachers unwelcome. 

I was fond of King, too. But when the Lederhosen's moved to the single teacherage next door to me with their female, now with a puppy by King, the three dogs covered the yard with droppings and leapt into my car trunk to steal groceries unless I closed it after each trip to my door. King got into the habit of sleeping on my doormat leaning against the storm door, so that I had to heave him to his feet to get in or out. I began to be annoyed. My disposition was not improved by Mr. Lederhosen's attachment to loud musical instruments on which he never played whole melodies, but only intermittent snatches as the mood struck him. I was beginning to get cabin fever-- shack batty. A familiar malady in those parts, but mine came from wanting to be even more alone. 

The Lederhosens gave birth to a baby. Their first goat, fond of riding around on the front seat of the pickup next to Mr. Lederhosen, was once transported in the back of the vehicle, where it found a bag of dry rice and foundered during the ride. Their second goat, a sweet little angora nanny, was tethered to her goathouse alongside the teacherage. Mrs. Lederhosen was standing next to the goat, holding her baby, when King came out of nowhere and tore the throat out of the goat, killing it on the spot and traumatizing the gentle mother. Later, calves began to be killed and King was shot on the scene of slaughter by one of the students whose family owned the calves. 

Probably nothing divided the outsiders from the insiders so clearly as their reaction to the death of the King. Country people hardly paused to notice King was gone. More dogs were always coming. City people thought that if someone just tried enough, they could find some way to end violence, prevent bloodshed, and stop the dominance of alpha-animals. These dogs are my metaphor for the conduct of administration in Heart Butte. Likewise, the community would make attacks on the administrators, one after another, believing the supply of new superintendents was endless. The teachers believed that reform was possible and tried to organize committees, write letters, and make plans. This got them fired. 

The cynical conviction that underlay much of the Heart Butte political scene was, as Churchill put it, "Big dogs eat first." The administration and the community families were pitted in a battle for dominance as surely as Shunka and King. The goal was economic security, which only the school could provide in this tiny reservation hamlet. This dynamic was so strong that everything else became scenery and every kind of strategy became legitimate. White educators off the reservation, and even Browning administrators, watched with interest but had no desire to intervene. They also intended to be Big Dogs and to Eat First. But Heart Butte wasn't their pack. 

Strategies included hiring weak teachers, making sure they never got tenure, keeping facts -- especially about funding-- secret, doing business in a fractured and unrecorded way, buying off enemies, and -- if necessary-- bluffing. Few administrators or school board members, if any, ever took any interest at all in teaching methods or content unless the community questioned them. Government overseers, both state and federal, were too far away to know what was going on. 

The biggest advantage the Heart Butte administration had was simply racism, both the racism of the local white community and the racism of the elitist half-breed community. Secretly, both groups believed that Heart Butte did not deserve help. They thought nothing could be done to improve the situation and would freely say so in bars -- though not in official contexts. In short, the local citizenry was so busy fighting each other, they were easily shunted aside from saving themselves. 

In the actual matter of killer dogs, the Supe issued a memo, which I quote exactly: 

RE: Dogs 

There has been a lot of dogs in the neighborhood that have not been under control, fenced, leashed, or kept in. The problem needs addressed immediately. 

All dogs who are not kept under control by a leash, fence, or kept in, and is allowed to run, will be subject to removal by the authority of the Heart Butte School District. 

No real action was ever taken. The Supe knew that if he really did anything, people would be angry. In short, the Heart Butte School District would claim no authority. Let sleeping dogs lie. 

MONKEY BRAIN

One of my more interesting feeds is from the National Institute of Mental Health, though they often seem sort of overwhelmed, esp. in the midst of this giant revolution in how to think about human beings and their mental health.  I mean, we are shifting from brilliant schemes invented by thoughtful people who were only partly right, to evidence-based electro-chemical reactions in the brain, observable in screen data.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2016/schizophrenia-autism-risk-gene-trajectories-point-to-shared-causes.shtml

Today’s post was about monkey brain, not the metaphor of a jabbering pack of primates babbling in one’s head — which can either be healthy ideas competing with each other or just a lot of trash fermenting.  This research was about the risk genes for schizophrenia and autism, which are located close to each other in the brain’s cortex.  A hundred scientists collaborated on the project.

“Their study, which pinpointed the developmental trajectories of the suspect genes in the monkey brain, also identified divergent timing of risk gene activation that might help to explain the differing courses of the illnesses. Autism-related genes first switched on in newborn neurons during prenatal development, while schizophrenia risk genes didn’t activate until infancy.  

“This suggests that genetic risk for autism may have more to do with prenatal processes, such as the birth of new neurons, while schizophrenia risk genes may impact processes underway during infancy, such as refinement of neuronal circuitry. The delay is consistent with schizophrenia’s much later onset of symptoms in late adolescence/early adulthood, the researchers note.”

