…or “I’m going to be sued any day now.”

A very personal story

Dog breeders are an irresponsible bunch, always breeding for the wrong traits.

Take border collies, for instance.  They’re among the smartest dogs around, primarily because they’re a newly recognized breed by the American Kennel Club.

Let the AKC recognize a breed of dogs and they’re immediately bred for “show” traits, without respect to what made the breed different and interesting in the first place.  Take a water dog like the poodle and start breeding it only for looks and in only a few generations you have a useless – but pretty – dog.  Take a working dog like the Irish Setter and start breeding it to show in the ring and you’ve turned a calm, smart, well-behaved dog into a neurotic mess.

Take collies, who used to be working dogs.  Ruined.  Take German Shepherds.  Ruined.  Take schnauzers.  Ruined.  Take Gordon shepherds, English shepherds, Irish wolfhounds.  Ruined, ruined, ruined.  The traits that made these dogs valuable as working dogs or as pets have gone by the wayside in favor of withers height, muzzle shape, coat length, color and density and general prettiness.

Less than ten years ago, the AKC was debating whether to “recognize” border collies as an accepted breed.  “Please, please, please,” begged the responsible owners and breeders of border collies.  “Don’t recognize them.  You’ll ruin them.”

But the AKC, voracious for registration fees for every newborn pup from registered parents – and for advertising dollars from its annual Westminster Kennel Club dog-and-pony show – wouldn’t listen.  “Another new breed?” the elderly New England bachelors and crones bay with ears perked up and tails wagging.  “And we get how many dollars for each new registered pup?  Open the gates and let ‘em in!”

You could call them Stepford Dogs, and nothing illustrates this name better than the nasal-sounding fellow who narrates the Westminster Kennel Club’s annual televised beauty show.  He’s been announcing these shows since Dick Clark was too young to dance on “American Bandstand” and his voice hasn’t changed a bit.

Long after I’m gone, this guy will still be droning on television, “The Bernese mountain dog is an ancient breed, loyal and faithful…The komandor is an ancient breed, loyal and faithful…The dachshund, or dachl, is an ancient breed, loyal and faithful…”

*

I currently have two Dalmatians – my sixth and seventh in the last 20 years.  The Dalmatian is an ancient breed, loyal and faithful.  And severely damaged by the AKC’s breeding standards.

The Dalmatian has never been what you might call a “working” dog, like collies and shepherds, or a “sporting” dog, like retrievers and setters.  Its only usefulness was to keep the horses calm.  Originally bred as coaching dogs, the Dal seems to have a particular affinity for horses, can run for miles beside the coach horses and used to sleep with them at night.  Back when fire engines were pulled by horses, they became a favorite of firemen and have been identified with firemen ever since.

But they’re a bit skittish, a bundle of energy, stubborn, excitable and extremely smart.  In fact, they’re generally smarter than their owners, and if they’re not highly trained or if they don’t get enough exercise, they can be a double handful.  All of my Dalmatians have been so wily and mischievous that I firmly believe if they only had opposable thumbs there wouldn’t be any trouble they couldn’t get themselves into.  They’re a marvelous breed, but certainly not for everybody.

*

So when you take this personality and begin breeding only for certain characteristics without regard to temperament, you’re asking for trouble.  A number of years ago, there was an attempt to breed miniature Dalmatians, a project that ended in disaster because the dogs chosen as breeders were chosen for size only, without regard to temperament.  In just a few generations, this experiment produced a pool of smaller, but wholly unmanageable, dogs.

But the breeding practices of the AKC are not significantly better.  AKC breeders strive for perfectly round, well-separated spots, each about the size of a fifty-cent piece.  The eyelids must be rimmed in black, all the way around, like a fashion model with freshly applied eyeliner.  Spots all running together are frowned upon and a “patch,” or solid black ear, is a definite no-no.

But Dalmatians also have a couple of genetic faults that the AKC totally ignores.  They tend to have high uric acid, due to a missing gene, which can easily cause kidney stones, and they are prone to deafness in one or both ears.

Responsible breeders – if there are such things – now have all of their newborn pups tested for hearing, a procedure which involves sticking electrodes under the skin on their heads, pulsing signals through the needles and feeding the results into a computer-like machine.  The AKC’s sole bow toward eliminating deafness in Dals is to refuse to register any pups who are deaf in either or both ears.

