TKM

After 20 minutes of deliberation a jury has found Scout Morrison guilty on 118 misdemeanor charges stemming from a December 2007 harassment incident involving a California ground squirrel.

Morrison, a 2½-year-old German Shepherd mix who was tried as an adult, wagged his tail merrily as the jury foreman read the guilty verdicts, including one count of assault, one count of kidnapping by confinement, one count of torture, one count of reckless mayhem, and 114 counts of criminal barking threats.

Morrison in a 2009 file photo

Morrison was just 11 months old at the time of the incident, during which he chased the squirrel up an elm tree located in his backyard, then barked and paced below for a solid hour, preventing descent by the squirrel, who testified that he was “paralyzed by his fear of heights, and also of being eaten,” and therefore was forced to remain in the upper branches of the elm to a point of mental and physical exhaustion that required immediate hospitalization.

Prosecutor Rocky Lundt, representing the plaintiff through Breaking Down Fences, a nonprofit legal advocacy organization dedicated to fighting the yardification of squirrel habitats, said he believed the jury reached “absolutely the correct verdict” but also bemoaned the slowness of the criminal justice system. “It may be perfectly fine for humans, or even dogs, to wait a year and a half to see justice served, but California ground squirrels have an average life span of four, maybe five years. It’s an indignity, to say the least, that my client had to spend the best months of his life suffering through baseless motions and hearings while his attacker ran loose in his ancestral home.”

Prosecutor Lundt

The case raised a number of questions pertaining to the nature of ownership and clashing land-use rights between native wildlife and the so-called domesticated predators who arrive with host families following a home sale.

Defense counsel Needles, an opossum who disagreed strongly with the jury’s verdict, noted that while she largely felt sympathy for suburban and exurban wildlife, the backyard in question is attached to a ranch home built in 1954, giving this particular squirrel’s forebears 55 years to relocate to a nice nearby park. Besides which, Needles added, “I maintain, as counsel has repeatedly maintained, that dogs are incapable of recognizing the difference between a scared squirrel and a small, playful dog. One can either choose to see that as vicious or beautifully egalitarian; I think you know where I stand.”

Delays in the case were partly due to discontinuity in Morrison’s defense. Morrison’s initial counsel, Slinky—an undocumented cat who may have been angry with the homeowners for trapping, spaying, and re-releasing her to their yard with a nicked ear—disappeared several months into the trial and wasn’t heard from again. Morrison then briefly enlisted a squirrel attorney, but a caseworker intervened on his behalf to request a competency hearing and Morrison’s trial was put on hold until new counsel could be found.

Needles, who took over Morrison’s case in mid 2008, motioned for a change of venue, arguing that it was “impossible for him to obtain a fair trial in a backyard he feels obliged to defend from alien creatures, strange sounds, and shiny things,” but Judge Chi Chi Champaign, a Chinese Crested dog from next door, ruled that the trial would take place under the pomegranate tree, with jury selection to begin as soon as the homeowners could be bothered to fill the nearby birdfeeders to attract a suitable jury pool.

Judge Champagne

The eventual jury of four house finches, two mourning doves, two lesser goldfinches, two Western scrub-jays, one mockingbird, and one starling all fixed their gaze on Morrison as the jury foreman read the verdicts, convicting Morrison on all counts—despite a potentially damning photograph of the plaintiff that emerged during the trial suggesting he may be in the habit of taunting predators.

Defense exhibit A

“Look, this clearly was not a jury of his peers. Some were just too dumb to get out of jury duty, and the rest obviously had an ax to grind. He’s likely given chase to every one of them at some point,” Needles said. “And 114 counts of criminal barking threats? The squirrel was paralyzed by fear but somehow had his wits about him to count the number of times my client barked. Ever heard of a little thing called ‘playing’ possum? There’s no play to it, folks, that’s threat-triggered paralysis—and I could no more tell you how many times a dog has barked at me in that state than I could tell you what you ate for breakfast in your kitchen this morning, because I wasn’t there!”

Needles went rigid twice during the course of the trial, forcing the court to adjourn indefinitely while she regained consciousness. She spoke frankly about her handicap at the press conference. “It’s certainly a hindrance professionally,” she sighed. “The sudden paralysis is one thing, but the foaming at the mouth and the anal secretions—it’s all quite involuntary, but only other opossums can truly understand the embarrassment. Sure, I think about how life might be different for us otherwise. We have opposable thumbs on our hind feet, you know, and 50 razor-sharp teeth that we rarely get a chance to use defensively because of our stupid maladaptive reflex.”

Needles showing off her teeth to reporters

Prosecutor Lundt moved that Morrison be housed in a secure facility pending sentencing, calling him a “loose cannon,” but Judge Champagne remanded Morrison to the custody of his host family.

“That’s ludicrous!” Lundt shrieked. “The homeowners have been completely irresponsible about curbing this lunatic canine! How can you possibly guarantee my client’s safety?”

Judge Champagne, in a rare show of irritation after the long and sometimes circus-like trial, sighed, blowing the forelock of hair from her brow. “I don’t know, counsel,” she said. “Perhaps your client could, for his own good, temporarily relocate to the perfectly nice elm tree just outside the fence line?”

Sentencing is scheduled for the next time the birdfeeders are filled.

A German shepherd mix charged with the unlawful harassment of a squirrel will not face hate-crime charges, according to his lawyer.

The dog, Scout Morrison, confined to his backyard until his court date, still faces a number of criminal and civil complaints related to a Sunday incident for which a squirrel, claiming undue hardship and psychological trauma, seeks compensatory damages in addition to permanent relocation of the accused.

A police sketch of the accused, who was quickly identified in a backyard lineup.

Alarmed at the dismissal of hate-crime charges, the squirrel—who in addition to the unlawful harassment complaint is charging Morrison with reckless endangerment and mayhem—appeared shaken at a press conference during which he called the entire backyard animal behavioral code into question. “I cannot imagine how the court can dismiss such an obvious example of a hate crime,” the squirrel said. “Sadly, the day has arrived when a city squirrel can no longer peaceably live in his chosen backyard, where,” he choked audibly, “my forebears have long acted as the sole remaining visible example of undomesticated wildlife for so many suburban children.”

