Born to Bark (17 page)

Toto was really a dog named Terry who belonged to the famous dog trainer Carl Spitz. She was brought to his dog training school by her owners, who felt that she was uncontrollable and needed training. The owners never returned for the dog, so Spitz trained Toto along with his other acting dogs, and she went on to star in 10 Hollywood films including
Bright Eyes
with Shirley Temple.

Toto was a valued member of the
Wizard of Oz
cast and was paid a weekly salary of $125. In comparison, the little people who sang and danced as the Munchkins received only $50 a week. However, like most stars, or at least like most Cairn terriers, Toto had her quirks and terrierlike outbursts. During the cornfield scene when Dorothy meets the Scarecrow for the first time, the shooting had to be stopped while Toto was reprimanded by director Victor Fleming for trying to chew on the costume of Ray Bolger, who was playing the Scarecrow. Carl Spitz explained to Fleming that the straw aro
und the Scarecrow’s legs was flopping around so loosely that it was irresistible for a terrier. Something moving erratically on or near the ground triggers the genetic predisposition in a terrier and tells its brain, “Here is a thing that must be chased.” A quick costume repair was needed to tighten the pieces of straw at Toto’s eye level so they would be less appealing. While the crew waited for the costume modification, the director fumed, “Must dogs be just as temperamental as actors?”

In a second incident, an actor playing one of the witch’s guards stepped on Toto’s paw. At first everyone feared that it was broken, but it was only bruised. To give her a bit of rest, however, they decided to use a stuffed toy, the same shape and size as a Cairn terrier, to stand in for lighting and camera checks.
The moment that Toto saw her replacement, she leapt off her chair and raced across the set with teeth bared and began to rip her stuffed double to pieces. The director Fleming sighed and asked, “Must dogs be as jealous and insecure as actors?”

As a child I loved the way that Toto scampered around Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion as they danced down the yellow brick road, but it was that scene where Judy Garland sings “Over the Rainbow” to Toto that was the clincher. It would be wonderful—heavenly—to have a dog who gazed so lovingly at me when I talked to him.

So, whether to replace Feldspar or to find my own version of Toto, I was getting a Cairn terrier. I had recently learned about the Melita line of Cairns, which had been established by the late Mrs. L. M. Wood, who lived in nearby Victoria, British Columbia. Her dogs were quite handsome, and she had bred them to have a milder, more sociable temperament than most terriers do. She would not breed any animal that showed aggressive tendencies, since her dogs lived together in large open kennel areas and fighting could not be tolerated. Because Mrs. Wood had died only a few years earlier
, and her dogs had been so successful in the show ring, it was relatively easy to still find dogs that were only one generation away from the Melita line. I eventually discovered a litter of pups that would be available for pickup the second week of December.

Joannie decided to present the new dog as her Christmas gift to me. She and I were not yet married, and she felt morally obligated to contribute something toward our living expenses. As a teacher, she was at the bottom-rung starting salary and was still paying off debts associated with her education and things that her kids needed or wanted but her husband would not cover. I refused her offers to pay what she called her “room and board.”
Even though I was still paying child support and alimony, as well as a mortgage, I was earning enough for both of us to live on (albeit modestly), and believed that she would feel happier and less stressed if she had fewer drains on her financial reserves. Still it bothered her that she did not appear to be contributing to our household, and although the dog would be an expensive gift, she wanted to buy it. She put her arms around me and whispered in my ear, “I know how good that dog will make you feel, and I want to know that I’m part of making you happy.”

We couldn’t have known that the new dog would become a high point of my life and a low point of hers.

A few weeks later we took the ferry to Vancouver Island to pick up the pup. The breeder was a pleasant older woman named Margaret who had been breeding Cairn terriers for more than four decades. Margaret offered us mugs of sweet mint tea and explained that the new litter had been small, only three puppies, and she had already reserved a female to keep for herself. I looked at the two remaining pups, a gray brindle and a brown brindle, and knelt down and began to get to know them better. Their mother, an almost black dog with a bit of light gray brindling, had a good temperament; sh
e appeared to be friendly, self-confident, and independent as she bustled around her pups and then explored the visitors before settling down for a nap. A dog’s temperament is under a strong genetic control, and pups will usually grow up to be their sire or their dam or something in between in personality.

Today there are several popular systems of puppy temperament testing, but at that time nothing formal had been developed, although I knew of some tests that were emerging as reasonable ways of determining what a puppy’s personality might be. I started by seeing how sociable the pups were. I knelt down, placed my
mug of tea on the floor and off to the side, and called, “Puppy, puppy, puppy!” in a friendly tone. The gray dashed over to me immediately, and the brown followed somewhat more slowly.

I gave each a little pat on the head, then stood up and started to walk away again calling “Puppy, puppy, puppy!” and slapping my leg as I moved. Again the gray was most enthusiastic and the brown lagged behind. Pups that willingly come to people and follow them are usually sociable and friendly.

