A City That Barks - proliferation of dogs in New York - Brief Article

National Review, Sept 2, 2002 by Richard Brookhiser

Dogs, dogs, dogs, dogs, dogs. New Yorkers live in the midst of dogs. My apartment building has about 500 inhabitants, and one-tenth of them are dogs. Why do they proliferate so?

Cats some time ago passed dogs as America's most popular pet. There must be more of them in New York than dogs. But cats don't need to be walked, and they would not abide leashes. Cats are private and self- conscious. If they don't get exactly the attention they want, they want to be by themselves. The only cat I know sits on the floor of my shoemaker; I have tried to woo it for years; though it does not repel my familiarities, it scorns to welcome them. Dogs by contrast have neither pride, nor shame, nor awareness of playing a role in society. They will eat, drink, defecate, inquire, shout, frolic, run, waddle if they can't run, and copulate if the urge takes them, all in broad daylight. Dogs are like supermodels and politicians -- totally public creatures.

Another reason dogs catch our attention is that they show more variation among themselves. Pigeons, the most common urban bird, are, you realize when you study them, beautifully feathered. We seldom make the effort because they are all the same size, and hence blur into anonymity. The same is true of sparrows and (substituting fur for feathers) squirrels. Speciesism makes us pay attention to people, yet they too occupy a narrow range of sizes and shapes. There may be a twenty-inch height differential between the woman running the Korean laundry and the man making the lay-up at the basketball court, but even that is only a third of the size of the shorter human. Barring deformity, there are no adult people half the height of other adult people. But an Irish wolfhound can be four or five times as long, or as tall, as a Yorkie. Dog coloration varies as wildly as size. New York has white, brown, black, and yellow men. But it does not have brindled men. There are probably New Yorkers from Dalmatia, but none that look like Dalmatians. Dogs draw our eyes because any dog you see you may be seeing for the first time.

Money and taste have always bred fantastic and extreme urban dogs. In Vanity Fair, someone advises Becky Sharp about buying a dog. "Why not have a Danish dog? I know of one as big as a camel leopard, by Jove. It would almost pull your brougham. Or . . . a little pug that would go into one of Lord Steyne's snuff-boxes?" Another reason for the number of odd urban dog types is safety. Now that coyotes have spread throughout the continental United States, it would be folly to own a Chihuahua in the country, or in any but the most settled suburbs. In the city, freaks of nature can thrive.

Masters are famous for sharing their personalities with their dogs. In the big city, that means sharing neuroses. Every seasoned apartment dweller has had the experience of being confined in an elevator with a yapper, whose voice is ringing and insistent as a little car alarm, and its mistress (the owners of yappers generally seem to be women), whose admonitions -- "Be qui-et! Be qui-et!" -- only egg it on. There are the undisciplined dogs, whisked away before they can be identified, who decorate lobby carpets with the action painting of their urine. There are the child-substitute dogs, addressed with the vocabulary of intimacy -- "Come on, baby, come on, darling" -- which make one momentarily wonder if the Hasidim were right to flee modernity. There is the dog soul trapped in the wrong breed -- the box-headed, broad- shouldered, bandy-legged bulldog, built to dig in his heels and bite, who is afraid to go out on the sidewalk.

Human beings do worse than offload their personalities onto their pets; they use their pets as weapons. The worst dogfights are not between dogs, but between people about dogs. The battles between up- and down- stairs neighbors over daylong barking are as bitter as politics. The battles between dog owners and parents over the allocation of park space to dog runs and playgrounds can literally be issues of politics at the community-board level. In a typical Democratic national convention, how many members of the New York delegation got their start as public nuisances by their ability to adjudicate such disputes? (New York delegates to Republican conventions have never been elected to such awesome positions of authority.)

Many New York dogs, like many New Yorkers, should not be living here. When I see the runners and bounders, made to annoy sheep or to retrieve ducks, forced to navigate the forest of legs and strollers that is a greenmarket; or the short-legged and the low-slung, built for decorating ladies' laps or hunting in burrows, trundling their bellies over the hot asphalt of crosswalks; or the thick-maned, bred to the Alps or northern China, making no complaint on a 97-degree day beyond thrusting out their red or blue tongues; or the ears of every breed, all more sensitive than ours, buffeted by road work and the horns of impatient delivery trucks, then I mourn for human perversity and stubbornness.