The squirrel gathered himself and apologized to the gallery. “I’m sorry. It’s been an emotional day for me,” he said, his tail twitching. “I’ve been stressed and anxious since the incident, and now that animal has been confined to his backyard—my backyard!—pending trial. I can’t just pick up and find a new backyard. My family has been farming tangerines and pomegranates here for decades; it’s our ancestral home.”

The victim claims he suffered “extreme traumatic stress” from the incident.

Morrison, just shy of his first birthday, allegedly held the squirrel physically and emotionally captive for a solid hour Sunday, keeping watch at the base of the tall elm whose uppermost branches supported the squirrel.

When a reporter suggested that squirrels are “born tree dwellers,” the squirrel erupted, “We’re not all the same! I happen to be a California ground squirrel, which should tip you off that I’m not exactly comfortable with the heights.” He paused as his lawyer leaned to whisper something in his ear, then added, in a calmer tone, that he has an inordinately high metabolism and had slept only fitfully over the weekend. He said he feared falling from sheer exhaustion.

Reached for comment, Morrison’s lawyer, Slinky, also a backyard resident, said of the judge’s ruling, “Well, of course, it would have been a mockery of justice had the judge ruled otherwise. Even if my client did ‘harass’ the complainant, the notion that he targeted him solely because he’s a squirrel is beyond ludicrous.” Then she added, exasperated, “Look, as an undocumented cat, I certainly understand that canines can seem thuggish during encounters with smaller backyard residents, but we all recognize that dogs have no working concept of different species. It’s just a thing with them. To my client, the squirrel was just another dog, and for that reason a hate crime was plainly impossible in this instance.”

The accused, who chewed a rawhide throughout his preliminary hearing, betrayed no emotion as the judge announced his decision.

The squirrel’s legal team has called Morrison’s hiring of a feline lawyer “at best a publicity stunt, and at worst a calculated act of jury manipulation.” “We see right through this transparent ploy to paint the aggressor as a sympathetic and peaceable member of the community,” said prosecuting attorney Rockford “Rocky” Lundt, also a squirrel. “We’re hoping for an all-bird jury.”

When asked directly whether Slinky’s hiring indicates ulterior motives, Morrison replied that he didn’t understand the question, adding, “She’s the only dog I know with a law degree.”

The only known witness to the events of December 2 is Morrison’s sister, Biscuit, who, though also a canine, is not a littermate of the accused. Biscuit, 3, whose credibility has been called into question by the prosecution team, admitted that Scout “can be a little high-strung, but he was just trying to play with the little dog.” Biscuit called the squirrel’s reaction “a complete misunderstanding and overreaction. Scout just loves meeting new dogs, and he was especially fascinated with this one because he could climb trees!”

“This dumb act has got to stop,” Lundt said. “Dogs understand more than they let on, but they get away with murder because of this reputation they have for compromised critical thinking skills and attention deficits. It really does us all a disservice, and I would think they would be the first species to want to debunk this myth.”

Reached for comment inside the defendant’s home, Morrison’s feline sisters Halo, 5, and Califia, 13, said that they had no comment.

Asked how Halo’s and Califia’s refusal to testify on their brother’s behalf might affect the case, Slinky said, “They’re completely irrelevant. Anything they have to say would be discredited immediately since, you know, they’re ‘indoor’ cats. What are their lives about, day in and day out, other than lounging around on soft, warm things, waiting to hear the can opener?” Slinky then abruptly turned from the cameras and announced that she wasn’t taking any more questions, noting that she had something in her eye.

The accused reacts to the glare of news cameras.

The trial is scheduled for early in 2008.

Q: If a tree falls in the wee hours of the morning, crashing onto the garage roof, yanking electrical wiring from the wall, and demolishing the attic fan from one’s brand-new HVAC system along the way, does anyone hear it?

A: Yes.

Especially if one has already been roused by worried dogs. I feel terrible now for having told Scout repeatedly to “Shut up, shut up. Oh, my god, shut up!” in the midnight to one o’clock hour, during the whole of which he alternately whimpered, growled, and barked his fool head off. Had he the vocabulary, he would undoubtedly have said, calmly, “I’m hearing strange noises from the backyard. Would you like me to investigate?” But no matter how many times we tell our dogs, “Use your words,” they unfailingly turn to their primal barking language in a crisis.

The strange noises, which I did not hear, were undoubtedly the cracks and creaks of our 1,000-, or at the very least 50-year-old mulberry tree as it succeeded in casting off its mortal coil. To look at the tree, one might conclude that this was a long time coming, appearing as it does to be consumed by disease. I’d come to think of it as the “elephant tree,” such are the tumorous growths that riddle its core from the trunk up. Were it possible to send trees out on film shoots—as one might her cat or middle child—our tree would surely have enjoyed a career as a set piece in horror flicks.

So jarring is the tree’s appearance, we assumed when we bought the property that it would have to be removed. But when we consulted with an honest-to-god arborist, who winced when he first saw it but later affectionately patted its trunk like the head of a beloved nephew, he pronounced it sound—diseased, to be sure, but uncompromised in its integrity. In other words, it wasn’t about to fall on our house. So, really, the question became, Can we live with the tree and its gothic grotesqueries? Or, more to the point, Do we want to drop a couple grand taking this sucker out?

A funny thing happened during those deliberations: I grew fond of its beautiful ugliness. To be sure, no one else in the neighborhood has a tree quite like it, and such a prop can be seasonally decorative come Halloween. But for a little Spanish moss and Béla Lugosi, we could shoot a rogue indie monster movie, Ed Wood–style, entirely within the confines of our backyard.

But fall it did, about one third of it, as though the rotten core at the base of its trunk had simply exploded.



And while I didn’t hear the creaking and cracking, only Scout’s fretting over it, I certainly heard the crash as the tree fell onto our garage roof, after which there erupted paroxysms of pure dog panic. I got up to investigate, but finding the patio undisturbed I went back to sleep with glass-half-full thoughts: The cacophony that had sounded so near was nothing to worry about, really; maybe someone at the apartment building next door had thrown a body into a dumpster from their third-floor window.

Interestingly, had the latter scenario occurred, the owners of the apartment building might have called precisely the folks we did—as recommended by our insurance company—because when shit happens to your house or property, you need the kind of one-stop shopping Disaster Cleanup can provide. Fire? Flood? Mold? Rotten tree? Crime scene? They’re on it. And while I at first balked at the idea of having our tree removed, roof repaired, and wiring restored all by the self-same company that would, by the by, be happy to come and mop up after a murder, when I started to think about contracting with tree people, roofers, and an electrician—and having to submit all that billing through insurance company channels—Disaster Cleanup appeared as a beacon on an otherwise invoice-riddled horizon.

