Possibly the last thing on Earth I’d want to be is a politician. Sure, the allure of abundant bribes and chubby interns is tempting, but the five-hour workweek is just too much.
However....
I wish I could run for office merely to create some laws regarding dogs and cats in our country. Specifically, we euthanize millions of them every year, and it is one of the most shameful things we do as a society.
Can’t we create laws that would mandate spaying and neutering? Yeah, I know, there are people who make a living as breeders, and those people could keep on doing what they’re doing--with a permit. But the person who sells two or three litters a year from the bed of his truck--couldn’t he give that up? Couldn’t we force him to stop?
Also, why do we even sell dogs and cats in pet shops when there are millions of good pets in shelters? I’m all for capitalism, but in this case, let’s use our heads, okay?
I’m ranting about this because my wife shared a NY Times article with me last week about our local animal shelter. I’m going to cut and paste the text below, and I encourage you to read it--but be warned that some of it will put a lump in your throat.
Here's the article......
April 8, 2007
New Tricks
By CHARLES SIEBERT
“Let me know when you’re ready,” Diane Mollaghan called out as I rummaged one recent winter afternoon through the costumes and props she had stored in the back room of a run-down house trailer on the grounds of the Town Lake Animal Center in Austin. Mollaghan, a 34-year-old animal-behavior researcher and graduate student in the University of Texas’s psychology department, was waiting in the trailer’s main room beside a tan-and-brown mutt that had recently been left in the shelter’s night drop-off box with no ID tags or background-information form. Estimated by the shelter’s staff members to be a “Manchester terrier mix,” it looked like a pointy-faced Chihuahua on stilts, a creature of indeterminate origin and yet-to-be-determined disposition. That, literally, was where I was to come in.
All afternoon, in that continuous din of kennel-dog barking — high-pitched, autocatalytic, corrosive — I had been helping Mollaghan conduct various trait-assessment tests on some of the shelter’s recent arrivals, trying to get a fix on each animal’s temperament, measuring characteristics like sociability, playfulness, aggressiveness and fearfulness. The house trailer — situated midway between Town Lake’s western row of kennels, which hold already approved, adoptable dogs, and the compound’s eastern end, where the veterinary clinic and euthanasia rooms are — was serving as a kind of purgatorial courtroom. The dogs we gave high marks to would advance westward with a certificate of adoptability; those we didn’t rate so well would be dispatched the other way, eastward to the euthanasia room.
As fair trials go, these were anything but, given the inherently stressful venue and the somewhat offbeat nature of the tests themselves. Indeed, many a so-called well-homed dog I’ve met might have taken my head off for some of the antics our defendants were being subjected to that afternoon. There was the “approach by angry normal person, stare, raise voice, raise hand as if to strike” test; or test No. 12, the “friendly approach by toddler doll” — a three-foot-high, raggedy-haired creature in a paw-smeared yellow taffeta dress, a figure that is still showing up in my nightmares. And there was test No. 13, the little number that I was just then donning an outsize yellow raincoat with hood and walking stick to perform for our Manchester terrier mix: the “friendly ‘strange’ person with cane, approach and pet” test.
And yet by the unremittingly bleak standards of animal-shelter justice, such trait-assessment sessions are a much fairer shake than most shelter dogs will ever get. These sessions are part of a new trend among animal shelters across the United States to take a more proactive role in both controlling and counteracting the rampant discarding of dogs in this country. Mollaghan’s study, a joint project between Town Lake and the University of Texas’s Animal Personality Institute, makes use both of questionnaires filled out by dog relinquishers and of personality assessment forms designed for adopters in an attempt to better understand the mind-set not only of the abandoned animals but of their past and potential owners as well. Mollaghan’s hope is that she will be able to determine which people will best suit the needs and temperament of the different dogs she has assessed. It’s a kind of cutting-edge interspecies matchmaking service, a whole new science of animal rescue.
Town Lake alone takes in, on average, about 40 dogs a day from the greater Austin area, or some 14,000 over the course of a year. About half of them never make it back out again, a figure consistent with those reported by shelters across the United States. (The stats are even worse for cats.) According to Stephen Zawistowski, executive vice president for national programs for the ASPCA, about four million dogs enter shelters nationwide each year. Some two million of them end up being euthanized, about 5,000 dogs each day, one every 16 seconds. They are not, as is often assumed, merely the misbegotten mutts, castoffs of some imaginary canine lower caste. They hail from every stratum of the human society that shaped them, from all the varied quadrants of our keeping. According to nationwide surveys, as many as 25 percent of the dogs who end up in shelters are purebreds: Boston terriers, border collies, Pomeranians, standard poodles and so on, the sorts of dogs that people pay thousands of dollars to obtain. And yet they are discarded for the same dizzying array of reasons the mongrels are, ranging from the truly fraught to the downright frivolous.