I don’t know how much of a problem is presented to monkeys by schizophrenia and autism unless it makes them fall out of trees.  Both are devastating for human beings and demand major effort to compensate for the malfunctions.  Among the many things that people don’t know they don’t know — and therefore never try to find out about — are the complexities of brain function and the huge importance of gestation and earliest childhood.  If high schools taught these crucial things to know, it would help a lot of adolescents think more clearly about their sex lives.  Sex not as falling in love but sex as creation of new life.

For a while there I was buying a lot of books about troubled children and technical things like dissociation.  I’d read them, try to think about how they would help with kids I’ve known, explain what I thought to Tim, and discover what the books were saying didn’t really fit.  Now I’m glancing back through them and seeing that politics and Dunning-Kruger (not seeing what you don’t know exists) were distorting conclusions, but — more importantly — just leaving a lot of kids out without realizing that they were doing it.  

The mayor’s wife said indignantly that her neighbor was feeding feral cats, but that if “feral” means wild, that’s not what they were.  I suggested the category of “satellite” cats which are like barn cats, not cuddly but fed regularly while still hunting rodents.  She works with rez kids; I wonder whether she has a category for “satellite children.”  I do.

When I was doing animal control education, I saw that people had only two categories for dogs:  owned pets and unowned pets, strays.  In fact, research suggested at least five categories: feral dogs (totally wild), pye or pariah dogs (living off human garbage, feces, and corpses), child surrogate pets, working dogs, dogs “owned” by other dogs.  Pye dogs, which are mostly a Third World category, are the ones that are dangerous enough to require taboos.  For one thing, they carry rabies.  Dogs “owned” by other dogs will never quite understand humans.  There are probably other categories that need to be invented in order to have “handles” for recognizing and dealing with dogs. 

The same for human children, who are shaped by genetics, gestation, earliest care, trauma, education and experience.  My first superintendent, Phil Ward, used to say that HIS father (also an educator), would say that the best teachers were the ones with as many strategies for teaching as there were kids in the classroom, plus a couple of extras just in case.  This is pretty idealistic, but at least it acknowledges that humans are different at every stage and in every life path.  He would have made a good teacher of me if I hadn’t gotten involved with Bob Scriver.

So now I’ll get personal.  I hardly relate to my family in the “now.”  I’m so politically and sociologically different that we have trouble communicating. The parent generation is all dead.  Three aunts, two maternal and one paternal, died after years of dementia.  The two paternal uncles died of strokes, like my father, and showed vascular impaired personalities before death.  (I agree with Michael Moore that Trump should be medically screened for these things.)  

My father and brother both had personality changing head trauma to the pre-frontal cortex.  Of my maternal cousins, several have mal-developed digits (too many or missing fingers or toes) corrected by surgery.  This is a well-known English gene that runs in families: Anne Boleyn had an extra finger.  One cousin, whose mother was an army nurse in WWII, was constantly suspected of some kind of brain malfunction, seizure sorts of things.  Her son is probably the most brilliant among that generation.  He had a strong stable father, but the marriage ended in divorce.  And so on.

The next generation, which now has school-aged children themselves, are a mystery.  I don’t know their names, have never met them.  Two are adopted Chinese girls.  Even my mother, who monitored family, never knew these descendants.  She died in 1999, so anyone born after that went unrecorded in her book.  No one sends birth announcements anymore.

I’m not very tempted to see what my genome shows.  Mostly Scots immigrants with a dose of Irish.  I used to beg for a Native American in the family tree, but we never found any.  By accident I discovered that Tim has one, an early and honorable person on the East Coast. 

I’m slightly more interested in what my epigenome might show.  And the actions of what I suppose is called the “microgenome.”  I’ve read that lovers and intimate pairs like nurses/patients or mothering/infants soon share tiny migrating life-forms almost entirely.  So what does it mean that — unlike today’s youngsters — I was first intimate with an older man who had had many partners, living on a reservation and more briefly in Edmonton and Chicago.  I know he had herpes because it nearly took his eyesight, but I was vaccinated.  Now they speak of one’s “mineralome” or “metalome,” which would have been much affected by our development of the bronze foundry.  Since I did the patinas for years, I breathed in many compounds, mostly iron, sulphur, and copper.  

Frankly, I think I either inherited or developed schizo and autistic glitches and channeled them through Victorian/Edwardian reading of novels, which made me think of teaching and, more grandiosely, ministry.  I wasn’t good at either; they weren’t what I thought they would be.  Worse, one of my character flaws is a reluctance to compromise.  I see that people are back to reading my posts on Oppositional Defiance Disorder.  I better check out the recent research.

