Dog About Town
by Jane E. Smith

I don’t care what people say, I like dogs. It’s true that a German short-haired pointer named Andy, who had no business lurking under the dining room table, once took a chunk out of my thigh. Let bygones be bygones, I say. My memory’s hazy on this point (some years have passed), but there’s a small chance that I poked him in the eye with a pencil seconds before tooth met flesh.

Maybe Andy would have been a jollier canine if he’d gotten out more. As it was, his daily fun consisted of throwing menacing looks around the house and tossing kittens into the backyard stratosphere. Like other dogs of his generation, he ate Purina Dog Chow, slept outside in the frosty winds of January, and sallied forth from the domestic hearth only to visit the vet.

The Great Canine Leap Forward (the G.C.L.F.) changed all that. When and why the revolution happened are matters of argument and complexity, but the gist is that somebody lowered the fence between Homo sapiens and Canis lupus familiaris. Humans and canines have been tight for eons, but people who seem to know say the industrial revolution was decisive for the G.C.L.F. While our 18th- and 19th-century ancestors begat a passel of young’uns to help them bring in the harvest, nowadays we don’t need offspring to help us peck at the computer. We may or may not marry. We have one or two children, if any. We live among strangers, far from kinfolk. Result for Dutchess County dogs? Organic dining, sleeping on the Simmons Beautyrest, and gadding about town.

That town part fascinates me. Stroll down Rhinebeck’s Market Street on a Saturday afternoon, and ten to one you’re going to trip over a poodle. I’m the last to notice anything of social import, but I think I detected a distinct increase of dogginess in Rhinebeck about six years back, perhaps in response to the shaking of the American psyche in 2001, when benign public spaces became places where awful things could happen. Maybe we felt safer going out with Fido, faithful protector of the endangered family (cf. Old Yeller). In American dog we trust.

The dog-about-town phenomenon clearly needs further study, so the other day I approached a dog loitering outside Stickle’s Five and Dime. Her name was Cleo, her breed Portuguese water dog. (The American dog, like most of us, is an immigrant.) Her owner, a visitor from Scarsdale, said they’d just come from Gigi’s. He spoke approvingly of the waiters’ attentiveness to Cleo’s water and treat needs.

I inquired, gently, why he’d torn Cleo away from the comforts of Westchester. Owing to his sunglasses, I’m not certain the look he gave me was pitying. “To leave her at home would be a terrible thing—boring for her and less than exciting for me.” I snuck a look at Cleo, who, true to report, didn’t seem bored. Tail heading south, she seemed slightly worried.

“Do you have children?” he explained. “No? When you have a child, you get to see the world through their eyes. And when you bring a dog to town you get to experience the world through your dog’s eyes.” Cleo sniffed a tire. “And nose.”

I took leave of Cleo and checked out the furry child substitutes in Rhinebeck that day. Many were dogs of breeds so rare you’d swear somebody made them up, like the Great Icelandic Howler, the Balinese Snoutster, or the Bear-Faced Dog of Limpopo, whose purchase may have required foreign travel and complicated financial transactions. Others were dogs of mixed parentage with an infirmity, a bad reputation, or a stint on death row. A small, but clever number of owners had managed to follow both trends by rescuing a dog of pure blood who was down on his luck.

A friend of mine, who asked to remain nameless, is not fond of dogs, pure or impure. He is even less fond of dog people. Lavishing canines with the milk of human kindness is regressive and infantile, he says, a way to avoid emotional and financial commitment to people who really need it. These positions are not popular, possibly even dangerous. “It’s like saying you beat your grandparents for fun,” he says. “But there’s something profoundly nutty about a society that cares more for dogs than their own family members.” He may have a point. According to a 2006 Pew Research Center poll, 94% of Americans feel close to the family dog; 87% of us feel close to mom; 74% to dad. (Even the family cat ranks higher than dad.)

My last stops were two businesses, each less than two years old, that cater exclusively to dog clientele. The first was Pause Dog Boutique, on the backside of Montgomery Row. Mopping up pee left behind by a nervous customer (canine), owner Laura Betti said she got the idea for Pause when she couldn’t find a decent collar for her first dog. (She confessed she has a thing for collars, but I could already tell. There are two big racks of neckwear so sassy that I started wanting one to wear myself.) Before opening, she spent a whole year researching companies that make responsible products (i.e., all-natural or green) and that donate proceeds to shelters or rescue efforts, bursting these days with “foreclosure dogs,” cast off by owners who couldn’t pay their mortgages.

