What Will Become of the Pandemic Pets?

What Will Become of the Pandemic Pets?

There’s a lot of talk of a looming separation-anxiety crisis, as unsocialized, spoiled hounds encounter a new era, in which the humans go through the door thing to earn the bread that pays for the kibble. Andrea Tu is a behavior veterinarian in Manhattan, which makes her the equivalent of a psychiatrist: she can prescribe medications, including, but not limited to, popular S.S.R.I.s such as Reconcile (doggy Prozac), sertraline, and paroxetine, as well as a range of fast-acting basics like trazodone, gabapentin, clonidine, and various common benzodiazepines. “We’re looking at three-month waits,” she said. “We’re seeing a ton of cases where people are in over their heads. Now they can’t leave the dog alone for ten minutes, much less for ten hours.” Many vets are concerned that shelters may begin filling up again.

Cats, meanwhile, are often disturbed by not being left alone. “They’re not used to having to share space with people all the time,” Tu said. “We’re seeing a lot of stress-induced cystitis—cats getting U.T.I.s, basically, when they’re stressed.”

I’m a dog person. My childhood diary, abandoned after a few weeks, was a chronicle of the family Norfolk terrier, who had one testicle and the soul of a poet. Eight years ago, my wife, my sons, and I adopted a mutt allegedly from Tuscaloosa, Alabama—mostly black, long-haired, about fifty pounds, a herder with a retriever’s webbed paws. The boys, who were ten and eight at the time, chose him from an ever-shifting array on Petfinder, and changed his name from Zayn (the shelter apparently employed a One Direction stan) to Kiekko (which, according to their research, is Finnish for “puck”). He came north in a truck that was bound for a shelter in New Hampshire and disembarked at the Vince Lombardi Service Area, on the New Jersey Turnpike. We took him home to our apartment and surrendered very quickly to the premise that he was a member of the family.

Who knows what Kiekko was thinking? We often tried to imagine it by anthropomorphizing, pooch-talking, speech-bubbling. Kate Perry, the trainer, classifies four “canine-ality” types: the workaholic, the sensitive artist, the methodical thinker, and the party animal. It seemed to us that Kiekko could be any or all, as of course could we. We bathed and brushed him, plied him with rawhide and Greenies, invited him onto our bed, and also occasionally called him a crackhead, for his single-minded huffing for scraps. Such hunger. You’d think we weren’t feeding him. When neighbors, making elevator talk, remarked that he looked heavier, we took offense. It’s the undercoat. Our younger son, a mischievous live wire, had been getting in some trouble at school, and the dog mellowed him out: petamorphosis. But Kiekko was himself a bit of a shit-stirrer. He menaced people carrying tools, men with odd gaits or hats or uniforms or floppy shoes. He stole sandwiches out of the hands of small children. One Thanksgiving, a thud from the kitchen announced that he’d wrestled a carved turkey to the floor.

We walk him at the north end of Central Park. Before we adopted him, I had considered the dog people in the Park to be kind of nuts. Once we had him, I got to know how. Before 9 a.m., in parts of the Park, dogs are allowed off leash—a nice libertarian touch, in a jaywalking town. There are a lot of dogs out there in the morning, doing dog things, while their humans do their dog-human things: the scofflaws, the hall monitors, the ladies with the slobber-stained pockets full of treats, the shambling elders in dog-safari vests stocked with accoutrements. The dogless must doggedly pick their way through. We fell in with a group who got dogs around the same time we did. Behavioral noninterventionists, mostly, we congregated around a bench that now bears a small plaque with the names of an older couple who own a collie-husky mix that, for a while anyway, Kiekko, a gelding since Alabama, felt compelled to mount. For a few years, we all talked about having dinner together sometime, but by now it’s obvious that we won’t. As it stands, we see one another more often—and tell one another more about ourselves—than we do anyone else.

Over the years, I’ve had some run-ins. There was the unhappy gent, a ringer for Van Morrison, who often stood near the 103rd Street transverse, with what seemed to be a dire wolf on a rope, and yelled at anyone who allowed an unleashed dog to come near. One fine April morning, by the Park’s mulch depot, Kiekko wandered over, and Van Morrison barked at my wife, “Fuck you!” She blurted back, “Happy Easter!” There was also the aardvark of a man with a pair of enviable dachshunds who, after Kiekko had run up on him too aggressively, shouted at me, from six feet away, “You’re an asshole!” He might have been onto something. Or else he was projecting. Happy Easter.