But that doesn’t eliminate the carriers of the defect, and there seems to be a connection between deafness and other physical characteristics.  Some studies have shown that dogs with “patches” are less prone to deafness than those showing perfect spot patterns.  Still, however, a dog with a patch would never win a competition, nor even be bred by those breeders hewing to AKC standards.

*

The latest program, called the Dalmatian Heritage Project, has tried to introduce a low-acid gene into the breed.  Eight or nine generations ago, a Dalmatian bitch was bred to a pointer and about half of the resulting litter carried the low-acid gene.  The pups without the gene were sold as pets and the rest kept for breeding with the help of a volunteer bunch of breeder-caretakers and puppy raisers, much like the breeding programs of Guide Dogs for the Blind and Canine Companions for Independence.

No more pointer blood was introduced into the line and the descendants of the original litter have been bred only with pure-blood Dalmatians.  Thus, the first litter would have been 50% Dalmatian, the second generation 75% Dalmatian, the third generation 87.5% Dalmatian and so on.  By the eighth generation, these dogs are more than 99.6% Dalmatian.

But the AKC still won’t recognize them.  They’re not “purebred.”

*

Marianne and I became involved with the project because of our great interest in the breed.  And I admit that it sounded like a marvelous deal at first.  Its web site, www.dalmatianheritage.com, paints a glowing picture of its lofty goals, explains the genetic problems and proposed solutions in both technical and non-technical terms and is full of pictures of happy families with their cute Dalmatian puppies.

But the Dalmatian Heritage Project has distinct problems of its own, some similar to the “miniature Dalmatian” attempt and some simply a matter of believability.  Its literature claims that

We select parent dogs from among those that have the best chance of producing puppies that:

1. Have normal urinary metabolism
2. Have normal hearing
3. Are friendly and confident

However, one of these statements is false, one is misleading and only one has any validity.

The project is producing Dals with normal uric acid levels.  But its program for breeding dogs with normal hearing is exactly the same as the AKC, and could have been drafted by any middle-school science student: don’t breed dogs that are unilaterally or bilaterally deaf.

I suppose that makes a bit of sense, but I wouldn’t pat myself on the back for having thought of it.

It is claim No. 3, above, however, that is the sheerest advertising hype, as Marianne and I know first-hand.

*

What we didn’t know in the beginning was that internal politics – and, very probably, a disagreement over the direction the project was taking – had led to all of the original committee members and consultants dropping out.  The project was left with but a skeleton staff – some say a staff of only one, housed temporarily on an acre of land in Hayward, California.

Denise Howell, the project coordinator, was having trouble placing the last female from her most recent litter, a bitch that was destined to be a breeder.  She described the dog as “a difficult puppy” and we agreed to provide a foster home for her until a permanent home could be found.

I fell in love immediately and couldn’t bear to part with her, so we agreed to co-own her with Denise, to breed her and to help place her puppies.  We named her Bonnie Chuck, after my two closest friends, who had both recently died of cancer within weeks of each other.

Bonnie didn’t give us any problems at first, but her first and only litter did.  Even at six and eight weeks, three of her eight pups were exhibiting fairly severe fear issues, which were confirmed when we had their temperaments tested by a highly skilled doggie shrink.  According to the owners with whom we placed them, they have never overcome these innate tendencies.  The problem seemed so serious that we all agreed Bonnie would have no more litters.

When Bonnie began demonstrating her own wacko behavior, we remembered what Denise had told us a couple of years before: “We’re breeding for low uric acid first and will breed for temperament later.”

So much for the claim of “friendly and confident” puppies.

It started with a fear of reflections – of windows, skylights and even clock faces.  And it went from an easy acceptance of other dogs to outright hostility.  She turned her back on Brendan Mahoney, the 90-pound Labrador that had practically raised her and with whom she always used to sleep, and gradually wouldn’t have anything to do with him.

After Bonnie attacked my mother-in-law’s small dog twice, attacked a visiting eight-week-old puppy, started snapping and snarling at our other dogs, ripped a two-inch gash in Brendan’s cheek in a scuffle over a bone, caused us $1,700 in vet bills when she escaped and mauled a cat, bit a young boy and finally snapped at my face for no apparent reason…we decided enough was enough.  The dog is a danger to the public.

Marianne e-mailed Denise that we were planning to have Bonnie euthanized (even though it was breaking our hearts to come to this decision.)  Denise wrote to us demanding that we return Bonnie to her, pursuant to the contract we had signed when we adopted her.  I wrote back to Denise that giving Bonnie back to her was not an option.  Get an attorney, lady.

