[nagdu] satire

[Ed Meskys]

There's a Canine Conspiracy!
Television Reveals It!.
NY Times Saturday, 2011_01_08
By NEIL GENZLINGER. What in blazes is wrong with this country's
dogs? Such a collection of neurotic, insecure, bitchy, bullying creatures hasn't
been seen since whenever the latest episode of 'Real Housewives' was broadcast.
I do not own a dog and never have, but I do own a television, and from the
evidence
it emits, the whole danged species needs to go on a lengthy timeout. On the
National
Geographic Channel, Cesar Milan is now in his seventh season of grappling with
ill-behaved
mutts on his 'Dog Whisperer. On Saturday on Animal Planet, Victoria Stilwell
returns
for a third season of unprovoked barking and biting on 'It's Me or the Dog. Even
the Hallmark Channel got into the act this week; on Monday it rolled out a fresh
incarnation of 'Petkeeping With Marc Morrone,' which isn't limited to problem
dogs
but certainly had plenty of them in the premiere.
Watch enough of these shows and you come to suspect that they are treating the
symptoms
of an epidemic, not the causes. For instance, a superficial analysis might
suggest
that Ginger, the Chihuahua in Saturday's 'Me or the Dog,' is unbearable because
her
owner, an Upper East Side caricature (and 'Real Housewives of New York' alum)
named
Jill Zarin, has lost the ability to distinguish normal human-dog interactions
from
abnormal. (The episode becomes unwatchable about the fourth time Ginger is
allowed
to stick her doggie tongue up Ms. Zarin's nostrils.) But Ginger isn't yapping,
biting
and inappropriately licking just because she happened to be paired with a
permissive
human. This kind of misbehavior takes generations of breeding to perfect.
The same is true of Phoebe, a recent 'Dog Whisperer' poodle who attacked
anything
male on two legs; Sydney, a Jack Russell terrier whose hostility toward another
dog
puts her on Ms. Stilwell's 'Top 10 Difficult Dogs' list; Shayna Punim, a German
shepherd
in the 'Petkeeping' premiere who can't take a simple car trip without incident.
It's tempting to write these cases off to reality television's penchant for
focusing
on the absolute worst of a species, be it humans or animals, but apparently
there
is dog trouble all over the land, and multiple kinds of it. Start typing 'dog
behavior
problems' into Google, and it helpfully offers you these suggestions:
dog behavior problems dominance dog behavior problems anxiety
dog behavior problems biting dog behavior problems chewing dog behavior problems
barking
dog behavior problems aggression
dog behavior problems urinating dog behavior problems marking dog behavior
problems
licking
In contrast, start typing 'dog behavior good' into your search box, and Google
is
baffled. Dog behavior good bad,' it says, sounding like a desperate guess. No
'dog
behavior good rescuing Timmy from a well' here; apparently, since the invention
of
Google sometime in the last century, no one in the entire world has had occasion
to inquire about good behavior by dogs. Because there hasn't been any.
All our dog experts seem to be tied up trying to fix this mess one televised dog
at a time, an impractical approach, given that according to a news release I
just
received promoting -- no kidding -- a weight-loss contest for pets, there are
77.5
million dogs in the United States. So it's left to a nonexpert like myself to
try
to figure out the root causes of this orgy of misbehavior. It seems to me that
it
can all be traced to three familiar bugaboos:
1. THE MEDIA Specifically, television. Dogs, stuck in the house all day,
probably
watch more of it than kids do. That was fine in the early days of the medium
because
the role models they would see were, basically, Lassie and Rin Tin Tin, the two
finest
dogs in history.
Lassie never barked unless a tree had fallen on some family member eight miles
away
and certainly never required the kind of dog therapy loose in the land today.
And
it's a good thing that TV's Rin Tin Tin -- a German shepherd, like the
aforementioned
Shayna -- wasn't around to see Mr. Morrone's prescription for Shayna's travel
problems
in 'Petkeeping': he suggested an 'anxiety wrap,' a tight-fitting garment that
supposedly
has a soothing effect.
An anxiety wrap? Mr. Tin might say. For riding in a car? Are you arfing kidding
me?
You want anxiety, try rescuing Rusty from 50 armed Apaches. I did that three
times
a day, and nobody ever wrapped me.
Anyway, by the late '60s those paragons were going or gone, and there were new
dogs
in town. The neurotic Scooby-Doo arrived in 1969; yes, the title beast would
eventually
help save the day, but what the dogs in the viewing audience noticed was that he
could also, say, eat his master's triple-decker sandwich and not be punished.
Then came the slobbery 'Beethoven' movies, which turn up on TV a lot because
they're
family-friendly, and the even more slobbery 'Turner & Hooch,' which turns up on
TV
a lot because it has lengthy scenes with Tom Hanks wearing nothing but black
underpants.
And now there's Brian, the more-human-than-the-humans dog on 'Family Guy. It's
no
wonder your postmodern mutt, after spending hours watching this kind of stuff,
thinks
there are no rules.
2. LIBERAL DEMOCRATS The 'barking chain' scene in the 1961 film '101 Dalmatians'
taught dogs how to spread news far and wide, and one of their first chances to
do
so was provided on April 27, 1964, by the nation's No. 1 liberal Democrat,
Lyndon
B. Johnson. Johnson pulled his beagles, Him and Her, up on their hind legs by
yanking
their ears; a photograph of the president demonstrating the stunt with Him
appeared
far and wide. Him yipped, and dog lovers howled. ('White House Gets Protests on
Dogs,'
read a headline. Telephone Callers Deplore Pulling Beagles' Ears.')
We can safely postulate that word of the ear pulling reached every dog in
America
within a few days and that retaliatory planning began almost immediately.
Mid-'60s
dogs were smart enough to realize that a direct attack on a nuclear power like
the
United States could not succeed; instead they chose a guerrilla campaign of
accelerating
misbehavior, calculated to produce within a few generations -- i.e., now -- dog
anarchy.
3. OVERREGULATION Let's state the unpleasant but obvious: the balance of power
between
dogs and humans shifted when we started ordering ourselves to clean up after the
beasts. In New York that took place on Aug. 1, 1978; that's when the city's
Canine
Waste Law went into effect. One man interviewed that day called it 'the
stupidest
thing in the history of the city,' but now it's considered standard operating
procedure
-- by both us and our dogs. Is it any surprise that dogs don't obey us when they
view us as their personal hygienists?
So that's my guess as to what has given rise to the kinds of behavior now
rampant
on dog-whisperer TV: the confluence of bad role models, an image of subservience
and a long-held grudge. Possible solutions: play 'Lassie' DVDs in a continuous
loop,
limit dog ownership to landowners with at least 10 acres and have President
Obama
issue one of those apologies for historical grievances that have become popular
in
recent years. It's either that or get used to dog tongues in your nostrils and
dog
behaviorists every time you turn on the TV.
PHOTOS: Who's the real master? Jill Zarin and her Chihuahua, Ginger, on 'It's Me
or the Dog. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ANIMAL PLANET)(C1); Cesar Milan, the Dog Whisperer,
helps
pets like Macy with behavioral issues. (PHOTOGRAPH BY MPH-EMERY/SUMNER JOINT
VENTURE)(C6)
.