I’ve sometimes been perilously close to living on the street.  My youngest brother did, the one with brain trauma that made him oppositional and defiant.  Education has at least taught me how to present myself in a good light, but “retirement” frees me to be myself, at least in writing.  I’m grateful.  But sometimes it gives me monkey brain.

SIT! STAY!

Totally misleading -- this post is about lesbians.

Since I’m already convicted of making a lot of lists (maybe too many), I’ll just add to the evidence.  My real crime is not taking the time to integrate this material into a composed essay, so forcing readers to make their own sense of the list.  Maybe I just have the feeling that this stuff belongs together somehow and want to come back to it later, in hopes that my abilities have increased or that some additional element has pulled it into order.  This effort is very much hindered by the computer’s program which tries to impose some sequence of a faraway technician half my age and probably not my gender.  (Sometimes I suspect not my species.)

1.  The agenda for today was supposed to be the chapter of “The Queer Child” by Kathryn Bond Stockton that is numbered “2” though it is actually the third, since the introduction amounts to a chapter.  The long title of the chapter is “Why the (Lesbian) Child Requires an Interval of Animal.  The Family Dog as a Time Machine." Reading it had the effect of walking through tall weeds with a lot of grasshoppers jumping — thoughts set off in every direction.

Paul Sparks playing "Tom Yates, the writer"

2.  I watched “House of Cards” marathon-style yesterday and was most interested in the daughter/mother/writer triangle that formed near the end.  I’d like to see that as a separate series, not necessarily with the same characters, though I really liked the portrayal of the writer as empathetic but  in charge of himself.

3.  My cousin and I disagreed.  She states as a fact that she tries but cannot manage computers.  I sent her one of my simple (for oldsters) coaching books, after encouraging her to buy her own, which she clearly was not going to do.  She immediately gave the book to her husband and sent me a check for the postage, feeling that both moves were generosities.  With my “hermeneutics of suspicion” background spotting “games people play” I see this as clear rejection.  She topped me. 

Her branch of the family labels me as brainy (which is another way of distancing me.  They applied the label many years before college which probably affected my choice of venue.) I think these ideas about who I am, which she considers praise, could not be more foreign or threatening to her.  And me.  My education has not been “brainy” — more like visceral.  But not informed enough for me to have read Stockton’s list of texts.

Lassie with hair on her chest

4.  The point of the Stockton chapter is that “inverts” (a less scary and image-evoking word than “lesbian”, a word that always made my mother snort like a horse) can cope with a stuck place in their lives — where there is no way to go forward, back or even sideways — by being a dog for a while.  Not Lassie or Rin-Tin-Tin, a pet and guardian, and not a bitch, but a simple observant and reacting domestic animal, included but not consulted.  Usually this animal trope is about how much girls love horses, which is not-very-covertly sexual.  (It works for boys as well.)  But that is about relationship between quite different beings.  The idea of the dog is more about faithful intimacy with hints of mother/child.

Not wisteria.

Now the texts are the Thom Fitzgerald’s vid of “The Hanging Garden”; Djuna Barnes novel “Nightwood”; Virginia Woolffs “Mrs. Dalloway” both novel and vid; Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness”; a photography book by David Douglas Duncan, “Picasso and Lump: a Dachshund’s Odyssey”.  It is haunted by DeleuzeGuattari’s book “A Thousand Plateaus,” which suggests rhizomes as a strategy, about as sideways as one can go.  The writing in this chapter about these elements is inspired, vivid with metaphor gracefully expressed.

When intimacy is described publicly — I don’t mean sex but rather the kind of relationship that sometimes supports sex — it can upset people if it is outside convention.  (It upsets ME when it is IN convention.)  My family is easily upset because they find it unaccountable that I have not followed their script.  (They can’t even figure out what script it is, but neither can I. My script is no-script.  Maybe contra-script.)  

Flush and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

But I always suspect that the deficit, the loss, is in them rather than me.  Their background is immigration (Scots) and homesteading (South Dakota) in an Edwardian era. They happily read “Flush”, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s fond and sentimental poem about her dog, but they keep no pets.  (Except my mother, who is not really part of my father’s family and sometimes snorts like a horse at the thought of them, always wants a small dog and throughout our childhood kept one, though she insisted it was my brother’s.  When I was working at animal control, I had a little Jack Russell and since she had a key to my apartment, she often "dog-napped" him.) 

My own “plateau” has always been cats, though I’ve had plenty of other animals.  I do not inhabit my cats.  Maybe I ought to, but our relationship is rather strongly mother/child with permission for them to be feral, to live their own lives.  The Striped Terror is missing this morning.  I expect him to return stinking of tomcat.  If not, it’s still his life and death.  I feed, I shelter, but I do not control.  Nor inhabit.