As Laura put the mop away, several customers popped in. One woman made a beeline for the large Tuckered Out Premium Dog Bed. Three young women fussed over shop dogs Ella (hunt terrier) and Empi (Shetland sheepdog). A regular patron cleaned out Laura’s supply of vanilla and yogurt dog snacks. I was drawn to the health and beauty products. Having noticed a flier on the counter—“Brushing Your Dog’s Teeth. It’s Mandatory for a Healthy Pet”—I inspected the KissAble Toothpaste with tea tree oil.

This may not be the most propitious moment to own a small business, but Laura’s smart to sell primo products that not only outlast the first chew, but benefit canine and environmental welfare to boot. The American Pet Products Association says pet owners will spend $45.4 billion on food and accoutrements this year, two billion more than last year. They’re buying fewer items, but they’re willing to shell out for quality goods, especially food.

That’s dandy for Hooked on Dogs, my next stop, which is under the front porch of Red Hook’s Chocolate Factory. Its owners, Kara Gilmore and Nadja Palenzuela, have stocked the place with more healthy dog kibble than you can shake a stick at. Dry food and wet food. Raw food that’s frozen and raw food that’s dehydrated.

When I got there, Nadja was on the phone with a customer discussing canine metabolism, so I asked Kara why people spend so much money on pooches these days. “It’s one of those chicken or the egg things,” she said. “Do we take better care of our dogs when we can find better things for them? Or do we create those things because our dogs have become more like family members?”

Kara and Nadja’s family has ten canine members, all rescued. Even their owners, a former lawyer and former professor of architecture, seemed surprised to report there are so many. They root for the adoption of dogs with checkered backgrounds (not that they have anything against Balinese Snoutsters). To prevent favoritism, each dog gets a turn at being shop dog.

Given the milieu, it seemed tacky to ask the next question. Shop dog-of-the-day Smokey (part Australian cattle dog, part border collie) materialized, sprang about 20 feet in the air, and landed in Kara’s arms. (It turned out she was also a Frisbee dog practicing her form.) After scanning the air for other flying hounds, I finally forced out the question. Is the dogification of American society, as my friend argues, an unmistakable marker of moral decline and nuttiness?

“We joke about how we love dogs more than people,” Kara told me. “But it really makes you more sensitive to relationships in general. People who have wonderful relationships with their animals usually have wonderful relationships with their families.”

“There’s that famous quote by Gandhi,” added Nadja, freed from the phone. I looked it up later: “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” I thought about phoning my friend and unleashing Gandhi on him, maybe accidentally suggesting I made up that wisdom all by myself, but I figured something that fun might be unethical.

A few days later, parked in front of the TV watching Cesar Millan help a German shepherd who couldn’t stop chasing his tail, I realized I’d forgotten to ask the most important question of all. Do dogs actually like sashaying around town eating organic treats? I hate to embarrass her, but the dog who peed at Pause, dribbling her nervousness over several square feet, was Cleo of Scarsdale. What she did not ooze was enthusiasm.

So I called Kathleen Cano of Professional Pet Care, a dog trainer who seems to know exactly what a dog’s thinking, especially the worried ones. She says that the very best thing you can do for a dog is to take him out for a walk in public. Cleo should probably get out more, not less.

Then Kathleen tells me about a Jack Russell whose owner takes him up and down Market Street in the early morning. In the summer, they stop at Town Hall when the sprinklers are fizzing outside so the terrier can leap and play in the water. “It’s pure joy,” she says. I swear she was channeling the Jack Russell. “If ever there were proof that getting out and about is a good thing for dogs, it’s that little pup.”

P.S.: I don’t care what people say, I like dogs. Andy and I may not have seen eye to eye, but Lucy (1992 2003), a shelter dog of Labrador and beagle provenance, was the love of my life. Her successor, Percy—a black-and-white pit bull mix, another rescue—can often be seen gallivanting around Rhinebeck.

To visit Hooked on Dogs and Pause Dog Boutique online, go to www.hookedondogs.net and www.pausedogboutique.com, swell websites both.

The photo that appears with this story was taken by Lisa Prince-Fishler of Printz Photography and the drawing by Daniel Baxter. To contact Printz Photography go to www.printzphotography.com; to find out more about Daniel Baxter's pet portraits go to dogdrawnit.com.