Dog mania being at an all-time peak in this country, it is difficult to say whether such profligacy with our pooches is a logical phenomenon or a wholly paradoxical one. A recent survey of the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association estimates that Americans house some 74 million dogs. And with the often factorylike production of ever more new puppies to satisfy growing consumer demand, the 5 percent of owned dogs that wind up disowned each year could be thought of as the inevitable spillage that attends all forms of mass consumption. Except, of course, for the simple, discomforting fact that the “product” in question is not only a living being but also our proverbial best friend, our most loyal and longtime animal companion.
Dog abandonment is hardly a new phenomenon. Still, the overwhelming number of canine outcasts being taken in and put down in recent years is now prompting animal shelters — places, by definition, of surrender — to fight back. With the help of a broad array of specialists, including human and dog psychologists, animal behaviorists and ethologists, local veterinarians and dog trainers, even dog-minded architects, shelters like Town Lake are now rethinking the whole phenomenon of abandoned pets: from the behavioral dysfunctions (human and animal) that lead to dog relinquishment; to the experience and expectations of potential adopters; to developing new design features in shelters that reduce the stress and depression of the animals there and, in turn, lure more people to come and consider them for adoption. The animal shelter, a place long consigned to being a lost pet’s last, is fast becoming among the most likely places to find a lasting pet.
They come to Town Lake — the found strays, the “owner-surrendered” and the recidivist failed adoptions — at all times of day: during normal working hours, delivered directly into the hands of shelter staff; or long after closing, furtively placed in the wee hours of the morning inside one of the shelter’s self-locking drop-off bins, often without any ID tags or background-information forms. The rest of Town Lake’s unhappy residents come via that time-honored but oft-maligned civil servant, the dogcatcher.
Mollaghan created a four-page form for dog relinquishers. The reasons they list for surrender reflect a dizzying range, from the serious (lifestyle issues like a move or loss of job, or dog aggression) to the supercilious (people going on vacation). Mollaghan told me one person reported that her pet was “boring.” Another family said they had bought new furniture that their dog’s coat didn’t quite match.
At Town Lake — as with all shelters except for the “no kill” variety, which keep a strict limit on the number of dogs they’ll accept — three fates can befall an animal that’s not reclaimed by its owner within three days: 1) adoption; 2) rescue (meaning it is claimed by one of many different groups out there that are vigorously devoted to the salvation of a specific breed — Schnauzer Rescue, for example, or Standard Poodle Rescue — and are known for being as strict as human adoption agencies are about whom they’ll place their dogs with); or 3) euthanasia, the dismal reality of which was brought home to me one morning upon returning to Town Lake after a dawn patrol with an animal-rescue officer from Austin’s Health and Human Services department named Billy Seguin.
“Uh-oh,” Seguin said, looking into his rearview mirror as we pulled into the shelter’s unloading area. He restarted his vehicle. “Got to make way for the meat truck.”
Pulling off to one side, we watched as a wide-cab trailer backed into our spot, its rear door already open, revealing a large metal-lined container.
“Will you be O.K. with this?” a female shelter worker asked, taking hold of my arm as I started walking over from Seguin’s truck.
Just then a small side door opened to my left. A man was standing in a dimly lighted room before a partly visible mound, the startling dimensions of which would soon become apparent as, one by one, shiny black tied-off garbage bags were being tossed out into the area before me. Big, small and middle-size lumps, well over 50 of them, some rigid with rigor mortis and some — like the large, handsome, two-toned boxer mix that I watched spill out of the tear in his bag and slide down the mound — loose-limbed and floppy-eared, like deeply asleep dogs.
It was, I learned later, merely a day and a half’s grim output; the majority of the animals, according to Mollaghan, could have, with very little time and effort, made some people perfectly fine companions. Town Lake, however, like most other large, municipally financed shelters, lacks the resources to undo the distortions of every dog’s prior ownership and guide it on its way to a successful subsequent one.
