CANINE QUALITY TIME
Henry Porter joins a
basset-hound on a sponsored walk in Central Park
New York THE OLD basset-hound in Central Park wore a little lumberjack's sheepskin hat with the earflaps tied up in a bow. The dog was mostly skin and bones and walked with great difficulty, bunched up like Daumier's drawing of Rosinante. The basset was a miracle of life though not of mobility. For his owner, a woman also in a lumberjack hat, towed a little trolley on which she placed her arthritic pet when his legs crumpled beneath him.
I had been watching her fuss over the basset for about five minutes when a man approached her and said without pream- ble, 'Main, that dog oughta be dead.' She was surprisingly unruffled by this and said, 'Oh he's fine. Just a little old. He's got no tumours though we went to the veterina- rian this week and we're going to. . I did not catch the end of the sentence, but I think she used the word 'therapist'.
She, her dog and I were all attending a sponsored dog walk in aid of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in which the basset was a purely technical entry. Still, the geriatric dog wore the ASPCA T-shirt round his arched mid- dle and gamely hobbled after a marmalade cat that had mystifyingly turned up for the occasion with its owner.
'Sure, you have a cat. That's good. We don't discriminate between cats and dogs here,' said one of the organisers. He then turned his attention to the actress Brooke Shields who was opening the event in a manner that reminded me of a flat-coated retriever — all black hair and artless goodwill. The cat, meanwhile, had been fixed to a lead and was being towed along by its owner.
In New York, dogs are very important to their owners, much more so than to the dog walkers of Kensington Gardens. Dogs are more integrated into human life and are deemed to share the emotions and problems of their owners — which means that it was entirely possible that the woman with the basset had booked an appoint- ment with some sort of canine shrink. If she needs a therapist to cope with the loneliness and introspective demands of New York City, so does her hound. There were many doggie organisations with powerful-sounding acronymic names represented at the Dog Walk. There is PAT, the council for Pet-Assisted Ther- apy, which chose the day to announce something called Help — Homebound Elderly Love Pets. The benefits claimed by Help's press release were astonishing. Elderly people who participate in pet- assisted therapy programmes experience reduced stress, blood pressure, cholesterol levels and coronary disease, as well as improved socialisation, verbalisation, self- confidence and reality reorientation.' I asked the assistant on the PAT stall how a dog could reduce the level of cholesterol. She said that everyone knew that stroking a dog was beneficial. 'Yes,' I said, 'but how can owning a dog possibly affect your consumption of dairy pro- ducts?' Instead of answering she turned away and gazed angelically at a schnauzer. The gushing affection shown to dogs that afternoon was remarkable. There was much muzzle-kissing, intimate tummY- tickling and back-scratching which seemed to be a sort of display of sensuality for the benefit of humans only. Perhaps this is what PAT means by 'improved socialisa- tion'.
The newest doggie organisation is Powars, which stands for Pet Owners with Aids or Aids-related Complex Resource Service Inc. Powars has a number of aims, one of which captured the almost supersti- tious reverence about dog-owning. The Powars declaration says, 'Pets have 3 beneficial side-effect that few forms of therapy can match, and no medication can rival for safety.' Another of its stated aims is `to provide scientifically accurate and up-to-date in- formation about potential health problems in order to prevent unnecessary pet/owner separations'. After the snub from PAT, I did not feel I could ask what this meant at the Powars stall, and so I stood listening to a long story about a 15-year-old deaf and arthritic German shepherd whose owner had died of Aids. An old lady listening with me got the wrong end of the walking stick and said that she didn't know dogs could catch Aids.
I hoped that she did not suffer a similar confusion at the end of the afternoon when a Mr Cohen, deputy vice-president of ASPCA, got up to give a long speech about castration. He said that there were 700 unwanted dogs born in the United States each year and that ASPCA's funds were almost absorbed by dealing with the prob- lem of strays. 'So,' he concluded, abandon- ing all euphemism, 'be kind to ASPCA. Be kind to America's dog population and have your dog's balls cut off.'
His words fell on deaf ears. For the moment the ASPCA's dog walk was over, most entrants set off to a mound in the park which was once called Cedar Hill and is now known as Dog Hill.
It is a venue of unbridled canine lust, where the most expensive breeds rush round trying to create less valuable offspring with each other. There must have been 50 dogs on the hill that afternoon. They included five unleashed Rottweilers and a couple of tethered pit bull terriers. Clearly these two breeds have not received the publicity they have in Britain, or perhaps it is that New Yorkers find the occasional mauling by a Rottweiler small beer in comparison to the city's daily murder toll. At any rate, the owners appeared to be happily out of control and stood — nobody sits on Dog Hill — calling out absurd advice to their pets. Cried one, Dinkens, why don't you come over here and play with this cute King Charles? Dinnnkennns, baby: Mommy won't love you if you don't come now.'
Just as the chilly, thin career women of Madison Avenue devote periods of inten- sive affection to their children after work, thus the dog owners go to Central Park and enjoy quality time with their pets. And if the lonely owners are lucky, they may meet a mate for themselves.
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