As one might expect, Disaster Cleanup is more of a contracting superstore than a jack-of-all-trades. So it is that Michael, a local construction contractor, was dispatched to my location for an initial assessment. And, because you know I asked, Michael tells me that he has neither the stomach nor the desire to clean up trauma sites. “There are contractors who do nothing but, and they’re better at leaving their job at the office than I could ever be in the same situation,” he says, but he’s happy to take care of my structural damage and subcontract for my tree removal, wiring work, and anything else I might need seeing to—short of human viscera.

It occurs to me that there are more contractors in the world than there are people who actually carry out contract labor, but the idea of a single invoice is so compelling that I don’t want to interrupt the choir of angels in my head to question the American Way. They’re having enough trouble rising above the din of the chainsaws at work dismantling the elephant tree.

Scout, meanwhile, continues to bark his fool head off. If only he could presently access his language center, he would say, calmly, “There are guys I don’t know in the backyard. Would you like me to investigate?”

Scout, the sweetest, cutest dog in the whole wide world™, and among the most industrious, has been crafting his own dog doors from which to exit our yard.

First, a dog-size hole appeared in the side gate. It wasn’t a dog-shaped hole as seen in cartoons—that would have been really cool—just a ragged security breach. We thought it was a fluke at the time. After all, that gate had consisted basically of long-since-rotten particleboard an ambitious kitten could have destroyed. Still, it came as a surprise: We’ve had at least one dog for all but about six dark days since we bought our house, and none before had expressed the slightest interest in escaping the confines of our admittedly dystopic yard.

The day of hole #1, le domestique called me at work to tell me the dogs had gleefully met her in the front yard when she arrived home. My heart jumped half a rib in my chest, because I immediately went to what-if land: What if they’d run away? What if I had forgotten to put Scout’s collar back on that morning—the collar I’ve been removing at night because I’m a sucker for a dog with mournful eyes that plead It burns! as he paws pitifully at the silky fabric draped about his neck? What if they’d run out into the street, each of them having the car sense of newborn bunnies, to become two more casualties of the NASCAR drivers-in-training who live in our neighborhood?

But such worry was entirely retrospective because, as le domestique told me, there they were in our only partially fenced front yard, happy as clams at high tide to be able to greet her TWO WHOLE SECONDS sooner than they might any other day, when they have to wait forever for her to get out of her car and cover the five long strides from the driveway to our backyard gate.

The next escape incident occurred several days later, when the dogs were separated for a full half day while Biscuit visited the groomer for her summer cut. A bereft Scout, who has surpassed mere cordial cohabitation with Biscuit to form a near-pathological attachment to his MENTOR, put a neglectfully convenient ladder to use and jumped the fence into the front yard. When le domestique returned home with Biscuit, Scout was lying on the front porch, no doubt exhausted from all that fretting. He seemed to harbor no inclination to go beyond the front yard; he was just bored in Biscuit’s absence and, in all likelihood, wanted to change up his scenery.

I can relate.

You may remember my mentioning back in February a brief stint in the mental hospital. It was, readers, an experience so lacking in stimuli I was inclined to attend everything on the daily grid, even nonmandatory groups addressing avenues far outside my personal experience. One can never really know too much about probationary meds-compliance issues for drug offenders. Then, in addition to the mandatory group therapy sessions and psychiatric consults, there were the optional occupational therapy classes: crafts (I finished only half my basket, leaving me nothing to show for the effort; completed crafts are kept in the contraband cabinet—yarn hangings, though undoubtedly rare, remain a concern—and the half-baked works of discharged patients are unraveled and recycled); sing-alongs (what happens in the psych hospital stays in the psych hospital, or so I warned my discordant fellow inmates); and “exercise.” The physical activities on offer were pitiful: either supervised time in the gym (a couple of stationary bikes and some free weights, the latter’s presence striking me as queer in a population denied shoelaces) or a supervised outside walk—neither of which option exceeded 30 minutes per day.

I don’t think one need be a mathematician to calculate that a population of folks fed six times daily (three “square meals” of fatty institutional food, plus three snacks), the vast majority of whom are on one or more prescription meds with weight-gain and/or metabolism-slowing side effects, really need at least the option of more than 30 minutes of exercise daily. Still, that was what was offered, and I jumped at every opportunity. During my scant four days inpatient, the gym was opened an even scanter once; on the other three days, we went for a walk.

The walk occurred on hospital grounds in the staff parking lot, but still, it was outside! We got to leave the sameness of the hospital halls and dayrooms and nurses’ stations to pass through the doors alluringly marked with cautionary “Elopement Risk” signs (which never failed to provoke an image in my head of patients running off to Las Vegas for a quickie wedding, taking their vows in pajama pants and unlaced shoes). I remember thinking how strange it was to so enjoy a walk through a parking lot—just to smell new smells, however tinged by the whiff of asphalt tar, and see the world immediately outside those elopement doors—and at the same time not want to go any farther. After all, I hadn’t committed myself on a lark, and the world beyond the parking lot was uncertain.

When le domestique called the dogs in from the backyard on a recent Saturday morning, only Biscuit responded. She called several more times before she ran to tell me that Scout seemed to have gone missing. She went out front and called his name loud and long, while I went to investigate hidden places in our backyard that might yield a somnolent dog. Scouring the nooks and overgrown hedges, I missed the obvious: a slat in our six-foot wood fence whose middle had gone missing. Before I even noticed the broken fence, Scout wormed back through the hole from the outside in and came bounding through the backyard, wagging his tail as if to say, “Look, I made the fence better!”

Le domestique generously offered to go to Home Depot while I kept the dogs in the house. She returned with four new planks, three of which we put to immediate use: We replaced the plank Scout broke, another that was on its last wooden leg, and the one next to the latter because it was so warped we couldn’t fit the new plank in without removing it. Scout looked on with a wounded expression, as if he had presented us with a craft he made—like, say, a half-finished basket woven from dark brown yarn—and there we were, blithely unraveling his effort.