The Striped Terror -- back just after lunch.

When I was an AC officer, I scraped up a garbage can’s full capacity of squashed cats every day.  One puts one hand in the plastic bag, grasps the rag-flesh through it, and everts the bag, hoping the mess will stay intact.  But to impound a living dog, one must take it in one’s arms and lift it into the truck, an embrace of relationship that the dog usually accepts.  I always felt it clearly, probably more than is wise or comfortable, esp. if the dog were badly hurt or soaking wet, as dogs often are in Portland, OR.  

The neighbors were always watching and their demand was that I make things “right”, get rid of damage and mess — but more than that — pain, because the idea of suffering is denied in our streets.  Even in our street children.  Most people want the feral eliminated.  Culture is control.  Minorities and inverts are just as hooked on control as anyone else.  But they have to make a convincing case for their suffering in order to be heard (or read).

I commend to you a poem by James Dickey called “The Sheep-Child” which was inspired by a pickled specimen in a lab that looked rather like a chimera created by mating a sheep and a human.  Dickey didn’t make it a joke, as is conventional, but a poem.   (Easy to find on the Internet.) 

“. . . In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes

Far more than human.  I saw for a blazing moment

The great grassy world from both sides,

Man and Beast in the round of their need,

And the hill wind stirred in my wool,

My hoof and my hand clasped each other . . .

If a child or a woman, stalling to get enough time to figure out what is keeping them on a plateau, assumes the guise of a canine, esp. when the source of the anomaly is physical (like desire or gender-identity), it seems to me a benign strategy easily accepted by a biological dog.  It is an expansion into new worlds rather than an acceptance of limits, even if it is done in situ.  

THE FLUFFY STORIES

Fluffy just woofs me off.  Or more accurately it’s fluffy-headed people like the two writers about dogs in the dialogue linked here.  Sooooo cute!

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/books/review/susan-orlean-and-julie-klam-discuss-dog-books.html   They’re talking about the dumb assumptions by readers of dog books, like the idea that people who write about dogs never write about anything else.  Or that books about dogs are always light and lovable -- never about serious matters.  Everyone loves to make dog puns.  FAR too many people have lost the line between dogs and children.  

Julie Klam  http://www.julieklam.com/  refers to “sad books about how to train your schnauzer.”  (If she knew any schnauzers, she know how sad an UNtrained schnauzer can be.)  Susan Orlean  http://susanorlean.com/books/   thinks ugly children are sad, but ugly dogs are funny and cute.  It doesn’t get to her that most of the ugly dogs are deformed by in-breeders and suffer from the deformations.  THAT’s sad.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4TSWvyYNos  Here’s a sad video made by these two.  Forget the dogs -- these women need training.  It’s meant to mock dog training, but comes off like four-year-olds playing grownups.

Klam thinks that dog feelings are limited:  bad, good, or being bad or being good.  This is completely out of whack.  I used to train new animal control officers by assigning them to sit in front of a kennel with a clipboard and write down at five minute intervals what the dog was thinking.  True enough, they didn’t see much at first, but by the end of a half-hour they had begun to realize just how much the dog was taking in and what it to chose to pay attention to.  The first thing the dog did was sit down to figure out what this guy with a clipboard was up to.  If the observers repeated the process with a second dog, they usually saw how different the two dogs were in their reactions to basically the same boring scene of chain-link and people.  Of course, dogs that had been left alone in close confinement all day every day were like zombies.  Feral dogs reacted to faint and far sounds and lifted their noses to every wandering scent.  Pets listened for their people.

Orlean thinks it’s a rare person who actually dislikes dogs.  She means people LIKE HER rarely dislike dogs.  She doesn’t know there are very different folks out there.  Partly it’s a class issue and partly it’s a Third World issue.  In high-crime neighborhoods dogs are meant to be weapons and they are.  Sometimes on behalf of the criminal.  It has been hard for Americans to understand why Muslim people are so terrified of dogs, because they don’t even “see” the feral dogs in cities -- they think they are stray pets.  Feral dogs in America are garbage eaters, not carrion eaters.  In poor countries they are “pye” dogs, pariah dogs.  It is dogs, pigs, rats and vultures who clean up shit and bodies -- ALL bodies.  They lap up the blood of children.  They tear out the guts of soldiers -- it’s so much easier once they are ripped open by wounds.  And they eat shit.  In almost all the war movies shot in North Africa or Eurasia, there are dogs constantly passing through, looking for death and carrying disease, possibly rabies.  The only shots they get are from guns.

