Whistling Dogsie

  

“I’ll straighten this thing out. I know just what to say to him, especially to him. Okay? I’m gonna tell him you’re gonna go back to him and everything’s gonna be just the way it was when you first brought him home from the pound.”

While I don’t currently live with a dog, I’m often called upon by desperate owners to get through the thick skull of misanthropic mutts. When nothing else works, when all the training seems useless, all the fetchables are frayed and every last chew toy has been ripped to shreds, I enter the neck fold of a show shar-pei. The truth is, it was easier before. The conflicts usually stemmed from the destruction of a piece of pricey midcentury modern furniture or a cherished family heirloom. Frequently, owners ignore root causes, reacting only to the result. They don’t ask, “why did my pooch chew on a $7000 credenza instead of the cheap golf umbrella leaning against it?” It’s not a question they consider. When maybe it was done precisely to get their attention. Your dog isn’t so dumb, after all. 

I consider every possibility when sitting down for a one-on-one with a problematic pup. I want to understand the why as much as much as anything else. Most owners only care about the damage to their rug or whether that smell will ever go away (it won't). 

The problem is that most owners cannot easily connect to their canines. Sure, they use words like sit, stay, and down. Monosyllabic commands that belie the dog’s true grasp of the English language. People talk constantly of dog whistles, how these high-pitched signals have pervaded our society, cuing in nefarious actors of sinister plans. That’s certainly possible. But why then are the dogs – the very animals who understand the difference between discordant sounds – excluded from the conversation? Folks who talk down to dogs, delivering patronizing imperatives and annoying head pats never think to ask their dog, “hey, did you hear that speech from the congressman from Mississippi? What did you make of it?” No, they have all the answers. Why would they bother?

Yet dogs are the ones who are supposedly lapping up all this hateful rhetoric. They are left in the dust, to moan with their bone, snarling at postal carriers, worrying that future drone delivery systems won’t satisfy their taste from pant legs. The same people who never ask a dog what they heard, somehow believe they can speak for all dogs. It’s  insane. 

I ask: how would you know? Are you a dog? No. Wouldn’t it stand to reason that many a dog within a mile of a television set or political rally would be sent into a frenzy, should these whistles be for them? You'd think so.

It’s not the only code. And why is it always a whistle? Never a wind chime or a dinner bell. Never a low-toned hum or a cuckoo clock clang. Wouldn’t a simple bark work?

Now there's something to chew on.