I felt for the little guy. After all, the yard may be big and full of diversions, but how many holes can you dig, how many relics can you excavate, how many times can you bark at the same dumb neighbors doing the same dumb things before you need a change of scenery? I was in country for just four days, and the sameness of them seriously threatened whatever sanity I had brought to the party. Still, I have to be the mom here, not to mention the dad, nailing up the holes and keeping him safe, and that’s no fun at all.

Le domestique and I have been planning to landscape the backyard for some time, and this year we’re committed to actually doing it, especially given that Scout has an unfortunate tendency to bite the heads off weeds—cute with dandelions, not so much with foxtails. He’s aggressive toward other plants as well, as evidenced by our diminished birds of paradise, our no-longer-viable Brazil plant, several upended and de-potted aloes, and the climbing mandevilla that one day permanently ascended. Any colorful border flowerbeds or precious little vegetable gardens would quickly lose a war of attrition with the little yellow dog. And who are we to stop him? We may pay the mortgage, but the dogs put in the most yard time and squatters’ rights do apply. That’s why I’m thinking we may want to go in a different direction and make the backyard so enticing only a fool would want to escape it.

While I’m at it, may I propose that bounce houses would make a mighty fine (and inexpensive!) addition to psychiatric hospitals.

Ho yeah! The only problem with this padded room may lie in getting patients to leave it! Until such time, consider me an elopement risk, but don’t worry—I’m like as not to confine my meanderings to the front yard.

RePete wasn’t the dog we went to see. He was on our list, but pretty far down—maybe seventh—and I honestly didn’t expect to get past number 1. I had constructed a full-figured fantasy around number 1, “Lenny,” in the 24 hours since I had first seen his picture at the Beagles & Buddies Web site.

Lenny, the rescue organization’s site said, is a beagle–Australian shepherd mix, only two of my favorite dog breeds ever! His description also noted that he’s an extremely high-energy dog. And doesn’t it seem that his one blue eye can see right into your soul? He could be my people filter, warning me off the baddies! I had called to ensure that Lenny was still available—he was—and inquire what his adoption donation would be: $150, the bottom end of their scale. What a steal! I shopped him by le domestique and we decided to go meet him over the weekend.

B & B is located in the Los Angeles suburb of El Monte, the kind of town where smoking toddlers in diapers play in the street unsupervised. We were a little queasy about the n’hood when we drove up, but we got over it. After all, we’re not so fancy ourselves, and it’s not like swank types are clamoring for dog rescues to lay chain-link within their city limits. Besides, my little Lenny was in there; we needed to bust him out so that he could come home with us and be my best friend forever.

At the entrance gate we handed over our application, which I had downloaded and filled out before we arrived, and which a rescue volunteer prescreened to ensure our worthiness as potential parents. Good thing it wasn’t one of those born-again Christian rescues. The only Scripture in this joint was the “Caring for Your New Dog” pamphlets furnished by the makers of Pedigree dog food, who, by the way, have the right food for your dog at every stage of his life.

(Speaking of which, the proliferation of pet food varieties must stop, because I’m a notoriously indecisive shopper capable of entering full-blown catatonia when confronted with too many choices. I understand that today’s range of pet nutrition represents a vast improvement over olden times, when we fed our cats Purina Cat Chow and our dogs Purina Dog Chow. But under the Hill’s Science Diet brand alone, 34 different varieties of dog food are sold, not counting the Prescription Diet line, under the banner of which 39 additional products are offered, including a potato and venison formula, because dogs love them some taters and deer, and—I shit you not—an anorexia-recovery formula. Maybe dogs are hunger-striking because we’re feeding them POTATOES AND VENISON. Seriously, pet food makers, enough with the choices—unless you can come up with a food that makes dogs stop craving cat shit.)

We passed muster and through the gates into a little courtyard area where greeter dogs sniffed us and La Diabla, whom we had brought along for vetting. Lenny was not among the greeter dogs but in the kennels out back. We followed the din of barking and baying until we reached kennel seven, where I saw that solitary soul-seeing eye reflecting the high sun in a moment of halcyon stillness…just before Lenny’s turbulent psyche vomited forth.

This will shock and amaze you, readers, but Lenny turned out to be a very high-energy dog! Like, bowing-out-the-walls-of-his-chain-link-enclosure, on-crack high-energy. That furtive glance at his single blue eye set off his crazy bell and he barked me into the next kennel.

But maybe he was just nervous on first meeting. I decided to wander a bit, give him some time to realize I’m the BFF he’s always wanted but dared not dream possible. In the meantime I’d flirt with some other dogs, maybe make him jealous for my affection.

The first dog to activate my aww reflex was a reserved-looking lemon beagle. As instructed by those who know such things, I took care to introduce myself properly, with relaxed body language, no direct eye contact, and the back of one hand extended ever so casually for sniffing. The little gal approached shyly and sat quietly on the other side of the fence, wagging her tail. So far, so good. I inched my hand a bit closer, whereupon she lunged, gave it a quick nip, and ran away, barking ferociously to alert the others that something wicked their way came.

Put off the lemon beagle’s scent, I sidestepped back over toward Lenny to give him another shot at recognizing our love match. Results were consistent with initial findings.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you again—don’t you know I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt? Fool me three times, and I’ll call you Chelsea.

As I said, we had jotted down a few other dogs we liked from the Web site, just in case Lenny turned out to be, well, Lenny. But we quickly dispatched the list: Midnight the whippet mix was doing vertical flips in her run; Jake the basset mix didn’t have enough energy to keep La Diabla and her ADHD company; Jolie the coonhound mix, we were told, “just isn’t ready to meet people yet”; and Rosie the beagle, it turned out, had revealed a talent for climbing six-foot fences without breaking a pant.

The last dogs on our list were littermates Pete and RePete the mixed-breed mixes. Pete had been adopted that morning, but his bro RePete was still there.

RePete evokes for me generic dogdom, the sum of all dogs, every breed and no breed at once. I thought I had a dog aesthetic—a visual one—that forbade terribly ordinary-looking earth-tone dogs, but as I got to know RePete, he seemed perfect. He and La Diabla took to each other like Dick and Jane. He was curious, calm, and playful—and kind of beta without being a pushover. And that face, that black-spotted tongue, those soft floppy ears, those winsome eyebrows, and look at the way he sits sidesaddle!

Anyone who reads le domestique’s blog knows that we brought RePete home a couple of weeks ago: I’m lagging on the blog front. And since then we’ve been trying to suss out his heritage.

