The British Bobby & BSL

In a horrible kind of way, it is a good thing for us that other countries introduced their Breed Specific Legislations years ago – or it would be, if only this country had the good sense to take advantage of their experiences.

Take the whole issue of where the attack takes place.  The Dangerous Dogs Act that this government is planning to put in place says that “dangerous dogs” can not leave their owner’s yards, except in two rare instances.  By saying this, the Act is clearly trying to prevent dogs from attacking people in public spaces and highways.  If dangerous dogs bite anyone while in the public domain the dog will be seized, and/or possibly killed and the owner fined severely. Fair enough.  England has the same law.

But the British Bobbies are now up in arms about dog attacks.  Apparently 5 officers were attacked by a pit bull type dog in East London recently.  The policemen were well enough after the attack to hold the dog down while a police marksman shot it dead, but injured enough that they had to be hospitalized afterwards.

First of all, this was reportedly an attack by a pit bull – a type of dog that England outlawed over 20 years ago.  Not only outlawed, but passed a Dangerous Dogs Act prohibiting anyone from breeding or importing such a dog into the country.  But still, here we have a case where this proclaimed dangerous dog is able to take on five of Britain’s armed and dangerous public defenders. Unless this dog is over 20 years old, one would have to assume that it was either bred locally or imported.  So much for the enforce-ability of the Act.

Secondly, and this is the crux of the matter that has caused Gareth Pritchard, North Wales Assistant Chief Constable, to publicly express his disgust about the Act,  the attack took place on private property.  It seems that the Dangerous Dogs Act did not take into consideration that policemen might have to enter on private property in pursuit of their duties, so there is no recourse for the officers who were injured.  The police are demanding that the Act be amended to allow the same penalties to apply when people are attacked by a dangerous dog even when on its own (private) property.

You know how they say there are always two sides to every story?  This story has about twenty-two sides.

I wonder how our citizenry would feel about a law being passed that said if you have a dangerous dog, you can be fined $50,000.00 and sent to prison for a year if he bites somebody while trying to protect your property from invasion?

Let us just put aside for the minute the fact that the police were doing a good thing by entering a suspected criminal’s yard.  The point is – how is the dog to differentiate between them and a real invader with evil intentions towards his master?  In fact, the police did have evil intentions against the dog’s master!  How is anybody supposed to train their dog – any dog – to recognize a police uniform and not attack anybody wearing one?  Would you even want to do that and run the risk of the criminals donning police uniforms to get by your dog?  What about postal workers, or visiting nurses or firemen – is the dog supposed to recognize all of those people too?  What is he to do, ask them for ID before biting them on the leg?  Again, the dog is being punished for something it has no control over.

The police are also calling for more powers to seize dogs that they consider to be dangerous.  I am assuming they are not referring to pit bulls, because they have already been labelled dangerous in the Dangerous Dog Act and are therefore seize-able by the police.  So one has to assume that there are other dogs out there that the police consider dangerous and that are not on their Dangerous Dogs Act.  What a wild concept – that any dog can be dangerous – wherever did they get that crazy idea from??

Prime Real Estate

The following story has been circulating the local internet and it came to my in-box today

I trust that each and every one of you had a Happy and Holy Easter. I would just like to share an incident that occurred on Wrightson Road on Saturday 7th April, 2012 between 4 to 5pm.

A 4-door pickup heading west in the vicinity of SWWTU Hall saw a man kneeling on the road and in his lane so he had to slam brakes to avoid hitting the man. Of course a station wagon hit the back of his van since the stop was so sudden. But what transpired next is what is so amazing because it was almost a scene out of a movie.

The guy kneeling on the road was an outpatient of St Ann's Medical Institution. He is from Farm Road Rich Plain Diego Martin. His mother is Mrs King and he was released about 2 weeks ago. He was opening people's car doors and snatching their bags when someone chopped him across his face so he knelt on the road bleeding forcing the van to stop.

He immediately got up ran to the station wagon to try opening the door but the doors were locked so he tried the 4- door pick up (the doors weren't locked) opened the door and sitting in the back seat was a mother with her 2 infant children probably  a 6 year old boy and a 2 year old girl who lay asleep.