Orlean confides that people tell her that they won’t buy a dog book in which the dog dies, because it’s just too sad and depressing, so there is very little chance that anyone will publish a book about dogs in war zones where it is the people who die.  Even in America “Cujo” had to be sold as a horror story.  The number of dogs that kill people in the US -- mostly children -- are not much noted.  (327 between 1979 and 1998, according to stats compiled from hewspapers by the CDC.)  The stories rarely hit the newspapers unless there is a lawsuit or there's some other sensational aspect, like the two giant mastiff-type dogs who nearly killed a small woman in the hallway of her apartment while she fought to get her key in her lock and the owner stood by, shouting.

In the social media where people twitty-tweet back and forth, dogs are considered a “safe” subject, like one’s fav song or movie.   Show and tell grips the list.   Even on the scholarly listservs, where some strong opinion might be met by a terse rejoinder or two, an inquiry about dogs can trigger days and days of cute little tales (“tails” !!!!) accompanied by photos.  (Don’t even ask about YouTube.  Cats don’t always rule.)  These two authors say that everyone wants to show them THEIR dogs, either in photos or in the fur, and they encourage it, arranging for pets to come to their readings.  Soooo cute.  Cruising dogs.

Strangely, there is not so much written about dogs in the cultures where they are actually integrated into the way of life to share work: hunting dogs, guard dogs, herding dogs, retrievers, cop dogs, helper dogs.  A book remains to be written about the tragedy of greyhounds.  When I write a story about Native Americans, regardless of the time period, I always put dogs in there.  Doing things.  Figuring things out.  Working hard.  And sometimes being cooked and eaten.  Talk about faithful service.  

I’m only being tongue-in-cheek to a small degree in this post.  In fact, the denial with which the urban privileged can close themselves off into a fantasy world, all the time purporting to be helping others, is Evil.  Evil is what prevents getting to the roots of bad outcomes instead of feeding off them with sentimentality.  But sentimental makes money -- ask Hallmark.

There is another Evil aspect to this way of thinking, and it is specifically religious though it could be called anthropology (the study of people).  It is ambivalence about the distinction between humans and other animals.  Labeling everything humans don’t like as “bestial” gives away the narcissistic conviction that the human animal is different -- NOT an animal at all, though it’s perfectly obvious that we are.  Religions assure their adherents that they are NOT animals and tell them they should give up all animal practices -- like sex.  Or not tithing.

Julie Klam is a Boston Bull rescuer.  She’s a little confused about individuals because there were so many.  They’re very stubborn, energetic, screwy little dogs, basically Jack Russells with pushed-in-faces, meaning that unless you’re right there in sync with them all the time, they are going to do things you won’t like.   And they have a lot of breathing and eye disorders. Carelessly acquired, mostly neglected, they will be anything but lovable.  Fluffy is mostly what Mommy makes him.  Don’t even dare to think about the children Mommy might make.

IMITAIKS: The Dogs with Us

These history seminars in Browning in mid-August are always wonderful just as an experience, quite aside from what one learns from the experts. Bill Grant’s design of Cuts Wood School works beautifully to pull breezes through the open spaces of the classrooms and the grassy yard is a good place to eat the traditional-style lunch, maybe buffalo soup. Usually the attenders are an interesting mix of local and traveler, Blackfeet and other.

As prep or, if you bring your laptop, as preface, you might enjoy one of my fav vids, which is Tom Hall’s video of reservation dogs. The url has wandered off from my notes, but you might enjoy the search since now there are a LOT Of YouTube vids about reservation dogs, as well as a homegrown soap opera called “Rez Dogs.”

It’s hard to think about dogs, as it is always when the subject is familiar and daily, too close to see. I just watched a show about advertising called “Art and Copy” which is a very vigorous (and profane) exploration of the GOOD side of advertising, the side that pulls us to a new way of thinking, often in service to better behavior. For instance, here’s an innovative Brit public service ad that a friend sent me:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=embrace+life++UK&aq=f

It’s quite wonderful. I love looking at it. But my response is NOT to buckle my seatbelt. It makes me want to hug people I care about. Maybe I’m dense or maybe I’m too anti-sentimental, but it’s clear to me that much of the advertising done on behalf of dogs is along these lines, by humane societies and based on the human/animal bond. The alternative strategy is like the ghastly photos we see about refugees or babies with cleft palates: shocking. Both approaches are through emotion. There is more to dogs than that.

“Art and Copy” talked about taking YEARS to analyze how we feel about milk or Volkswagens and why, trying to disassemble the unconscious assumptions we have, boil it down to a two word slogan. “Got milk?” (“Got dogs?” )

When I was working for animal control, at the beginning of a talk I would sometimes ask everyone to draw a quick cartoon of a dog and hold it up to share. No two dogs were alike. The trouble with the subject of dogs is that they are so various, but people insist on seeing them as all one category, just like the dogs they know best. Of course, they’re aware that dogs are big and little, black and white, male and female -- but they are usually NOT aware of the incredible variety of ways that dogs are shaped by their environments, whether as companions to a person they imitate so closely that they begin to look like them, or as near-wolves, pack animals loyal only to the strongest dog -- the one they call the alpha dog. And sometimes the alpha is a bitch. Loners are rare.