Shepherd, for sure, but certainly bred with smaller sorts—Chihuahua? And there’s that black-spotted tongue, so maybe we can throw some chow in. Le domestique suggested shar-pei as a possibility.

Then she said something I’d been quietly thinking myself, that the way his forehead wrinkles and his tail curls is suggestive of the devil breed: basenji, as in “destructo the wonder dog” Carter and her nervous bladder.

Did saying it aloud make it more real? He barks, so how much basenji—“the barkless dog”—could he really have in him? There are some folks, le domestique noted, who breed basenjis and Chihuahuas together: Maybe he has a bahuahua parent?

I like this notion of mashing names together such that every dog, however mixed, has a breed identity. The American Canine Hybrid Club lists dozens of them: the giant schnoodle (giant schnauzer/standard poodle), the dorkie (dachshund/Yorkshire terrier), the bagle hound (basset hound/beagle).

So I have to be ready, when approached at the dog park by fascinated onlookers who want to know all about my beautiful boy, to say, without a hitch, “Oh, yes, he’s a bahuashepchowpei. It’s a rare breed, especially in this earth-tone variety.”

RePete is now “Scout,” which I know may be confusing, that being my blog nick and all. It’s the name I chose for my child, girl or boy—should I ever have one—after I read To Kill a Mockingbird in junior high. It’s so coolly androgynous, with implications of both daring individualism and ethical humanity—the kind of child, or dog, I’d be proud to call my own.

Maybe I should change my name here. But there are a couple of folks who link to me who find it tiresome to type “neurotranscendence”—I can’t say as I blame them—and therefore link to me as “scout,” so changing my blog name to, say, “myrtle” would be confusing to new visitors, whom I don’t want to alienate. (Shout-out to new visitors!) Then again, visitors reading future posts who are unfamiliar with all the fascinating details of my life may think I’m referring to myself in the third person when I mention Scout, which can be not only irritating to readers but embarrassing to me should I write something along the lines of, “Scout’s been eating cat shit again.” Clearly the name problem is not something I’ll resolve in this post.

At any rate, I am completely smitten with my boy. I think about him at work, I can’t wait to see him when I get home, and everything he does further goes to prove that he is—objectively—the sweetest, smartest, cutest dog in the whole wide world. Even his penis is cute!

So, no, Scout isn’t the kind of dog you go to see. He’s the dog who romps into your life when you’re pretty sure you’ve struck out. My best relationships have always found me, and always when I’ve least expected them.

Her name was Chelsea. Not my favorite name, too post-Clintonian trendy, Gen Y’s “Lisa.” I briefly changed her name to Scout—need I say a name I’m fond of?—going so far as to make a tag for “Scout” with our address and phone number, thinking, of course, that she would be our dog in the long term. Funny how quickly animals can worm into our lives and seem absolutely right for us, even when they’re absolutely wrong.

I’ve always considered myself more of a cat person, though I think such distinctions are overrated as predictors of human personality. I gather I’ve been what you call a “cat person” all these years largely due to my exposure to such piss-poor models of the caninus family, from the antisocial dogs of my youth to the curly tailed terror visited upon me by my life partner, le domestique, who 12 years ago came into my life bundled with “Carter,” a destructive overachiever given to fits of separation anxiety most explicitly expressed via nervous bladder. I’ll never again be able to look at basenjis without wincing.

After Carter’s death, and not by my hand, we took in le domestique’s parents’ Welsh springer spaniel “Red.” Red was nice enough, but he came to us in declining health, with eight years under his coat, and ours was more an assisted-living relationship than a lesbians’ best friend kind of thing.

Soon after Red died came Biscuit, a magical entity inasmuch as she’s the dog who made me love dogs. She’s a cocker mix from the south central L.A. shelter, and while she fails factorially short of the “perfect dog” appellation thrust upon her by le domestique—via phone from the shelter, seeking my approval to go ahead with her adoption—she is preternaturally cute, proving a timeworn principle: The cuter you are, the more crap you can get away with. La Diabla, née Biscuit, is the least well-behaved member of our household, but she loves us, and she really works that cute angle.

Perhaps La Diabla’s greatest fault is that she’s cat-aggressive. Being a “cat person,” I have two feline space heaters—not counting the strays who live in our yard being that kibble is known to spring magically from a well on our property twice daily. La Diabla chases all equally, the outdoorsy types from their font of food, the indoorsy types from wherever they are. My eldest has grown accustomed to such dogergy and barely reacts anymore, which bores La Diabla, consequently diverting more of her restless energy toward Halo, our mutant five-year-old calico who, at six pounds, is as close to a perpetual kitten as nature allows. Both her teeny size and her fear of La Diabla make her just about the funnest quarry ever!

It may surprise you to learn that we were surprised by the cat aggression. Neither of us had ever experienced anything but mixed-use dog and cat households—without incident—though we do both know, abstractly, that dogs chase cats: See Spike the Bulldog and Chester the Terrier, Sylvester’s Looney Tunes nemeses:

On the other hand, our childhood was rife with examples to the contrary: See Marc Antony and Pussyfoot:

Or how about Chance, Sassy, and Shadow:

To bottom-line it, dogs who get along with cats and cats who warm to dogs are more winsome mammals for their harmony.

We’ve made every effort to break La Diabla’s habit of chasing Halo on sight, and to both her and Halo’s credit, they’ve managed occasionally to settle territory within several feet of one another for dozens of seconds at a time, like Israel and Palestine, though La Diabla hums like a power cut all the while, twitching with the readiness of a soldier at her checkpoint, ever ready to fire.

So it was that last weekend, while watching a Dog Whisperer episode in which Cesar Millan recommended and procured a second (perfect!) dog for a family whose first dog was out of control, I casually mentioned my own openness to the concept.

“Now, I don’t want you calling me Monday saying you’ve found the perfect second dog,” I clarified. “Let’s take this slow.” Le domestique tends to get a bit obsessed with focused on fun new projects, and she doesn’t always think through the consequences. Meanwhile, I’m the sensible one who positively obsesses over consequences, and I worry about the expense of a second dog, not so much in terms of food as in boarding fees, vet bills, and net destruction to the household (i.e., unforeseen damages should we adopt a chewer, a scratcher, a digger, or a nervous urinater).

“Monday’s Presidents’ Day,” le domestique reminded me. “The shelters won’t even be open.”