He grabbed the girl by her feet and dragged her out of the vehicle holding her upside down. The mother fought back in an attempt to get back the child, rolling and falling onto the roadway bruising her arms etc but getting back her baby. Fortunately, 2 cars behind were 2 plain clothes officers who stopped to investigate and this is the man saying
to them that the van had hit him and that they wanted to beat him. The police soon got the right story and held him but he was too much for them so he escaped again running and dodging the traffic he threw his bloodied t-shirt into a moving car hitting the driver in his face and blocking his vision also causing his face to be covered in blood. He
continued running, flipped over the median and onto the east bound lane, rolled onto the bonnet of a moving vehicle, dodged a few cars before diving head first through the back window and onto the backseat of a moving Matrix sitting between the backseat passengers causing more chaos and panic because the car stopped abruptly and everyone ran out of the vehicle.

By this time the police caught up with him but the more they tried to subdue him the harder it became. Even getting him into the ambulance was a task and the policemen collected some very hard cuffs to their faces. Although the little girl was covered in blood no physical harm was done but both mother and children were traumatised and the little girl
kept asking to go home. I guess because home to her is where she's safe. Further details of this incident can be obtained from the Central Police Station since those officers were on the scene.

The lesson learnt though: Please lock your doors and keep your windows up especially when in traffic.

Councillor Cleveland Garcia
Woodbrook

I found this story interesting because a few days ago I read in the Express Newspaper that the Minister of Health is planning to sell St. Ann’s Mental Hospital because, according to him, it is prime real estate and the government can get a lot of money for it.

He says that the proceeds from the sale will be used to implement community-based mental health care.  He says.  But we all know that is a statement to be taken with a grain of salt.  But seasoning aside, what his explanation logically means is that the government needs the money from the sale of the hospital to establish the alternative to the hospital.  So, St. Ann’s will be sold, the patients disbursed to the four winds, and then a community based mental health system will be put in place. 

Do these people ever think of what they are saying?

He also said that roughly 65% of the people at St. Ann’s should not be there.  I am not sure if that means they are not mentally ill, or if their illness is not so critical that they need hospitalization.  Even if that was true, which I very much doubt, what does he plan to do about the other 35%? 

My brother has been schizophrenic for most of his adult life – more than 35 years – so I have a little knowledge of how the system works, and I am here to tell you that this is, please pardon the pun, insanity at its highest level.

In the first place, does Dr. Faud Khan have any idea how difficult it is for a member of the public to get a mentally ill person admitted to the hospital in the first place?  I have a friend whose daughter is mentally ill.  The girl paces the house at night, talking loudly to voices only she can hear and sometimes smashing things and cursing.  She leaves the house during the day and nobody knows where she is or what has happened to her, sometimes for hours and hours.  She quarrels incessantly with everyone, accusing them of doing her bad things and sometimes becoming incoherent and often violent.  Although she takes medication, attends clinic (or more precisely, her mother drags her to clinic) and is under the care of a public health psychiatrist, her doctors refuse to have her admitted to a hospital.  They say her family just has to understand that she is ill and can not help her behaviour.  Her mother and siblings are nervous wrecks themselves, never knowing what she will do next, or if she will hurt somebody or somebody will hurt her. 

Years ago my brother had a violent episode and when we called his psychiatrist he advised to call the police as they could get him admitted to hospital.  When the police arrived, another family member who had just returned home and did not know what was taking place, told them that they must have received a prank call and they left.  When we called them and explained the misunderstanding they told us they did not have time to waste and they would not come back.  We had to get four men to help us to jump on my poor brother, tie his hands, force him into a car and take him to the psychiatric unit which was then still open in the Port of Spain General Hospital.  Fortunately they agreed to admit him as he was already a member of that clinic. I will never forget that horrifying day as long as I live.  Incidentally, that unit was closed a few years later.

So I don’t know how all of these not-so-mentally-ill patients got into St. Ann’s, but surely that is an indication of a poor system of evaluation and administration that needs to be corrected immediately – and not by the closure of the entire hospital.

My brother now lives in England.  When he first went there he was institutionalized.  A few years later, just like Trinidad, the country decided they could not afford to run a full time psychiatric hospital and would scale down to community based care.  By that time my brother had been released, so this decisioni did not affect him.  But this is the important difference between what happened in the UK and what Minister Khan is proposing for this country – the out-patient/community-based system was already in place when the decision was taken!  This means that there was a system in place for continuing evaluation and follow up of the released patients.  My brother has a team consisting of a doctor, psychiatric nurse and social worker assigned to him.  My mother is his official care-giver and she can call any member of this team at any time if she is having difficulty with him.  If needs be, he will be admitted to the psychiatric unit in the local general hospital, but for that to happen the members of the psychiatric team have to agree that it needs to be done and the police (who have been trained to deal with mentally ill people) have a role to play as well.

