Vancouver faces the Frankendogs

DOROTHY WOODEND

If you walk around Vancouver, you might see signs posted in the windows of stores and restaurants that read, "No Dogs!" The fact that business owners have taken this step tells you something. This city truly has gone to the dogs. We love our pooches to death and, sometimes, they return the favour.

In Vancouver this week, the mother of a boy who was mauled by Rottweilers testified at the inquest into his death. After a number of similar attacks on young children in Britain, police in England launched a week-long amnesty (beginning this past Wednesday) during which owners could turn in their dogs without danger of prosecution under the country's Dangerous Dogs Act.

The Vancouver mauling is almost too horrifying to think about, but it reminded me of a recent incident at the park near my house. The area is very heavily used by kids and parents; it houses a playground, a preschool and a community centre. Every so often, a young man on in-line skates appears and circles the park, towed along by a six-pack of enormous Rottweilers. Whenever this happens, the parents turn as one, on guard, like attack dogs themselves, watchful and careful. "I hope those dogs eat you, roller guy," I found myself thinking. But the people who deserve a bite in the ass rarely get it.

You tell your kids, "Don't trust strange dogs," but perhaps we ought to warn kids to trust strange dog owners even less. People do insanely stupid things with dogs. (In the case of the Vancouver mauling, it was alleged that some of the dogs were fed crack cocaine.) But it's not the fault of the dogs; after all, we have made them into what they are.

Ever since people first domesticated dogs, they have been bred and trained for specific human needs — there are dogs for war, police dogs for biting hippies and robbers, dogs to lead the blind or comfort the elderly. Most dogs used to have jobs (they guarded, they hunted, they ate garbage), but none of those things are of much use in a modern city.

So now a dog's primary function is usually as a companion, but much of their normal doggy nature — barking, digging, running, eating poo — conflicts with human needs. So they are forced to act like small furry people.

Urban dogs have had every type of human insanity projected onto them, and unlike cats, which can largely ignore us, dogs try to be everything we want them to be. But humans, being the fickle creatures we are, keep changing our minds. We want something to love, but nothing too needy, or anything that sheds or slobbers. We want to be adored, but we don't want to be inconvenienced.

Often animals just seem bewildered by the attention (or lack thereof), whether they are enormous mastiffs languishing in empty apartments all day long, or those shivering twiggy creatures carried about in handbags by Paris Hilton clones (who also look like they were bred genetically in a lab).

If you've ever looked deep into the eyes of some poor designer dog dressed in a pink tutu, you know the silent scream of a desperate creature. The phrase "treated like a dog" used to mean being beaten, chained up or hit with a stick. Now it can mean something quite different — spas, pampering, special diets, gyms, nannies, etc. Some dogs live far better than a lot of people I know.

But making dogs into substitute humans means they are also subjected to all our modern ills. When they develop neuroses, we take them to the doggy psychiatrist, to lie on the analyst's couch and complain, "My mother was such a bitch." When that doesn't work, there's always puppy Prozac.

Lately, we've been messing with their genetic structure again, this time not for function but according to the whims of fashion, A New York Times Magazine story this week investigated the human propensity to meddle with the canine genome.
This endless tinkering has succeeded in creating dogs that can't breathe properly, or hear, or find their way home from two streets over — Frankenstein's monsters, with names like puggles, bagels, maltipoos or doodleman pinschers. They look cute, but they're like defective toys; legs too long, snout too short, they easily fall apart.

The worst fashion victims, however, are those meaner, more threatening breeds such as mastiffs, pit bulls and Rottweilers, doggy styles favoured by rap stars and delinquents. Dogs being accommodating creatures, they can, and do, emulate the people they hang around with. Thus, a crazy, idiotic owner can mean a crazy, messed-up mutt. But unlike other dangerous creatures — a tiger or a great white shark — you don't need a licence, nor even any sense at all, to get yourself a big, mean canine.

If you choose to zip around town with the hound of the Baskervilles people might give you dirty looks, but that's about it. It remains to be seen whether the British initiative will have much effect; it might be more effective to euthanize the owners instead of the dogs.

So much human perversity comes out of love. People want some connection with nature, and the love people feel for their dogs is real.

Therefore, it is difficult to tell someone that they are torturing the very thing that they claim to love so much, or that their beloved snickerdoodle-shnitzi-pugglepoo might actually be better off never having come into existence.

If you truly love dogs, maybe get a cat instead.

Dorothy Woodend is a Vancouver-based writer.