That was Saturday. On Sunday we were driving by a park where, it happened, the L.A. city shelter was having an adoption fair. I impulsively suggested we stop.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” le domestique asked. “They bring their most adoptable dogs to these kinds of things.”

“Yeah, let’s just have a look,” I said.

When I first started chatting up the shelter folks, they said they figured Chelsea was three or four: good teeth, no gray on her muzzle. A little later they offered as how she might be five-ish, and they mentioned that she had been surrendered by owners who claimed she was “human aggressive.” Hah! People will say anything to allay their guilt when surrendering a family pet to the shelter. Look at this sweet face and tell me there’s an aggressive bone in her body!

Chelsea proved her former caretakers wrong again and again, suffering attacks on all sides by adults, children, and other dogs. If you had a free hand to pet her, she was yours for the stroking. How could her people have been so cruel to saddle her with the taint of “human aggression”? Didn’t they know that was tantamount to a death sentence for a dog? She’s lucky to live in Los Angeles, where animal shelters citywide are working toward achieving a “no-kill by 2008” goal, the only way a three- to four- to five-year-old mutt suspected of human aggression would be allowed a second chance.

Make that a third chance. On closer inspection staffers found paperwork showing that Chelsea had been surrendered earlier by another owner, in 1999, when she was two, making her 10 years old today. Reason given: “human aggression.”

My therapist is fond of saying that all those red flags I see aren’t there to cheer me to the finish line.

By this time I had already spent several hours with Chelsea. We were resonating, she and I. Senior dogs need love too! And re: aggression, she had been misunderstood, or mistreated, or they just flat-out had the wrong dog. Maybe she’d been set up by some no-account presa canario friend.

In the meantime le domestique had fetched La Diabla to see how they got on—well—and I had taken Chelsea through the cat area to see if any aroused her ire—they did not.

We adopted Chelsea.

Two hours later she bit le domestique’s forearm. Hard. Like, chomped down and shook her head back and forth. It was an unprovoked attack that required an emergency room visit, seven stitches, and a tetanus shot.

When we got home several hours later I slipped a leash over Chelsea’s head and we took her back to the shelter. We didn’t feel we had much choice, but in bringing her back I felt that I acquired a taint of my own: the surrendering owner, a burden on the system, the kind of person who buys a cute little baby bunny for Easter only to cast it aside by Administrative Professionals’ Day. At least I had le domestique’s bruised and bandaged forearm to back up my story.

The shelter officer took down my information as I stood there with Chelsea, who was busy looking all doe-eyed and docile. We emphasized to the officer that all of our animal companions had come from L.A. shelters (we’re good people, really!) and that every one, until now, had become a permanent family member, practically living a life of luxury in our benevolent home! The shelter officer was kind but disinterested. She noted that our adoption fee was transferable to another animal within 10 days. I told her we were probably a little gun-shy to adopt again within 10 days; consider it a donation.

I went to bed Sunday night feeling embarrassed both at my impulsiveness and poor taste in animal companions. I was sad for Chelsea—I really wanted to give the old girl a better life—and also sad for myself, that my first foray into dogdom had ended so miserably. Maybe I was a cat person after all.

Coming soon: “About Another Dog”

The lesbian-killing dogs have come for us.

Just when we thought our neighborhood couldn’t get much seedier—what with our being regulars on the city’s graffiti-cleanup service—backyard dog breeders have moved in next door. We’re one cockfighting den, crystal meth lab, and hand basket away from the breaking loose of all hell.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. We moved into a neighborhood which, while not glamorous, was characterized by optimistic Realtors as “improving.” Sure, our no-nonsense lesbian real estate agent warned us that a house abutting an apartment building and lacking a sidewalk invited a vague sort of trouble, not to mention lower-than-average property values for the Zip code. But it was precisely that crippled property value that brought the house within our financial reach, and given that we were then ourselves apartment dwellers we were willing to give the unpropertied the benefit of the doubt regarding their ability to live side-by-side with sophisticates like us.

Trouble of a less vague sort has arrived not in the form of apartment tenants but homeowners, or at the very least home dwellers, the kind who bark, bark, bark the night away, and presumably the day as well since their ire is particularly roused by our animal companion, Biscuit, who spends her days in the backyard, whimpering. This is Biscuit in happier times:

The next-door dogs moved in two weeks ago, into the backyard of a house that had been vacant since Mrs. Friend died six months ago. (We were charmed by the idea of a next-door neighbor named Mrs. Friend until we found her to be sour, demanding, and ungrateful; when we rebuilt the falling-down fence separating our two properties—a project for which we could have asked her to share the $1,200 expense but didn’t—her only comment was, “It’s about time.”) When we saw a U-Haul truck in her driveway two weekends ago we hoped for the best; the chances of our new neighbors being more personable than Mrs. Friend were at least 85%. I thought maybe I should take some cookies over and introduce myself, get things off on the right foot, but the thought, as so many others, failed to result in action. Now it’s two weeks after the U-Haul sighting and we still haven’t seen our new neighbors—none of the hominid variety anyway.

Our spectral neighbors’ first act of aggression was the clearing, via hired help, of Mrs. Friend’s bougainvillea, which had formerly climbed her back wall to a height of well over 10 feet. The impressive spray of purple flowers once camouflaged the concertina razor wire that rims the property line of the apartment building behind us: Whether it’s there to keep the tenants in or others out, the aesthetic smacks of prison yard. The yard crew also tore out a couple of small fruit trees.

But any palpable absence was forgotten once chain-link became visible over our fence line, and it didn’t take long to intuit that our new anti-foliage neighbors had built a kennel of some scope: Any pack of confined, agitated dogs can tell you that, and if we had been, by some miracle, able to ignore them, Biscuit would surely have alerted us.

The chain-link is an eyesore, and the incessant barking is a nuisance, but we would soon discover something far more insidious about the next-door dogs. When my partner peered over the fence to see just how many dogs had moved in, she saw three adults, one of whom is pregnant, and they aren’t just any dogs: They’re Presa Canarios. This is what one looks like:

You may remember this once obscure breed from a 2001 wrongful death case. In January of that year two Presa Canarios had lunged at Diane Whipple, a 33-year-old athlete, trapping her in the doorway of the San Francisco apartment she shared with her girlfriend, and the larger of the two dogs, a 123-pound unneutered male named “Bane,” mauled her to death as a caretaker for the dogs, neighbor Majorie Knoller, reportedly stood by.