In the meantime, we’ve postponed sending my baby over the “rainbow bridge” in favor of more testing and further soul searching.

And that’s where we stand.  Awaiting more expert information and advice on Bonnie.  Awaiting the process server with the lawsuit filed by Denise.  Awaiting another dangerous incident…

You want fries with that?

While skiing with my step-daughter and son-in-law a couple of years ago, we stopped to take a rest and grab a beer.  It was a warm, clear spring day, the sun on the snow was blinding and a temporary barbecue and drink area had been set up on the lodge’s sun deck.  I grabbed a beer from an iced tub and stood in line at the cash register.

It was one of those registers like they have at a fast-food restaurant, with pictures of the various items on its keypad.  (We don’t want the help to actually have to memorize the price of the items they’re selling.)  It also had a digital LCD readout, which was impossible to read in the bright light.

I showed my beer to the college-age kid manning the register; he punched the correct picture on the keypad and then shaded the LCD display with his hand so he could read it.

“Three, seventy-five,” he announced, and I handed him a five.

The kid punched in five dollars and then shaded the display again with his hand so he could find out what the correct change was.

Welcome to the wonderful world of California public education.

*

At some point back in the Cretaceous Period, the California legislature hit upon the brilliant idea that education was an investment in the future.  The better-educated are our children, so the folklore goes, the more able will be our workforce.  The more able our workforce, the better will be California products, the higher will be our wages, the more taxes we can collect to pour back into education and round and round we go.

And for a while, California did prosper, at least through the dot-com boom, attracting a highly educated workforce and becoming an economic powerhouse because of it.  Never mind that most of the intellects fueling the boom were products of elite private universities like Stanford or were imports from places like India and Japan.

It was a damned good idea and solid reasoning.  But for all but the top highschool students from mostly the top high schools (almost by definition located in the state’s wealthier enclaves), it was largely lip service.

*

Long before (long, long before) Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the California legislature began robbing the educational coffers to balance the state’s budget, the average California school district saw its secondary schools cut from six instruction periods per day to five, its core curriculum watered down and most elective courses, including music, speech, journalism, etc., axed.

In fact, as long as I can remember, California schools have been in a period of decline.  When I was in elementary school in a military town in Oklahoma (granted, we were awash in federal funds), when a student transferred in from California, s/he was automatically put back one grade.

*

We live in a relatively good school district.  The students’ annual test scores are well above the state-wide average, yet “relatively” is still the operative word.  Its schools can only be considered “good” when compared with the over-all, poorly performing schools in the rest of the state, and particularly when compared to neighboring school districts such as Oakland and Hayward, both of which make a mockery of education.

When my step-daughter was in middle school, her mother and I realized that she needed to go to a private high school rather than stay in public school for the next four years.  We investigated two of these nearby and finally settled on one.  This school had a track record of sending 96% of its graduating seniors on to four-year colleges or universities.  Castro Valley High School hovered around 18%.

We made the mistake of mentioning this to a school board member at a community function, and he immediately started blustering.  “Now, just…just…just wait just a minute,” he stammered.  “Why, only two or three years ago, we had a student admitted to an Ivy League college.”

Wow, and bada boom.  One student, two or three years ago.  That certainly makes all the difference.  And I suppose the fact that Castro Valley High School’s own Rachel Maddow, who went to Stanford, became a Rhodes Scholar and now hosts her own commentary show on CNN makes up for the majority of her classmates who attended a year or two at a community college – at best – before dropping out to become hairdressers or advertising salesmen.

*

I was astonished when my wife confessed to me that she had never read a Shakespeare play.  And no Dickens.  No Emily Dickenson.  No Walt Whitman.  No Carl Sandburg.  No T.S. Eliot.  Maybe one Poe short story and maybe one or two of Robert Frost’s shorter and more familiar poems.  And she was an A student.

In my Oklahoma high school (and I use Oklahoma for comparison not only because I am familiar with it, but also because it’s a benighted state, its citizens are suspicious of education and its legislature is perpetually at war with its major public university), we read a couple of Dickens’ works (even the C-level students read “Great Expectations”), “Julius Caesar,” “Romeo and Juliet” and “MacBeth,” and a broad selection of American prose and poetry.  What we did not read was Shel Silverstein or Khalil Gibran’s dreadfully sappy “The Prophet.”  How can you consider it an education if you’ve never read a single one of Shakespeare’s works?  If you don’t know Balaam’s ass from J. Alfred Prufrock?