One morning, I accompanied one of the shelter’s rapid-fire “disposition committees” on a tour of duty: four members of the shelter staff who roamed the facility’s three main buildings, deciding in brief visits which dogs are adoptable and which ones are not. The dogs are held in long, single-story barrackslike structures of narrow cement kennels with chain-link metal gates on them, everywhere crows flitting above the malodorous mayhem, like animate flecks of barking. Stray 1, the first building a prospective adopter encounters upon passing through Town Lake’s gates, tends to get the cuter, smaller and purebred dogs. It’s a tacit if somewhat begrudging nod toward the preferences of prospective adopters, though Mollaghan told me that part of the shelter’s mission is to get people to move past their initial biases and appearance-based choices and venture the many midsize, ostensibly nondescript mutts in Stray 2 and 3, dogs that often make for ideal companions.
The committee went from one animal on its list to the next, stopping before each one to see how it responded to the same basic human-dog interactions: talking excitedly, petting. The tests took on an almost unbearable gravitas in that context, especially when one of those dime-a-dozen, midsize mixed breeds in Stray 2 or 3 would get it right, would eagerly do all those human-pleasing things dogs have been bred to do. It was almost easier to watch the ones who reared back or stiffened at our approach, a clear sign of asocial tendencies and an almost certain death sentence; easier to watch dogs behaving beyond hope rather than having their hopes falsely stoked again.
“We’re trying to get a handle on each animal in a very short window,” Kim Barry, an applied animal behaviorist at Town Lake, told me afterward in her office. “We kind of feel in our gut that our assessments are accurate, but not much hard science has been done on this sort of thing.” Then, referring to Mollaghan, she said, “That’s where Diane’s work comes in.”
Final decisions are typically based on the disposition committee’s judgment. Mollaghan’s more nuanced assessments, however, performed on four randomly selected newly arrived dogs each day, sometimes have an influence on the fate of a dog whose potential might otherwise be missed.
“My tests are often done a day or two before the disposition committee does theirs,” she said. “And sometimes my results can be used to give a dog another chance. It goes outside the regular process and is something of a burden on the system, but it’s being allowed because the shelter is interested in seeing if what I’m doing can have some positive effect on real-world outcomes.”
A number of recent studies published in The Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science have indicated that the leading cause of dog abandonment is behavioral problems. A team of researchers for the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy, headed by Dr. Mo Salman of the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University, surveyed nearly 4,000 dog owners at 12 shelters across the United States about their reasons for relinquishing their dogs. They repeatedly cited things like biting, overaggression, chewed-up furniture, repeated soiling: dogs literally and figuratively bouncing off our walls.
And who can blame them, our walls now being just about all they have? With our full-scale shift from an agrarian to a service-based economy and society, the very nature of dog work and the tasks we ask of dogs have shifted as well. The hunters and sheepherders and the high-strung, ground-tearing terriers of yore — born ferreters of rats and badgers — are being increasingly disappointed from their intended earthly rounds, pulled skyward into high-rises, where there are only our ever-shifting moods, anthropomorphic projections and stuffed toys and couch pillows to alternately grasp, negotiate or tear through.
We look to dogs now to be not only companions but also substitute children, emotional and psychological support in the wake of deaths, divorces and breakups. We are asking them to be, in essence, little people, animate worry beads and stress absorbers: to undertake jobs that, while they may engage — to the point of exhaustion — the canine species’s long-heralded loyalty, exercise precious little else. The outcome has been an ever-growing number of incredibly messed-up, neurotic dogs, and with them a rise each year in the incidence of dog bites and other aggressive, antisocial behaviors — all of which contribute, of course, to the huge number of abandoned dogs.
Shelters in a number of states across the country are now employing a multifaceted, proactive approach, specifically to address these behavioral issues, taking their cues from surveys like Mo Salman’s, or another, similar study done by The Journal of the American Veterinary Association back in 1996 that concluded that dogs whose owners reported having received helpful behavior advice were at a 94 percent lower risk for abandonment. A shelter in Denver known as the Dumb Friends League began a dog behavior program back in the mid-1990s, teaching “shelter manners” to their abandoned dogs to make them more adoptable and offering behavior-training classes for dog adopters and other dog owners in the community. In four years’ time, the number of dogs returned to the shelter decreased by 23 percent and those returned for reasons of misbehavior by 38 percent.