A pet, you could say, is an animal that lives in the home and has a name, and that you don’t eat. People dine on rabbit but generally not on the pet rabbit. One of the earliest uses of the term “pet,” five centuries ago, described a lamb that was raised by hand and kept as a favorite; it’s hard to imagine that such a creature didn’t become food, and that someone in the household didn’t become sad. Over time, sentiment evolved. A University of Denver history professor named Ingrid Tague did a survey of pet elegies in eighteenth-century England, finding the incidence, even then, of deep mourning, snickering double-entendre, and totemic carpe diem, such as “On a Favourite Thrush, That Was Killed by Accident” and “On the Premature Death of Cloe Snappum, a Lady’s Favourite Lap-Dog,” whose fur, postmortem, was apparently converted into a muff:

Now Clo’s soft skin—dear, precious stuff!

Adorns fair Delia’s fav’rite muff:

Still glistens while ’tis gently press’d,

And fondly by the nymph caress’d;

. . .

But stop—methinks I’ve said enough—

Oh, happy-happy-happy muff!

The rise of dog breeding, in nineteenth-century England—with its emphasis on purity over purpose, and its echo of eugenics—ushered in a more intentional age. Here was something we could design, rather than merely tame and train.

The Harvard literature professor Marc Shell, in a 1986 essay titled “The Family Pet,” explored the exceptional status of the pet, as something half man and half beast. Gesturing to Genesis, the Eucharist, Freud, and Penthouse, he performs some rhetorical twirls, of questionable sincerity, in order to equate pet ownership with incest, bestiality, and cannibalism, and to call attention to the peerless anthropocentrism of Christianity: “If one wishes to avoid or sublimate both literal bestiality and literal incest—as who does not?—one way to do so would be to seek out a ‘snugglepup.’ ” The word “puppy” may derive from poupée, the French word for a doll (from the Latin pupa); it made the leap to canines in their incarnations as lap accessories for the women of the aristocracy. “Puppy” sounds playful enough, but, in light of its origin, also a little creepy, suggesting that the pet remains in some respects inanimate in the absence of its owner’s projections.

With the right kind of distance—a brain on science fiction, or a sativa gummy—one can start to feel a little queasy about the leashes and collars, the tugging and heeling, the sudden bursts of anger and reproach. This institution of cuddliness contains a trace of tyranny. Out of nowhere, a Park Avenue matron woofs an angry “No!” like Caesar in “Planet of the Apes.” The other day, I saw a middle-aged man sling a leashed corgi toward the curb and grab it by the scruff, the dog squealing as the man roared; apparently, the dog had got hold of a bread crust or a tasty turd. Why you so mad? If it had been a son, I might have called child services. I also saw a woman chide a doodle for sprawling on its back in the dirt, legs splayed: “That’s not very ladylike!” Nor is allowing an animal to lick your face; no one, or let’s say few, would tolerate such a thing from a fellow-human.

Men wearing ‘hazmat-type suits’ rob jewellery store in Oakville mall

Halton police are searching for two men after a jewellery store inside an Oakville mall was robbed Thursday night.

Officers were called to the Peoples Jewellers in Oakville Place around 9 p.m.

Police say two men entered the mall wearing white “hazmat-type suits” and went directly to the jewellery store.

Once inside, one of the men began to smash a display case at the back of the store with a crowbar.

The other man sprayed a fire extinguisher directly at the store’s surveillance cameras before both men ransacked the display case. They fled the mall in a dark-coloured SUV.

No one was physically hurt during the incident.

Detectives have released two photographs of the suspects.

Police are asking anyone with dashcam footage in the area around 9 p.m. Thursday to contact investigators.

Anyone with additional information is asked to contact Det. Barry Malciw at 905-825-4747, ext. 2218.

Last two men who robbed Kitchener mall jewelry store sentenced

Baseer Ahmed was sentenced to four years in prison Monday, while Mohammad Kermani was sentenced to a little more than one year.

The two were the last to be sentenced of the four men who robbed People’s Jewellers in Kitchener’s Fairview Park Mall in December 2010.

In a quick robbery that even the Crown admitted was well-planned, the quartet grabbed more than $200,000 worth of jewelry and speedily made their way to a getaway car.

During the heist, Ahmed was wearing a wrestling mask – later recovered nearby – and using a fake gun to order people to the ground.

None of the jewelry was ever recovered.

In court, Ahmed said he is now considered a “disappointment and disgrace” to his family.

“My sister is going to graduate from medical school, my brother from law school,” he said.

“Me … I’m going to jail.”

Unlike his three cohorts, Kermani was not involved in a similar robbery in Guelph.

In Kitchener, his role was to break display cases with a hammer, grab as much as he could hold, and run.

Crown prosecutor David Russell said the main reason for Kermani receiving a lesser sentence was his past as a “straight-A student” who had never been in trouble with the law before or since.

“It was amazing that he did this,” Russell said.