Knoller and her husband, Robert Noel, both of whom were then defense lawyers, were keeping the dogs on behalf of two Aryan Brotherhood prison inmates, Paul “Cornfed” Schneider and Dale Bretches, who, despite the inconvenience of serving life sentences without parole, were running a backyard breeding business, reportedly intending to supply the Mexican Mafia with fighters and guard dogs for meth labs and such. Bane was one of eight breeding Presa Canarios owned by the inmates, who farmed the care of the dogs out to various intermediaries. Knoller and Noel had taken in Bane and Hera—the second dog involved in the attack on Whipple—when another woman who had been caring for them complained that Bane was vicious and should be destroyed.

After the attack, Knoller and Noel might have had misgivings about ever getting involved in this mess, musing, How did two nice Jewish lawyers like ourselves get involved with an Aryan Brotherhood attack-dog racket that resulted in the death of a neighbor? As my therapist is fond of saying, “Those red flags you see aren’t there to cheer you to the finish line.” But where we see red flags, the Knoller-Noels saw an opportunity to bond: Three days after Whipple’s death, the couple adopted inmate–dog breeder Cornfed Schneider. He was 38.

Did I mention the bestiality? Cornfed reportedly circulated pics in prison of “Mom” in compromising positions with Bane, while “Dad” was said to have orally copulated with the dog. Unfortunately, any such evidence was barred from trial as irrelevant. The prosecution had to make do with their 30 witnesses who testified to having had terrifying encounters with Bane and Hera; in fact, had the victim been anyone but Whipple, she might have testified as well: Bane had bitten her before.

Despite the obvious charisma of the defendants, after 11 hours of deliberation the jury stoically delivered a guilty verdict. Noel, who wasn’t present during the attack, was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Knoller was convicted of second-degree murder (this being only the third time in U.S. history a jury had handed down a murder conviction in a dog-mauling case), but the murder conviction was later thrown out and she served half of a four-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter. Both are now out on parole, perhaps living next door to us! Bane and Hera were destroyed in the wake of the attack, but their snarling progeny live on, no doubt seeking to avenge their wronged parents. Perhaps they’ve found their mark.

I’m not saying Presa Canario appetites are limited to lesbians, though the Knoller-Noels went for a Hail Mary and blamed the victim, saying the dogs may have been provoked by hormones or pheromones peculiar to Whipple. They might as well have claimed Whipple conjured the dogs’ ire through Voodoo. And the next-door dogs probably aren’t kin to Bane and Hera after all. The popularity of the breed soared following the publicity surrounding the court case. Who wouldn’t want, as one breeder put it, “a pit bull on steroids”?

Well, I don’t. Nor do I want a pack of them living next door, which is to say nothing of Biscuit’s preferences. You see, Biscuit, while a very brave dog in the house, is a total sub bottom in the presence of other dogs. So while she knows in her heart that it’s her dog job to assert ownership over the backyard, and before the invasion of the next-door dogs she was as fierce as could be about enforcing her authority—by barking her little spaniel head off—whenever strangers loomed near, she now cowers and whimpers and tucks her tail whenever the other dogs bark, which is whenever she’s in the yard. As a result she’s become too anxious to do just about anything in her backyard: play ball, chase squirrels, eat, pee, etc. Again, here’s Biscuit:

And here’s a Presa:

So, to recap, Biscuit no longer has any fun in her backyard, and she’s courting kidney damage. And we would prefer not to be mauled.

So I’m dedicating myself to finding ways to get the dogs gone: noise ordinances, a maximum-dog-limit violation, owner negligence, anything. Maybe a nice, nice animal control officer, once summoned, can find illegal fight training implements or evidence of other mischief, like cockfighting, or a meth lab, or some of that legendary Presa-human canoodling. I officially don’t care. And if none of that works, perhaps puppies might enjoy an amuse-bouche of Snausage with shaved white truffle and antifreeze zest?*

*I would never harm an animal, ever, no matter how mean and snarly it is. This line is for comedic purposes only.

There was a fair amount of yelling coming from the bedroom this morning while I was getting ready for work. Toweling my hair I went to investigate and found my partner sitting on the edge of the bed, positively riveted by an Olympic curling match: Sweden v. Canada. Most of the yelling was coming from the guys on TV, but occasionally she’d let loose an “Oh!” or “Nice!” I tackled and pinned her to the bed in my own homage to sport, and once she had affected a suitable look of mock-terror I rolled off to the side and watched the match for a minute.

“Oh!” she yelled as the broom guys scuttled toward the target with the big pucky thing and it knocked some other pucky things out of the way. Gauging my blank look, she asked whether I wanted her to explain why that play was so extraordinarily cool.

My partner revealed her true self to me close to 11 years ago, only a few weeks into our relationship. I was in the impossibly small kitchen of her studio apartment and she was in the bedroom/living area. “THREE!” she yelled gleefully, and I couldn’t imagine what that meant. I went into the other room and found her watching a UCLA basketball game. Good God, I thought. She’s a sports fan.

We were both attending UCLA at the time, and, as I was quickly made to understand, it was a playoff game, a really big playoff game that, if won, would get them into the championships, so I was willing to chalk her enthusiasm up to school spirit, in which case it was really kind of endearing. Rah! Go team! I could get behind that.

But I was deluding myself. Her love of sport revealed itself to me in fits and starts over the next year, becoming fully manifest once we moved in together. And though that playoff game served as my early warning sign of the many athletic diversions to come, she’s not much into basketball as a rule. In fact, of the “big four” U.S. sports—which I would soon learn include football, baseball, basketball, and hockey—the only one she pledges allegiance to is baseball. Not that she’s some fanatic who runs around thrusting a big puffy number-one hand in the air, but she grew up rooting along with her family for her hometown boys, an underdog Atlanta Braves team in its fallow pre-’90s period. A kind of passion resulted from that long courtship, followed at last by victory. I could relate to that, having grown up within spitting distance of the Anaheim Angels.

Other than baseball, her taste veers off the beaten base path: English soccer, women’s billiards, sheep dog trials. Seriously, she used to watch a show called “One Man and His Dog” on BBC America—when the BBC was still trying to figure out what British shows Americans might cotton to—and it was like watching paint dry. Oil paint. On a hot day. But she loved it. And she has this talent for absorbing information in practically osmotic fashion, such that watching a man in a plaid tam play with his border collie for 30 minutes makes her an instantaneous expert in sheepherding skills. It’s uncanny.