*

Maybe that’s why California’s public universities have to offer remedial English classes, taken by huge numbers of freshmen – mostly California-educated freshmen – who must take the course without college credit.  “Bonehead English,” as it is commonly known, teaches college-age kids what they should have learned in high school: how to write a coherent sentence, a little bit about the great literature of the western world and, all too often, how to spell.

*

When my step-daughter was in the fifth grade, her principal was applying for some sort of state grant and wrote a grant proposal, which he sent home with the members of the Student Council to study.  She, of course, didn’t understand it and asked me to look it over.  I found it incredibly poorly written, full of grammatical errors, hackneyed phrases and misspellings.

I marked it up with a red pencil, gave it a big C-minus and sent it back to school with her.

Shortly afterward, her mid-term grades came out.  She was down in almost every subject and the grade for “effort” had slipped in every single subject.  We asked for a conference with her teacher, who told us that she was spending too much time out of the classroom on Student Council activities and that hardly a day went by when she did not miss at least one lesson due to absences from class.  She said Kristi was using Student Council as an excuse and that she had been late for class on several occasions with the excuse that “Mr. Lyen (the principal) wanted to see me,” when that was not true.

We asked for a meeting, during which the teacher, the assistant principal, Marianne and I all agreed that there was plenty of time for Student Council activities before and after school, at lunch and at recess, and that Kristi would remain in class at all other times.  Principal Taylor Lyen had been invited to this meeting, but declined to come.

A few days later, we attended a school open house, where we ran into Lyen.  Marianne asked if he had spoken to the assistant principal about the meeting.  He hadn’t.  When she tried to explain to him the consensus that had been reached, he interrupted her with, “I don’t agree.  You’ll kill her spirit.”

He then went into a long diatribe, contending that a child conniving her way out of the classroom was of more educational value than anything she could learn in the classroom.

“We’re teaching life skills, here,” he spewed before he stomped away.  “Long division is an archaic concept and spelling counts for nothing!”

*

Archaic concept.  Well.  I know that even the most disadvantaged kids have calculators today, but I’ve often found myself without one handy when I had a problem to be solved.  More importantly, however, long division teaches logic and reasoning.  And spelling “counts for nothing?”  If you want to be a plumber or a hairdresser, maybe.  But don’t get me started.

I thought the situation had pretty much hit bottom, but we had a long ways to go yet before our minor triumph.

*

Lyen called Kristi’s father and arranged a meeting, telling him that we were “murdering her soul.”

Father, when he picked up Kristi for his visitation the next weekend, told Marianne that “I’ve heard about all the terrible things you’re doing to Kristi.  You’re murdering her soul.”

Father contacted his attorney, claiming that what I was doing to Kristi was “intellectual abuse.”  Whatever that is.  Father’s attorney wrote to Marianne’s attorney saying that he was “shocked” to read the letters that had recently gone back and forth between myself and Lyen and adding that “Mr. Dimick needs to understand that he is not the father of this child and he needs to maintain a role consistent with the fact that he is the stepfather and not the natural father.”

I replied that I was sure that when he was given copies of these letters, “you were not given the letter of apology which Taylor wrote to us on the orders of the superintendent.”

*

Lyen was called on the carpet by the school superintendent for first, voicing his out-of-line sentiments about education in such a manner to the parents of one of his students and, second, for deliberately attempting to stir up trouble between a student’s parents because of a personal vendetta.

Although a letter of reprimand was placed in his personnel file, Taylor (“Long division is an archaic concept,” “Spelling counts for nothing,” “She’ll learn more by conning her way out of class than by staying in it”) Lyen is still teaching in the Castro Valley School District.  The kids under his tutelage are still absorbing his strange ideas.  Castro Valley High School graduates still can’t make change in their heads nor, for the most part, spell “Castro Valley” correctly two times out of three.

Kristi, fortunately, learned to spell, to write in complete sentences and to think critically.  In high school, she actually read some Shakespeare and several other worthwhile books and plays.  Since graduating from UC Santa Cruz, she has risen rapidly in the corporate world and, at age 29, is making a hell of a lot more money than I was at her age – even adjusted for inflation.

*

When Kristi was a junior or senior in high school, she attended a Chamber of Commerce function with me, where we spotted Taylor Lyen across the room.  She went up to him and announced proudly, “My soul is doing just fine, thank you.”