Authors: Martin Kihn
“I don’t know what to do about Hola,” I say. “Gloria drove away last night. I think she’s scared of the dog.”
“Where are you right now?”
“Driving around.”
“Your wife left you, and you’re driving around? Alone? What don’t I like about this image?”
“I’m not alone,” I say. “I have Hola.”
“Perfect. She left you with the crazy dog. She’s a genius.”
“She didn’t leave us. She’s just taking a break.”
“They all say—” He stops himself.
I can hear all his possible responses bouncing off the satellite
and coming back to Earth. He settles on: “Okay. We can talk about it later. Where are you going?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I have to do something about Hola. It’s a bad situation. Gloria’s scared.”
“Everybody’s scared of your dog, Marty. She’s totally out of control.”
“I think she’s okay.”
“That’s ’cause you’re a drunk. You’re not feeling it. Trust me, someday you will.”
Wince. “What should I do?”
“How about some training? Basic obedience work.”
“We’ve done that.”
“I’ve met your dog, bro. You haven’t done anything with her.”
Thwack
. “Whatever.”
“Someone’s looking out for you, though. Do you know what today is?”
“What?”
As Clark informs me, it happens to be the American Kennel Club’s designated Responsible Dog Ownership Day.
This is the kind of coincidence so outrageous that program people call it a God Shot.
The flagship event is being held ten blocks south of AKC headquarters in a beautifully landscaped patch of Manhattan on Twenty-third Street and Fifth Avenue called Madison Square Park, formerly a crack-and-hustler bazaar too dangerous to enter after dark, even with a dog. Clark tells me he’ll meet me down there if I want.
We newcomers are told over and over that we need to say yes to any invitation that does not involve alcohol. An alcoholic alone is in bad company, and the AKC officially discourages serving spirits to dogs.
I say, “Yes.”
I
T IS A CLEAN AND CLEAR DAY
, warm enough that the AKC reps can trot around in their bright red T-shirts and blue jeans and not much else.
There are balloons at the entrance to the park and a couple of rings set up with plastic gates, surrounded by a row of black folding chairs three deep. One ring is a demo space for agility shows and fun matches like an egg-and-spoon race for dogs that I assume must be about making scrambled eggs. It has a healthy crowd and an emcee with a working microphone.
The other ring, pushed up against an open-air meat restaurant called the Shake Shack, is some kind of obedience assessment area. The dogs inside this ring are small, and so is the audience. Maybe a dozen people sit or stand around the enclosure, most with dogs, watching with an air of wary expectation.
Reeling Hola on a short leash, I go over to the folding table set up at the entrance to the ring.
A perky terrier-like young woman with no makeup extends an application sheet and pen and says: “Welcome to Canine Good Citizen. Want to take the test?”
“We’re not ready.”
“How do you know? You could give it a—”
Hola stands up with her paws on the table, snatches the woman’s
Daily News
and starts chewing on the
Parade
magazine.
It happens, I notice, to have a cover article on Responsible Dog Ownership Day.
“No, Hola!” I say. “Drop it.”
She starts enjoying the Sports section.
“Drop,” says the woman, in a firm but not very loud voice.
Hola drops the newspaper.
“Back off.”
My dog puts four on the floor and stands there, looking up at her new master.
“Good,” she says, turning to me. “I see what you mean. You certainly have a wonderful opportunity to train your dog. Do her a favor and teach her some Good Citizenship. How old is she? Two?”
“Um, she’s five.”
The terrier is stunned into silence.
For the past two decades, since so-called corrective methods have fallen out of style, dog trainers have collectively decided to frame everything in a positive way. So when they tell you that you have a “wonderful opportunity to train your dog,” what they mean is that something is very, very wrong.
The woman hands me a pamphlet, and I force-march Hola to the spectator’s area and look around the CGC test ring. There are ten cards mounted on the plastic fence at equal intervals around the perimeter, each containing a numbered step. The serious-looking assessors take each dog through the test, make a notation, then pass it on to the next step. A line of five or six dog-owner pairs wait on deck by the check-in table.