A number of shelters that have broadened their scope in this way have reported similar improvements. At the Humane Society in Minneapolis, puppies that graduated from socialization classes were found to be far less likely to be returned after adoption. At the Town of North Hempstead Animal Shelter on Long Island, a volunteer shelter-dog training program initiated in 1999 cut the euthanasia rate by 50 percent in just six months. According to a 2006 survey of shelters in Ohio conducted by Ohio State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, the outlook for dogs in shelters has greatly improved in the past 10 years, thanks partly to spay/neutering programs and also to a big increase in the number of shelters that have an established partnership with a veterinary practice. There has been a 16 percent decrease statewide in the number of dogs taken in each year and a 39 percent decrease in the number of dogs euthanized.
Dogs still are animals — our endless manipulations and misperceptions of them notwithstanding — and it has now become the added and somehow logical role of animal shelters, in concert with local veterinarians, pet stores and dog breeders, and an ever-growing network of applied animal behaviorists and trainers, to remind us of this simple truth. To help us step back and readdress our best friends again.
Mollaghan speaks of her approach as a three-part puzzle: Try to get a handle on the dogs. Try to read a potential adopter’s personality and expectations. And, finally, develop the relationship element itself — try to get a sense of how people are choosing their dogs, what criteria they’re using.
The first part can be particularly daunting. Any abandoned dog is the living embodiment of a broken bond of some sort, an intriguing if maddeningly inarticulate emissary of some prior human entanglement. The challenge for shelter workers trying to re-home that animal, of course, is to get a firm enough idea of its disposition — which naturally deteriorates with every passing second the dog spends among its equally miserable fellow captives — to feel fairly confident that they’re not dispatching a ticking time bomb into someone’s life.
“The timing of these tests is pretty sensitive,” Mollaghan said as we made our way to the kennel of our next test subject, “because of the stress response of these animals.” The very act of our passing by them, Mollaghan explained, contributes to their decline, setting dogs off into a frenzy of barking and jumping because, invariably, some other visitor stopped once before and spoke to them and took them out on a lead. It’s a syndrome known as “conditioned frustration.”
“They were rewarded once,” Mollaghan went on to say, “so they behave that way whenever anyone passes. Why do people continue to gamble in the face of constant losing? Because they won once.”
Kennel No. 227 in Stray 3, one of the kennels for larger dogs, held a light tan, somewhat undernourished-looking pit bull named Lana. She hugged to the back corner of her kennel and, upon being greeted, began to tremble uncontrollably. Mollaghan opened the gate, went in and crouched down, very low, so as to be less threatening. A petite woman with a round-eyed, elfish face, she seemed utterly fearless and under control at all times. She waited a bit longer in silence. Called out again. More trembling.
“If I were to go any closer,” Mollaghan said to me in a hushed voice, “this dog would definitely bite me.”
She stepped gingerly back outside and locked the gate. She pulled out the stat sheet from the plastic pouch on the front of Lana’s kennel, telling me that they get dogs like her all the time. They usually have names like Nitro or Cocaine or Killer, dogs that spend their lives chained in yards, having no contact with other dogs or humans.
It had been, up until then, a fairly positive afternoon as shelter-dog days go. We had tested a young but extremely well-balanced Labrador-cattle dog mix that responded to the taffeta-doll dance and my rain-coated flasher-man get-up with what seemed like a perfectly appropriate mix of curiosity and concern. He was followed by a 7-year-old husky-malamute, a dog that countenanced the entire battery of assessments with such a world-weary calm that he somehow rendered us, the testers, the species under examination. We didn’t rate too well when it came to Lana. She would be put down the following afternoon.
“They pick up on that cue too,” Mollaghan told me. “A lot of them start to vomit or soil themselves the minute they enter the euthanasia room.”
On the way to retrieving our day’s last subject, fate delivered me a far more intimate look at the other two parts of Mollaghan’s puzzle and the larger dramas of modern-day dog adoption than I had ever anticipated getting. It happened at Stray 3, Kennel No. 252. Two names were listed on her data sheet: Cricket and Olive. A twice-abandoned “border terrier mix.” Tiny. Just over 12 pounds. A breathing bundle of gray-and-white carpet lint with long pipe-cleaner-like legs, a slight underbite and the proverbial button eyes. I’d have guessed the first-ever mating of a Maltese and a spider monkey. But whatever unknowable admixture of cockeyed progeny, behavioral flaws and human perversions had led to this creature’s double exile, it made no difference to me. I had lost not only my journalistic objectivity, my so-called reporterly remove, but also all remnants of reason and rationality. I was, in a word, sunk.
