Dog Bites Everyone
There’s something new to worry about.
I don’t mean the unlikely danger of an asteroid striking Earth or even the more immediate peril of being beaten by an L.A. cop.
I mean the growing number of emotionally unstable dogs among us.
While I have often worried about the melting Arctic icecap and lethal bacteria in my chicken, I have rarely concerned myself with maniacal pets.
Now, however, I am told this is something I ought to worry about so, by God, I’m going to.
I’m not about to soar through middle age eating fat-free foods, exercising regularly, avoiding stressful situations and shunning alcoholic beverages only to have my throat ripped open by a homicidal Lhasa apso. As I understand it, the problem is twofold: purebreds that are the result of incestuous relationships and hybrids born from crossbreeding with wolves.
Just as bad breeding of one type or another has created its share of maniacs among humans, we have now extended that practice to Canis familiaris with similar results.
Instead of just worrying about pit bulls, shepherds, Dobies or Rottweilers, we can concern ourselves with Chihuahuas whose parents were brother and sister, and collies with wolf blood in their veins.
Imagine Lassie turning suddenly on little Timmy? Imagine Benji tearing ass after Baby Bumpkin? Anything is possible.
Not since werewolves roamed France has a hybrid relationship so affected the human community.
Vicious dogs are in the news these days for a variety of reasons, the most recent being the use and misuse of them by--who else--the LAPD.
Like their handlers, police dogs have demonstrated an inability to distinguish good guys from bad guys, with predictable consequences.
This has stirred a campaign against vicious dogs, an offshoot of which has been to revive a crusade to regulate inbreeding and crossbreeding. The Senate is not likely to question Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas about his stand on dog breeding, but there are those who think it should.
Among them are L.A.’s own Barbara Fabricant, a captain in her self-founded Humane Task Force. Wherever a domestic animal is being beaten, eaten or otherwise provoked, you’ll find Barbara calling for mercy.
This time, however, she’s on the side of us humans. She cornered me one day to demand I do something about a growing tendency to crossbreed dogs with wolves, a practice that is creating new strains of vicious pets.
“There are 300,000 of these things in the country now and it’s got to be stopped!” she said, ears flattened against her head.
I replied honestly that animal breeding of any type was not high on my agenda and, in fact, I was beginning to lose interest in human breeding. But then one day recently my son brought home a dog that is part wolf, and Barbara’s warning took on new meaning.
The situation is not unlike that of ignoring the problem of public nudity until one discovers his daughter has signed on as a topless dancer in a cowboy bar.
Our new dog’s name is Sharmi. Up until now the only potentially lethal behavior she’s exhibited is a tendency to try licking a hole in my hand, a display of sweetness I find barely tolerable.
I had a hard time accepting that in my kids.
Armed with literature furnished by Fabricant, I am informed that hybrids, as we call the wolf-dog combination, suffer “conditions of irreconcilable conflict” and are apt to become schizophrenic.
Barbara insists the same thing happens when pups are born from incestuous relationships. Carrying the Oedipus Complex into doghood, she points out that breeders, in order to save money, will even combine mothers and sons to sire purebreds they sell for hundreds of dollars.
What this does, she says flatly, is create a crazy dog.
“Anything can set them off and they become violent, just like dingy humans. Even a cocker spaniel, if you can imagine anything more mild-mannered, is a trotting time bomb if he’s inbred.”
Wolf-dogs, she says, are similarly unpredictable. Something as simple as a cough can spook them into seeing you as nothing more formidable than a tree squirrel, which they love.
What had been licking your hand a moment before is now regarding you as an early dinner.
Lawyers whose pro bono talents are limited to suing have always benefited from vicious dogs. Fabricant says the benefits have now extended to insurance companies that are canceling liability policies of those who own wolf hybrids.
That is one more reason, Barbara says, not to own a vicious pet. I’m with her. We’ve got enough to worry about in the world without allowing demented dogs to run loose, however they arrive at their dementia. Keeping an eye out for demented cops is a full-time job in itself.