The ring itself is not much larger than my apartment, and most of the dogs are those typical Manhattan animal accessories you can carry in a Whole Foods bag. As these yip-meisters go
through their tiny paces, I look at the pamphlet, which turns out to be a description of the CGC.
Canine Good Citizen consists of ten tests that seem simple, unless you’re unfortunate enough to have an actual dog. In that context, the real test becomes how to ward off clinical depression as you read down the list of requirements.
As I scan it, my mood swings up and down like a chimp at Monkey Jungle, and I begin to get the feeling my father must have had surveying me at my high school graduation—dyed black hair, skinny tie, mounds of poetry, special needs in precalculus—and realizing his eldest son would not only not be going to medical school but might not actually be moving out of the basement anytime soon.
“Don’t worry,” says a familiar Long Island voice coming up behind me, “it’s a lot harder than it looks.”
Clark hugs me—men tend to do that in the program—and says, “Right, Hola?”
Hola looks up at him, then back at the ring. For some reason, she hasn’t warmed up to Clark.
In the ring, a poodle sits placidly to be brushed and have her front paws examined, one by one. A sheltie mix stands still as her owner shakes hands with the assessor and moves on. A minipinscher doesn’t jump up as somebody bends down to pet her. A Scottie-Yorkie mix with a button tail lies quietly on the grass as the assessor drops her clipboard behind her (to test “Reaction to distraction”). A nervous-looking Labradoodle nonetheless refrains from whining while her owner goes out of sight for a while (to test “Supervised separation”).
“How do they do that?” I ask Clark. “How many do they have to pass?”
“Every one.”
I check for sarcasm. “What?”
“It’s a pass-fail test. Dog has to pass every one. Ten out of ten. Perfect score.”
Darkness falls. Hola can’t do any of them. She’d fail before I filled out the form.
Clark says, “Hey, you and Hola should train for this.”
“You’re high.”
“You never thought you’d stop drinking either, right? This has got to be easier.”
“Maybe not.”
“She’s a smart girl. I feel like she has a lot of potential.”
There are few people in the world that I trust more than Clark, but at that moment I am entirely sure he is wrong.
What I don’t know is that all my fears are misplaced, and I am the one who is wrong. Hola can do all these things and much, much more. Everything she needs, she has, and there is nothing standing between her and a triumphant, a well-ordered life.
Nothing but me.
I
N ADDITION
to the dog-products sellers and subtalented woofy arts-and-crafts types you find at dog shows, a few breed and other organizations have set up tables. There are reps for Clumber spaniels and the Metropolitan Dog Club—and, unusually, the Bernese mountain dog.
The Bernese booth consists of a sloping card table, a pile of poorly printed color pamphlets, two women, and two dogs. The dogs are lovely, small-boned bitches with glowing coats and tender smiles. The women are at the far edge of middle age with faded short curly hair, Walmart flower-print blouses,
sensible jeans, and the no-nonsense faces often owned by people whose dogs respect them.
One of these women turns out to be a legend in the Bernese world, a breeder of multiple champions whose dogs dominated breed specialties in the 1990s. Her name is Lilian Ostermiller of De-Li’s kennel, and the previous month she’d been named the AKC’s Breeder of the Year in the Working Group.
As I bring Hola up to the little corral where the bitches are sunning, she sticks her nose between the slats and kisses her cousins. She wears her ecstatic expression, and her head is bobbing up and down like I just asked whether she has dance fever.
“They always recognize another Berner,” says Lilian. Her voice is clipped and clear and faintly German. “I have a male that barks at any other breed but lets the Berners go without a nod.”
“I feel the same way.”
“She’s being very good,” Lilian says, watching my baby. “What a sweetie.”
“Oh, she’s horrible,” I say. “We’ve tried everything and she doesn’t get better. I don’t know what to do. She was always like this. In her litter all the siblings were just sitting there, and Hola was running around like a nut.”
“Who picked her out?” she asks.
“The breeder.”
She nods.
“You know,” she says kindly, “we can always see a sucker.”
“That’s me,” I say. “A sucker.”
While I stand there chewing on my own regret, the great breeder is eyeing Hola’s engagement with her dogs.