We know that dogs look different from each other except that where dogs are used for a specific purpose they will often standardize into what we call breeds. (In plants they would be cultivars.) The Victorians, a little twisted as they usually are, made dog breeds into status indicators and inbred them to the point that in the last hundred years formally classified dogs -- meant to meet arbitrary appearances for shows -- are cripples and invalids. The word on this has not spread as far as it needs to, but the AKC is beginniing to see the error of its ways. Their advertising assumption has been like big glamorous cars that malfunction. The working breeds, valuing performance, have fared better.

Two books raised my consciousness. One was “The Hidden Life of Dogs” By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Growing up in Africa had taught her to see animals in a rather different way, so when she was house-sitting and caring for their family dogs, she noticed that the dogs disappeared for a couple of hours every morning. This made her curious, so she put on her running shoes and followed them for a few days. She learned their route around the terrain, the smelling signposts they visited (which she understood), their ritual activities, and the other dogs they stopped to visit. Her conclusion was, in fact, that what dogs want is other dogs. The reason they like us is that they think we’re dogs.

The other book was Alan Beck’s first book. He’s at Purdue University now, where he runs their human-animal bond program, but when he was young he wanted to study wolves. There was no money. So he decided to study dog packs in New York City. Most people until then had thought of dogs as either “pets” or “strays.” To them, “strays” were lost “pets” who should be restored to that status. This idea has given rise to a whole genre of books about rescuing dogs and dogs, like Lassie, trying to get home. What Beck saw was that some dogs don’t even relate to humans -- they belong to other dogs. The word is “feral.” Since in this country we see dogs as possessions, an undomestic dog had never registered in the public mind.

In third world countries the pariah dogs -- like vultures and pigs -- live on the streets, cleaning up everything edible including corpses, even human. No wonder the Islamic people consider dogs filthy. “Pye-dogs” barely survive so the selective pressure on them is high. Peckinpah, filming in Mexico, often included them. They slip around in “Blackhawk Down.” But lately I saw a news story that said now with war in the Middle Eastern countries so much more food and offal is in the streets that the dogs are reproducing rapidly and becoming nuisances. Officials have resorted to the same kind of animal control we used to have in Browning when I first came in 1961. In spring during calving, the ranchers and police simply shot all the loose dogs they saw. If you valued your dog, you kept it in the house for a few weeks.

Lately people here have lost their tolerance for dogs in traffic and dead dogs and injured bony dogs. Their response more strategic now, gathering them into spay/neuter clinics and encouraging fenced yards with leash laws. But the back side of that in the three communities close to the mountains is that with no dogs in the streets, the bears and cougars come into town. In Helena it’s deer who can jump the fences to taunt the dogs, so the deer have to be periodically culled. I have a friend who suggests they ought to just turn the dogs out loose at night. But deer kill dogs.

The family across the street have a golden retriever. This summer they are traveling a lot because this fall their daughter starts school and the family will begin to empty the nest. The dog, too big to take along, is fenced. He grieves for his pack. He doesn’t get over it until they are back. They don’t hear it -- I hear it. A high proportion of dog complaints is about noise.

I never forget the complainant whose daughter was dying at home -- a dog blocks away was a howler and to her it was the Black Dog that in the end comes for us all. In Browning dogs manage to attach to the street people who sometimes fancy that the dogs are the spirits of old friends now dead. Their “pack” is interspecies and includes spirits. Don’t ever make jokes with them about “dog soup,” no matter what your anthropological information might be. Dogs don’t pull travois anymore either. But now they go to Heaven. Don’t they?

DARWIN'S DOGS

When I first began to blog, I found another blog (http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/) called “Querencia” after Bodio’s novel by that name. This blog touched on many of my interests (high east slope prairie, archeology, ranch culture, Bozeman literati, and dogs). The phenomenon of blogs touching blogs touching blogs (called “linking”) is what makes a technological phenomenon into an organic human network coming from real-life knowledge and pursuits. This is parallel to, uncontrolled by, and often far more honest than the usual media outlet networks.

One of the great dog blogs is http://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/ which is written by Patrick Burns, one of the most literally grounded dog people on the planet. As a former animal control officer and constant dog companion, I find him a joy and a source of insight. His special interest is in “digging on the dogs” which consists of taking working terriers into the fields, chasing varmints (groundhogs, possoms, foxes, raccoons -- those smallish pesky mammals) down their holes, and then digging them back out. (The opposite of using hounds to tree a big cat.) What happens to them then varies, depending on the local population, the health state of the critter, and so on: some are set free. There are often photos. It’s got to be one of the most aerobic sports possible.