Mollaghan was on to me before I’d uttered a word: to the fact that I was both instantly becoming one of her human test subjects and already committing the classic shelter-shopper faux pas. I was going on first impression, mere appearance. I’d fallen for one of the “cutesy” dogs, one whose very presence there among the dime-a-dozen midsize mixes that I should, in good conscience, have been considering, only further bewitched me, the way she calmly and mutely came right up to greet me amid a maelstrom of barking and jumping kennel mates.
Back at Mollaghan’s office, we learned the following about Cricket/Olive: a spayed female, approximately 2 years old, found three days before, roaming the grounds of the Anderson Oaks town-home community. This was, we soon verified, her second stint at Town Lake. There was no information on her original owner, but as for her second, a guy named Forbes, records showed that he adopted her from Town Lake seven weeks earlier. An immediate message had been left on Forbes’s answering machine and an e-mail sent, quoting the usual reclaim fee of $50 and giving him a three-day deadline to reclaim his dog.
“That’s today,” I said.
“Yep,” Mollaghan said, staring up at the office clock, which read 6:40 p.m. “He’s got until closing. Twenty minutes.”
And then we learned this: I didn’t have a prayer. Even if Forbes didn’t show, three others before me had dibs on Cricket/Olive.
“So much for that,” I said, my sudden scheme of returning to Brooklyn and surprising my wife, Bex, and our own shelter-adopted terrier mix, Roz, evaporating as quickly as it had coalesced.
“Not necessarily,” said Mollaghan, who, I soon learned, was hatching a scheme of her own, one that would pivot around her intimate knowledge of the fickleness of dog adopters and certain nuances in the dog-adoption process itself. No. 2 on the waiting list turned out to be a rescue group. If, Mollaghan explained, she could get the rescue group to defer to me as its ideal adopter, that would legitimately leapfrog me to the slot just behind the first C.I. (customer interest) on the list, a man named Welch. He had happened upon Kennel No. 252 the day Cricket/Olive arrived. Welch’s deadline clock of 36 hours would commence ticking the day after the one expired on Forbes.
Seven p.m. would come and go that evening with no sign of the mercurial Mr. Forbes. Beneath the once daunting list of the three other prior C.I.’s for the dog, Mollaghan now typed the following: “Charles Siebert (visiting journalist from nytimes mag) also has strong interest in Cricket a k a Olive. I will advise him to contact rescue if the other app. falls through.”
The next day and a half was — between waiting out the deadline on Welch and going through my own pre-adoption gantlet — a beguiling mix of torturous time-distension and a kind of frenzied, dual-pronged detective mystery: the shelter trying to determine my true motives for wanting Olive (I had already opted for that half of her dual identity on the chance that I did get her), even as I was trying to divine what sort of a devil might be lurking underneath that adorable exterior to induce two prior owners to discard her.
Back at the shelter the next morning, I filled out the Ten-Item Personality Inventory (TIPI) form Mollaghan has devised for her study. It presents 10 general trait descriptions and allows seven degrees of agreement with them, from 1 (“Disagree strongly”) to 7 (“Agree strongly”), with 4 being “Neither agree nor disagree.” Apparent contradictions notwithstanding, I gave myself “7s” for the first eight descriptions: extroverted, quarrelsome, self-disciplined, easy to upset, open to new experiences, reserved, sympathetic and disorganized. I gave myself a “Neither agree nor disagree” on “Emotionally stable,” and a “Disagree strongly” for “Conventional, uncreative.” The second half of the TIPI covered both the most important characteristics in my selection of Olive — “Breed” (No), “Age” (No), “Personality” (Pending) or “Appearance” (Agree strongly!) — as well as my method of choosing, as in “Love at first sight” (Duh!) or “Advice from adoption counselor” (None as of yet) or “The pet’s behavioral history” (Now my obsession).
As I awaited the afternoon interview that Mollaghan had arranged for me with Kathryn Sharp, Town Lake’s rescue-group coordinator, I kept going back out to Kennel No. 252. I was trying at once to affirm that this dog was real and to catch her doing something dastardly. I must have made 10 trips, and each time, amid the clamor of the other Stray 3 residents, the same button-eyed bundle came soundlessly forward, tail wagging. Shelter-staff adoption counselors stationed in the foyer between the administrative offices and the back dog kennels began to give me funny looks. A half-hour after my successful interview with Kathryn Sharp, I bumped into her on my way back to Stray 3. I stopped and pretended to read some fliers on the foyer bulletin board. She smiled.