But it does not end there.  As his care-giver, recognition is given that my mother also needs help.  They system does not leave her to sink or swim.  If she needs a break, provision is made for the care of my brother and she is given the financial support necessary to go on a vacation.  The case worker will also take my brother out – to the cinema, shopping, to museums, or just for a walk – on a regular basis both to make his life interesting and to allow my mother to have a breather.  If he does not want to go out, the case worker will just visit with him, chat or play cards, watch television – whatever he wants to do. 

My friend has a very difficult time getting her daughter to go to clinic.  My mother used to have the same problem when she lived in Trinidad with my brother.  Now she does not have that problem – if my brother won’t go to clinic, they will do a home visit.  If she is having problems with transportation (hardly likely due to the excellent public transport system), they will send a car for her.

Community based health care systems do not work unless they take every aspect of the problem into consideration.  Total support is essential.  In Trinidad the needs of the care-givers and other family members are not considered at all.  But it is like when you are in an aircraft and they tell you that in an emergency you should put on your own oxygen mask before trying to help anyone else.  If the person helping is not strong and healthy – how can they help anyone else?

Years ago they started to “phase out” the inmates at the St. James Geriatric Hospital.  As a child I remember going to visit these elderly people with my grandmother – just to chat with them, sing some hymns and hopefully brighten their lives a little bit.  In those days, if a family could not take care of their older members, or if there was no family, that person would live at the “St. James Infirmary” as it was called.  As an adult, I used to visit maybe once a year and that is how I found out that the Government had decided not to accept any more admissions.  When the people already there died, they would not be replaced and the Infirmary would be closed once it was empty. 

Not everybody knows this, but the hospital cared for other types of people too.  I think that the reason d’etre behind the hospital was wider than just the elderly. It cared for those who could not care for themselves and who did not have anyone else to care for them. Some people in that hospital had lived their whole lives there.  There was an elderly man who had come in when he was six years old with his elderly granny and just stayed on after she died.  There were wards for people who were severely handicapped, sometimes brain damaged – for instance there was a lady who had been born without legs and was brain damaged as well.  Poor people can not always afford to stay at home to care for a handicapped person, so the only solution was to institutionalize them.  Sometimes family visited these people, more often they forgot about them.  There were wards for the insane – not all the people in these wards were elderly and not all of these wards were clean or well and humanely run either.  Sometimes terrible abuses took place.  I remember going into one and seeing a half naked woman locked into a small room with mattresses pushed up against the walls, screaming and screaming to be let out.  The ward that day was being run by another patient who said the woman had to be punished because she had tried to run away.

I have not been back to the St. James Infirmary since December 2008.  I don’t know what has happened to the people in the handicapped wards or the psychiatric wards or the geriatric wards.  But I agree with the nurse who said that if their families could not take care of them for all years, she did not see how they could suddenly do it now or how the patients would be better off living with strangers.

Which brings us full circle to the patients at St. Ann’s Hospital.  Is this country so cash-strapped that it has to sell “prime real estate” to find money to care for its mentally ill?  Is it really a lack of money that is causing the under-staffing at St. Ann’s?  Is it because we have no money that so many of the attendants are callous and cruel?  Is poor maintenance due to lack of money, so that a ward has to practically fall to pieces before it is refurbished? Are we really such a poor country that we can not afford modern exercise, recreational or entertainment facilities, except those little entertainments organized by the staff themselves? 

I have visited St. Ann’s on many, many occasions. It is a lovely location.  There are many caring, committed, knowledgeable nurses and doctors there.  But that is about it.  With few exceptions (the “Villa” being one), the buildings more nearly resemble some institution called “Bedlam” out of a Charles Dickens book and the care is generally mechanical and indifferent.  There is little friendliness, cheerfulness or happiness in that place – I don’t suppose those characteristics exist in most psychiatric hospitals, but it seems like they are deliberately sucked out of the fabric of people working in St. Ann’s. And no amount of money is going to put them back in.

The Ministry of Health has identified several priority health concerns of Trinidad and Tobago (chronic diseases like hypertension and diabetes, non-communicable diseases like cancer being two of them) but nothing is ever said in all the policy documents about mental illness and drug addiction – one sometimes caused by the other – which contribute to more crime, stress and lost productivity in this country than anything else.  So it is no surprise that the Minister of Health can so cavalierly talk about selling prime real estate to fund a system to take care of people that need to be taken care of now and not after escrow.