Terrierman links to a whole circle of dog people full of common sense. Lately this circle has begun to form and toughen into a counter-movement responding to HSUS and other publicity machines intent on raising money by monopolizing the subject. I’ve known the latter since my animal control days in the Seventies when HSUS was trying to discredit other humane organizations, esp. the American Humane Association. Their tactic is to portray something as an atrocity (in those days a high-altitude machine as a method of euthanasia), tie it to their enemy, and thereby demonize the enemy into extinction. In this case they didn’t manage to eliminate AHA, but they did make that method of killing impossible to use anymore.

When the public gets it into their heads that something is demonic, there’s no arguing with them. Also, if they get hold of the idea that something is linked to high status and possibly big money, they hang on just as hard. An example is the American Kennel Club. Based on British class system assumptions plus early domestic animal breeding, for a century or more dog “breeds” have been defined and enforced by the AKC, convincing people that having “papers” means a dog is worthy in both senses. But, also like the Brit landed gentry, the control of pedigree by inbreeding has created dogs with deep genetic flaws and validated the assumptions that make puppy mills possible: forget the dog itself -- consider the piece of paper that comes with it.

The AKC makes money by issuing these “birth certificates” that claim a particular provenance (parentage) without any information about the actual genetic inheritance of the pup, which can be badly compromised by various forces, but esp. the practice of canine incest. Incest, as defined by law, is not meant to be a moral law handed down by God and the Bible, so much as a practical prohibition to prevent damaged babies. But a dog that is prone to joint trouble, deafness, heart trouble and so on is still considered valuable if it has papers. In the early days the faulty pups were destroyed. Because of their “papers” they are now commodified for the gullible as pets.

But that’s not all. Having co-opted the idea of certain classes being “better” than others, based on appearance, the practice of “dog shows” arose. In fact, back in the days before Hitler showed where this would lead with his strange notions of an “Aryan” breed, for which he himself didn’t qualify, county fairs used to hold the equivalent of dog shows for humans, which were generally won by big blonde people. Appearance-based dog shows, added to the idea of provenance or inheritance, have created dog “breeds” with cruel, life-shortening defects. Ask any veterinarian.

The circle of dog people who write blogs I read are also fond of forming loose organizations based on dog breeds but their “breeds” or types of dogs are not grouped according to appearance. Rather they are based on performance. So terriers (terra=earth) are suited by size and temperament to pursue critters more or less their size and chase them down holes -- then dive into the holes after them. This is only helpful if the person with the dog has a shovel and spud bar, plus the energy to dig.

So what’s a “good” dog in this way or in the many other ways that dogs work with people -- specialization that formed the breeds in the first place, esp. since the specialties tend to be local -- is an effective dog, a dog that can be shaped by circumstances, evolved. Patrick is constantly reminding us that a dog with a large chest can’t go down a groundhog hole, no matter how motivated it is. And a high energy terrier kept as a pet in an apartment where no one is home all day, is going to raise hob, quite aside from the fact that as Temple Grandin remarks, a dog that lives in solitary confinement is suffering more than a hog in a factory farm, where it at least has companions. Dogs need things to do and friends who are present to do them with.

Though dogs can “speak” and defend themselves, in the face of intractable and predatory humans they are -- um -- out-manned. Therefore Patrick and his friends have made themselves into publicity terriers and are providing polemic artwork, often based on the idea of evolution. At Patrick’s website you can find examples, in case you want to go walk around the Crufts Kennel Club show, “barking” visually.

Around here people are not sentimental about animals. They love their companions and take good care of them, but they also deal with livestock as their living and know that fancy credentials don’t guarantee conformance or performance. The result of reproduction might simply be the usual hamburger. They want to see the genome, since often they buy only the sperm of the bull, not the bull.

Neither will they tolerate cruelty. Right now the Montana legislature is wrestling with the problem of how to write a bill to close down “animal hoarding” and puppy mill operations. Not easy, since hoarders are often certifiable dementia sufferers who think they are being kind to confine animals they cannot feed or care for and puppy mills who think they will get rich. They are protected by those sentimental enough to approve of outfits like HSUS who show up, offer sound bites to the media, accept checks, and leave.

As we struggle to dis-commodify so many things by restoring them to their rightful value, dogs should take a high priority.

DOGGED DEVOTION

The first widely known American statue of an American Indian shows him alongside his hunting dog. The bronze is called “The Indian Hunter” and was created about 1860 by John Quincy Adams Ward. It shows a young man holding his bow and arrow in one hand while restraining his dog with the other. The man doesn’t have what we think of as an Indian face, though Ward traveled to the Sioux reservation to make studies and was praised for the “ethnic authenticity of the physiognomy.” A life-sized casting of it is in Central Park and also on Ward’s grave, paid for by his wife.