“You know,” she says, “I like this dog. The ones that just sit there like couch potatoes are too boring. This one has a lot of
personality; she’s interested in the world. This to me is a great type of dog.”
Of course I am shocked to hear my own mini-monster praised by so esteemed a breeder. But not nearly as shocked as I am by what comes next:
“Her problem,” says Lilian, “is intelligence. That’s a very smart dog you’ve got there.”
I actually look down to make sure I’ve got the right dog on my leash.
Hola, Clark, and I head for the fenced dog park known as Jemmy’s Run, and I let her off leash for some good times. Clark and I lean against the metal fence talking, and I monitor Hola carefully and continuously for signs of funny business.
“I agree,” Clark says.
“What?”
“What you’re thinking—it’s a good idea. The best one you’ve had this month.”
“What?”
“That you should train Hola for her Canine Good Citizen—”
“That was your idea.”
“Oh, right. I knew it was a winner.”
Now we’re watching Hola locked in a full-body clinch with a Yorkie, rolling around and around on the rocky ground like a two-headed furry tornado. “She can’t do it,” I say. “It’s impossible.”
“She can totally do it. It’s you I’m worried about.”
“I’m not the weak link here.”
“Yes, you are. You’re bad for each other.”
I don’t have time to respond to this slander before plunging into the storm to haul Hola away from the Yorkie, who emerges
from the dust cloud looking like he’s won some kind of commendation from the mayor. Hola collapses at my feet, heaving in air, and Clark says:
“Here’s the thing. My advice to you. You get this CGC for Gloria. To prove something to her.”
“What? That I’m crazy?”
“No,” he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. “That you’re sane.”
I
N A LETTER
introducing the Canine Good Citizen test to dog clubs in 1989, the AKC’s then VP of Obedience, James Dearinger, explained: “This program was designed as a response to the anti-canine sentiment that has painfully been gaining momentum these past few years.”
CGC was the first AKC-sponsored certification program to open its paws to non-purebred dogs—what the AKC calls mixed breeds rather than mutts. The test, Dearinger explained, focuses entirely on good dog manners and responsible pet ownership.
An early video promoting the test described its goal succinctly: “A dog that makes its owner happy and doesn’t make anyone else unhappy.”
A test to encourage pet training, as opposed to competitive obedience, was discussed within the AKC as early as the 1970s, and outside the AKC, members of the American Temperament Test Society were advocating a pass/fail test for puppy temperament. Breeders feared that cities would pass laws restricting ownership because of a few highly publicized incidents. The late Herm David, a columnist for
Dog World
magazine, wrote articles about the challenge of dogs living in urban environments and outlined a “good citizen” program in the early 1980s.
The original elements of what became the AKC’s CGC
test were developed by a committee that included James Dearinger, Bob Self of
Front & Finish
magazine, and AKC Field Rep Wally Kodis. A pilot was run in 1989 with the Upper Suncoast Dog Training Club in Clearwater, Florida, and early tests were conducted with the Tallahassee Police Department K-9 Unit, a purebred rottweiler club, and the mixed-breed Ochlockonee River Kennel Club. The K-9 dogs passed easily, the well-trained rottweilers all passed, and one-third of the mixed-breed club failed.
As a result of the pilots, some changes were made to the program.
The first three elements were rearranged to a more natural sequence of accepting a stranger, sitting for petting, and sitting still for an exam instead of the original, inverted order.
Strangely, the original test did not include a recall, or come exercise. The reason, says AKC Field Rep Mary Burch, who runs the CGC program today, was that it was considered too basic.
However, she told me, “The club received hundreds of requests from instructors to add a recall, mainly because you really can’t begin to train a dog until he comes to you to have a collar put on for training.”
Originally, the test included an eccentric item called “Praise and interaction,” in which the owner was supposed to play with her dog and then suddenly get it under control, praising its calmness. However, according to Burch, “The more we looked at it, we realized we set the stage for owners to think they should only praise the dog in that test item.” There was also the more tactical problem that some breeds, like Labs, couldn’t calm down, while others, like basset hounds, “just stared at the evaluators like they were morons.”