I asked Joannie to hold the brown and sat on the floor with the gray. I flipped him on his back and held him there for about 30 seconds. He gave a quick attempt to free himself, but then lay there quietly and licked my hand. When I did that with the brown, she struggled and then tried to bite me. Next I lifted each pup and held it up for a few seconds with its legs hanging down and got much the same results: the gray first struggled, then accepted the situation, while the brown continued to try to bite me. These tests both indicate whether a dog will accept human control.

Next I asked Joan to stamp her foot as loudly as possible on the wooden floor. She winced a bit at my request. Joan’s philosophy is that a person should never do anything to draw attention to herself, nor do anything that anyone might consider impolite, unusual, or eccentric. Stamping your foot to make a loud sound in the home of a complete stranger violated her idea of proper behavior.

“Joannie, please! I need a loud sound coming from a direction that the pups are not looking.”

Joan sighed and glanced at Margaret, who simply smiled pleasantly. So she stamped her foot hard enough to produce a loud clapping sound. The brown pup looked startled, jumped backward, and then growled, while the gray pup gave a quick snap of his head in Joan’s direction and than took a few steps toward her as if he wanted to investigate the source of the noise. This is a crude test of sound sensitivity and response to an unexpected stimulus.

Next I took a piece of paper and crumpled it into a ball. I waved it in front of the pups and then threw it. This test is based on the suggestion of Clarence Pfaffenberger, one of the most important figures in the development of training and selection programs for guide dogs for blind people. Although he used a variety of different tests to select dogs, he claimed that a young puppy’s willingness to retrieve playfully thrown objects was the best single indicator of whether it would grow up to be a good working dog.

In this case the brown dog simply looked at the paper ball and then moved a few paces away from me and sat down. The gray pup ran out after the paper ball and nosed at it. I repeated the test for the gray, and again he raced out after the crumpled paper ball and this time picked it up and looked at me. Then he dropped down on his belly and began to tear it apart.

As I watched him I thought, “Typical terrier.” As a follow-up I took out my key ring and jangled the keys. The gray looked up, dropped the paper ball that he was dissecting, and trotted over to inspect the shiny tinkling object in my hand. When he drew close, I tossed the key ring into the middle of the floor. He immediately dashed over to it, grabbed the keys by biting the plastic identification tab on the ring, and began to shake it back and forth as if he were killing a rat. This was a true terrier—brave, energetic, and with a hunter’s instinct. At that moment I knew that the
gray was going to be my dog.

The little pup continued his battle with my keys, but his puppy teeth were not strong enough to hold on as he snapped his head back and forth trying to kill them. As a result, the ring full of keys slipped out of his jaws, flew across the room, banged into my mug of tea, and spilled its contents over the floor. The pup was not fazed by this outcome at all, and merely sauntered over to lick at the sweet liquid. Joan was very embarrassed by the outcome of my testing, however. She began apologizing to Margaret and offering to clean up the spill, glaring at me as I sat
on the floor laughing at the pup’s antics. She could not understand why I was not upset by my role in making a mess.

So it began. A bouncy dog acting like a classic terrier, my laughter, and Joan’s distress—this would become the pattern of our life for years to come.

Of course, Margaret was not bothered by the pup’s behavior any more than I was. If you choose to live with terriers, you either have to be very accepting and tolerant or you have to have a good sense of humor.

I told Margaret that we would take the gray and call him Flint because of his color. She nodded but pointed out that the brown was the more handsome of the pair and would grow up to be good enough to do well in the show ring while the gray “doesn’t have classic Cairn proportions.”

“I know,” I told her, “but I don’t intend to put him in confirmation shows. If we ever enter a show ring, it will be in an obedience competition.”

Margaret looked a bit nonplussed at my comment and said, “Cairn terriers really aren’t designed for obedience work. They’re more catlike and independent. In my forty years or so of breeding, only two of my dogs have ever earned an obedience degree. Terriers don’t like taking orders.” She paused for a moment as if considering whether she had been too negative and then added with a smile, “They do learn their names very quickly.”

Joannie looked at me as if to ask whether this new information would make me reconsider taking this hyperactive little gray thing home. I repeated, “His name will be Flint and we’ll just have to see what he can learn.”

Long before I’d signed the paperwork and officially purchased him, Flint had cleaned up all of the liquid on the floor and was now nosing the mug around, pushing it noisily across the floor. Joan glanced back and forth between me and the pup, looking a bit apprehensive.

The trip home with Flint was relatively uneventful. Although I had brought a secondhand wicker-and-wire kennel crate, and padded the bottom with some bath towels, Joan had decided that it would be “cruel to cage him” and had piled the towels on the space between us and put Flint on top of them. He curled up there, and she stroked him gently, softly smiling in the way I had grown to love.