“You’re going out to see her again, aren’t you?”
By late afternoon, with another 20 hours to Welch’s 1 p.m. deadline the following day, the wait was starting to get to me. I began to behave, well, badly. At the shelter’s front greeting desk just outside Mollaghan’s office, I overheard a young couple asking the volunteer worker stationed there about “a cute little black-and-white dog called Cricket?”
“They mean Olive,” I said, running up to the desk, nearly knocking the startled pair over. “No chance. She’s spoken for.”
It got worse. Back in Mollaghan’s office, I filed a Freedom of Information Act petition for Welch’s phone number and called him on my cellphone. I wanted to know his intentions, to talk him out of them if need be. If that didn’t work, I was prepared to offer money. A lot. I got his answering machine but decided not to leave a message. That, for some reason, struck me as too weird. I made three more calls over the next hour. Someone picked up the last time, then smashed the phone down. I joked to Mollaghan that Welch seemed to have serious anger issues and perhaps should be disqualified. She laughed. Sort of.
Mollaghan, who also works part time as a dog-behavior consultant, had an appointment that evening at the home of a client with whom she had recently placed a Town Lake outcast. She asked if I’d like to accompany her. On the drive there it occurred to me that contacting Welch might be exactly the wrong thing to do, that it might rekindle a desire that had in fact long ago waned. Mollaghan agreed. We made a deal. If Welch called in, she would contact me, and then I could go to work on him.
The dog we visited that evening, a black Schnauzer mix named Sparky, was living testimony to the miraculous powers of just ounces of behavioral training and the right human-dog matchmaking. Sparky was left three months earlier in a Town Lake drop-off box. Apparently picked up in an abandoned apartment complex somewhere in south Austin, Sparky’s drop-off info sheet read only, “Found in a room.” The dog was emaciated and quite mean. In the course of his trait assessments, he tried to bite Mollaghan.
“Things did not look good for Sparky,” Mollaghan said as we pulled up in front of a lovely brick Georgian manse in Austin’s tony Aldridge Place neighborhood. “Now look.”
Sparky’s new owners, Elizabeth and Dennis Cole, had previously had a bad experience with an adopted shelter dog orphaned by Hurricane Katrina. Elizabeth Cole came to Town Lake and had a pre-adoption consultation with Mollaghan to discuss what she was looking for in a dog. Sparky, Mollaghan told me, was not the match she would have made, but after their consult, Cole went off by herself among Town Lake’s kennels and immediately fell for Sparky.
“I like recycled men,” Cole told me as we sat sipping coffee in her backyard. “My husband’s first marriage ended in divorce.”
After Cole chose Sparky, Mollaghan immediately went to work on the dog, taking him out of his kennel and keeping him beside her in her office each day. She gradually conditioned him to human company and was able to temper his aggression. Now, in the Coles’ backyard, she was instructing their 11-year-old son, Criss, on how to manage an extremely contented-looking, mild-mannered Sparky on the lead. He had been with the Coles now for four months. A real-life canine rags-to-riches story.
“We basically got him for our son,” Elizabeth Cole told me, smiling broadly. “But now I’m totally in love.”
I asked if there were any lingering problems with Sparky, who was now at my feet, gleefully absorbing a back rub. Cole said the only thing was that he refuses to go up stairs. It all only further fueled my fervor for Olive, convincing me that whatever it was that got her twice tossed by her previous owners, it could be overcome.
As things turned out, however, I needn’t have worried. About any of it. The following day, another deadline on Olive came and went. Mollaghan phoned me at my hotel at 1 p.m. sharp to say that the little girl was mine. Three months have passed. Olive and Roz play and nap together all day long, sleep at night intertwined. No sign whatsoever to date of that inner devil.
It’s hard for me to imagine now why she was never reclaimed, or why her next suitor never showed. I’ve often thought of picking up the phone to try to find out, but somehow it’s better not knowing. Sometimes, Mollaghan told me, a dog’s behavior just hews to and mirrors the environment that it’s living in, and there is something deeply reaffirming, heartening in that. Just as there is in watching the daily loosening of Olive’s abandonment anxiety: from the early days of her following everywhere at my heels, even when I got up for a drink of water in the middle of the night, to now seeing her dare solo, field-long dashes during our walks in the park, nearly out of sight, just because she feels that she can.
Charles Siebert, a contributing writer who has reported frequently on animals, is at work on “Humanzee,” a book about humans and chimpanzees.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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