I took a shine to bicycling a couple of years ago, and within a few months’ time she knew more about the sport of cycling than I’ll ever know—even if I were to apply myself. The first time we watched the Tour de France together she quickly committed the team names to memory and gleaned the roles of the various riders, from sprinters to climbers to domestiques. Her zeal makes me a little lazy, because I know that I can just watch all the colorful jerseys and beautiful bikes fly through the French countryside while she keeps track of what’s actually going on. I expect to tap her talents next week when we go to the South Bay to watch a leg of the inaugural Tour of California. I haven’t so much as glanced at a roster or route map, but my partner, if asked right now, could rattle off every European team committed to attend, along with the name of each team’s star rider—”captain” in cycling parlance—and the distances they’ll be riding each day.

It occurs to me sometimes that she deserves someone with whom she can share her vast reserves of idiosyncratic information, someone who would feast on her knowledge of curling rules like a dog alone at last with a honey-baked ham. And while I really do try to digest why that curling play was so cool, what I’m really thinking, what I can’t help thinking while she’s explaining it to me is, You’re so goddam cute when you’re excited about something.

Happy Valentine’s Day, sweet fan of mine.

So I’m in the backyard picking undersize oranges from our dwarf tree—for a time I was leaving them attached in hopes they would attain their proper orange size, but they’ve now started to leap from the tree en masse, indicating a certain ripeness that forestalls any plans for future growth—while my partner is playing ball with our dog, Biscuit. This is how that goes: My partner lobs a tennis ball with a thingy called the Chuckit, a curved piece of plastic with a cup on the end that not only sends the ball sailing with precious little effort by the thrower but saves her from having to bend over and pick up the increasingly slimy ball with her bare hands. Biscuit takes off like a shot and tries—oh, how she tries—to track the ball and catch it before it lands and rolls to a stop. She never achieves this goal. Instead, she most often gets the ball tangled in her legs as she overruns its rolling trajectory and kind of stops it with her body as if she’s throwing herself on a grenade. Then she picks it up in her mouth and trots around the yard with it, generally dropping it 20 feet away from my partner to segue into chasing her tail or scratching an ubiquitous itch, quickly forgetting that she was playing a game she enjoys.

It strikes me from my vantage point high on a ladder that our dog is not good at sports. There are breeds of dog, of course, that take no interest in playing ball, but judging from Biscuit’s appearance it’s in her genes to retrieve: Our best guess is that she’s the product of a cocker spaniel–golden retriever love match. And she certainly seems to be attracted to playing ball, but her enthusiasm greatly exceeds her talent.

It makes sense to think that there are dogs possessed of natural athleticism, just as there are people who are paid millions to play sports and millions of less talented people who’ll pay to watch them. Of course, less athletic dogs could give a fig about watching their superstar peers on Purina’s Incredible Dog Challenge—a televised event my partner has been known to watch, you know, casual-like, maybe when she’s waiting for me to finish showering and getting dressed so that we can begin our Saturday errand spectacular—but I think the corollary holds nevertheless. There are sporting dogs who outrun Frisbees and twist 180 degrees as they leap to nab them in midair with every bit as much grace and skill as Willie Mays* in his famous over-the-shoulder catch. (*I had to ask my partner whose catch that was, she being the baseball historian in the household.) Then there’s Biscuit.

I can relate. I’ve never shown a lick of talent for sports. I was the last one picked in P.E. throughout my school career. Been hit in the face by just about every kind of ball there is, usually while trying—and really, really wanting—to catch it. I’m not sure why, of all my failures, I should remember this one the most clearly: I’m in the 7th grade, playing flag football, and the ball is coming right for me. I watch it sailing through the air and I think I have a bead on it; somehow it seems so catchable even though I’ve never caught a football in my life. I’m backing up, practically tripping over myself to get into position, and my teammates are screaming at me—I’m not sure what they’re saying because I’m in the zone, right up until the ball glances off my nose and I fall at the feet of Kristin Yamamoto, who was right behind me, who was good in sports and would undoubtedly have caught the football had I not gotten in her way, which is probably what the other girls were screaming at me, to bug out. I probably remember that moment because it was the last time I thought I could be the hero; afterward I knew that I was just the easy out, the warm body taking up space on the field.

In the 8th grade I went out for cross-country running, largely because it would get me out of P.E. While the other girls played volleyball and softball I ran around and around the perimeter of the schoolyard. I wasn’t any more talented at running than I was at other sports, but I had decent endurance. I could push through pain, and I always finished my races, even if I never placed better than average. Best of all, there was no one relying on me to catch or hit a ball to help the team. There was no one screaming at me.

As an adult I discovered cycling, first as a way to get in some kind of shape, then as a way of being in touch with my physicality in a positive way. I’m not a fast cyclist, and I’m not at all competitive. The one time I tried riding with a cycling club I drove to Pasadena to meet with a group called Different Spokes, a gay and lesbian cycling organization, for a ride listed on their website as “easy,” a level they described as maintaining a “social, conversational pace.” I arrived at the meeting place early and rode around the parking lot at the bottom of the arroyo until I saw bicycles start to arrive. I went to greet them and received a lukewarm response. The ride started on an incline out of the arroyo; the group took the hill with more verve than I was accustomed to, but I hung in, huffing. As the ride continued I felt panic setting in over the pace they were keeping, and seven miles into it I bugged out, feeling like a miserable failure as I retraced my tracks to the arroyo and my car.

Since then I’ve ridden alone, always alone, just as I had ridden before the cycling-group debacle. I’m happier that way, I think, with no one pressuring me to take the hill aggressively or keep up with their pace, with no one making me feel bad for not being able to do more than I can do. I’ve found that, just as in cross-country, my legs will take me far when I value distance over speed, when I take in the scenery instead of leaving it behind in a blur. My cycling style will never put me on a podium, and that’s fine by me.

Maybe Biscuit has the right idea, then. Run after the ball if you’re so inclined, but don’t forget to chase your tail when the mood strikes. Let all those type-A dogs on the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge soak up all the glory. Biscuit and I think it’s a shame they’ll never know the private joy of aimless distraction.