The Indian and his dog were a symbiotic pair long before the horse showed up in North America. In fact, most of them thought of a horse as a sort of super-dog. I cannot think of a single American Indian tribe that didn’t include dogs. In fact, dogs are a major characteristic of Indian communities and reservations today, though they are not dogs in terms that the Humane Society of the United States can grasp or approve. They are dogs as “people” with goals and ideas of their own.

In fact, I cannot think of any cultures until modern times that didn’t include dogs. (Iceland bans dogs.) But it is true that in some cultures the dog is a pariah, a “pye dog” that cleans up carrion and garbage and lives enmeshed but separate from humans. Then it is despised and feared as a carrier of disease, esp. rabies. American military are not above using the fear of dogs. Cops use dogs as enforcers. Meaner than a junkyard dog is a forceful expression. Dogs can be legally defined as weapons.

When dogs are reduced to pets and surrogate children, they are suppressed, regulated and shut up alone in houses. They are an expense rather than the contribution they once where when life depended on finding prey, being alert to enemies, herding animals, and even keeping rats and other busy little mammals out of human habitations, keeping woodchucks and rabbits out of the fields and gardens.

The popular conception of dogs is that they derive from wolves, which then reflexively causes some people to think of wolves as untamed dogs -- which they are not. But they are close enough to interbreed, as are coyotes. The kinds of canids seem more separated by social and ecological forces than by actual genetics.

Genetic research has suggested some new ways to see where dogs came from, but so far the suggestions have not been reconciled among themselves. A November 22, 2002, article in the New York Times by Nicholas Wade describes three lines of inquiry. One idea is that dogs domesticated about 15,000 years ago some place in the Old World, maybe east Asia. An earlier study of mitochondrial DNA proposed the derivation as happening 135,00 years ago. But so far no one has found dog bones earlier than 14,000.

One thing is for sure, dogs and humans have been entwined for millennia. The most likely story so far is that the early tribal dogs on this continent came from Asia, the same as the people, WITH the people, but not necessarily walking across the Bering Straits. In boats, maybe. Coming across the Arctic ice cap maybe, maybe as sled dogs. But all those early American dog breeds or kinds seem to have disappeared. One rather ethno-centric idea is that European dogs were more desired by Indians and displaced the older kinds. I think it’s more likely that the dogs, like the people, had no immunity to the diseases of the Euro dogs.

When I was doing education for Portland, Oregon, animal control, I found that the earliest descriptions of dogs in the Pacific Northwest were about two kinds of dogs. One was the standard sort of coyotish camp and hunting dog. The other was a woolly dog like a Samoyed. When these dogs were in heat, the Indians took them out to islands and kept them isolated there so they would stay distinct, because their fur was made into yarn and knitted into sweaters. They were a version of “sheep.” This is close as I can find to the modern rather crazed dog-breeding that creates tiny pools of deliberately deformed animals described as “breeds.” Even in Europe in older times species evolved in response to their use: herding dogs, hunting dogs, guarding dogs, rescuing dogs, harness dogs, and so on. And the deficient versions were not sold for pets -- they were simply killed. Weeding -- not breeding.

The mutation that probably created dogs as we know them was pretty likely to have been one that no one could see. It was some kind of mutation in their brains that made them super-attentive to humans and able to interpret what those people want their dogs to do. (I’m sure this doesn’t apply to black labs whom I have observed totally ignoring any humans, but esp. ignoring those that are giving commands.) The doggest of the dogs study your face, feel what you feel, and respond accordingly. This is what makes them excellent guides, helpers and therapists. Not that it doesn’t take some training to teach them the right way to respond. But it wasn’t that people set out to create an attentive animal -- it was something in the dog that decided to attend to us. Those who did that the best were the ones who survived.

Many modern people get their first dog as children. Since their growing up takes just about as long as a dog’s lifespan, handling the dog’s death is often one of the first tasks of their early maturity. In old age, esp. in places where dogs are a part of life, the aging of pets presents the problem of whether the human has enough lifespan left to start a new puppy, esp. when nursing homes and so on might be involved. It is hard to get old with no dog, at least for people like me, though cats help.

In subtle ways dogs become symbolic of our sense of our own lives: places, times, occupations. The death of a dog involves far more than just the relationship with the animal, but is tied to the whole course of shared life and its circumstances: the place, the loves, the strength and health or lack thereof. People get mad and turn away or just get more interested in someone else. But dogs, in the best of cases, stay right there, always the same.

Art and literature about dogs range the whole span from botched to exquisite, from debased to transcendent. Just like people. Constancy in a world of change is hard to overestimate.