HAPPY BATHDAY

Today I bathed the dogs.  This is not an unalloyed pleasure.  Rescue, who is 85 lbs, handles the stress by rapidly wrapping himself around my legs.  Unfortunately I secure him with a thin chain to the side of the arbour that covers the porch where I bathe them, and by moving in circles around me, he very quickly wraps the chain around my legs and throws me down (after cutting off my circulation). He does this every time he gets a bath, and because he suffers from “Pitbullitis” (my name for those little bumps that seem to afflict pit bulls at one time or another during their lives), he has to bathe several times a week with a special (and very expensive) shampoo anytime he has an outbreak.

 Sahara, on the other hand, clearly enjoys the whole thing and gives me no trouble whatsoever.  I always try to bathe the dogs when the sun is out in full blast.  But even if it goes behind a cloud, Sahara does not flinch, shiver, slink down or try to get away. She is also very cooperative, lifting her feet for to have between her toes cleaned properly. When you are bathing the other dogs, she is always nosing around and your best bet would be to bathe her first and get her out of the way.

You Can Bathe Me If You Can Catch Me!

Her daughter, Hope, is the diametric opposite.  You first have to find Hope.  Then you have to drag her out from wherever she is hiding (under the bed this time).  Holding her collar you coax and cajole her to the front door while she plants her bottom on the floor and braces herself against any forward movement with her front paws.  When you get to the front door, my advice would be to save yourself further aggravation and just lift her up.  However, as she weighs nearly 50 lbs, and she allows herself to go completely limp in your arms, you had better prepare yourself for a strained back.  One way or the other you will eventually get to the porch at the side of the house and the minute you let go of her collar to reach for the chain, she tries to bolt.  Once you have her secured, however, the rest is relatively easy.  One thing I will say – having her ears un-cropped makes bathing her so much easier.  Part of the problem with Rescue is that, regardless of what you do, he ends up getting water in his ears. And he hates that.  Hope has long dangly ears that close like the seal of a Tupperware bowl over her auditory orifice and washing her face does not bother her in the least. The other dogs have never had their faces properly washed – a wipe off with a damp hand is as near to it as they have ever gotten.

Hope Ignoring Me

Hope does not have Pitbullitis.  In fact, she has the most soft, thick fur imaginable.  Over the months I have tried several different kinds of shampoos and the one I am using now – Hartz Wheat Germ - is very good.  It is also $50.90 a damn bottle.  By the time we are finished she is smelling good and looking better, as is to be expected with the shampoo at that price.  I have to try to dry her off more than the others, however, because the minute I let her go she heads straight for the bedroom where she lies, shivering like crazy, under the bed until even she can sulk no more.  Even after emerging, the cut-eyes continue for several hours.  Today I tried bribing her out of her bad mood with a few Ovaltine biscuits, but though she took them, she did so with a definite sniff of condescension and it did not change the looks of deep reproof that she kept sending my way, as much as to say “that was not cool!”

So, in a desperate and craven bid to get back in her good books, I chose her to go for a walk with Aslan this afternoon.  I take two dogs every afternoon, but Aslan is always one of them because he is the only one who knows how to walk to heel so I can concentrate on the other one.  Although I am going to have to re-think that logic because what he has recently started to do is show off: 

“ Look at me criss-cross in front of you, look at me criss cross behind you – oops, did I tie the leads up like a May pole?  Well, while you’re trying to untangle yourself and avoid falling flat on your face at the same time, don’t forget that if you drop the lead I’m going to run my little ass off and you’ll never be able to catch me. Hahahaha! It’s so funny to take off like a bat out of hell when you least expect it and just about pull your arm out of the socket when I reach the end of the leash – oh, and look at Hope trying to follow me – but she hasn’t gotten down the end-of-the-leash thing down yet, has she?  She gets pulled off of her feet every time when the leash runs out – hahahaha – this is really funny.” 

One day I am going to kill that dog.

I Don't Want to Gooooooo...

The challenges begin the minute we turn off the car engine.  Aslan jumps out first, but I have to keep him on a short leash because we are right next to the walkway with all the runners and walkers, none of whom believe that he is not a vicious attack dog with designs on their throats.  So I have him in my right hand – but I still have to pull forward the seat to allow Hope to get out, and I only have one hand left to do it with.  If he would cooperate and return to the car I could use the hand holding his leash to pull the seat forward while I operate the lever with my left hand, but he is not going to take the chance of being put back in the car, so he keeps the tension on the leash to its full extent while I, holding Hope’s leash in my left hand, try to get the seat forward and her out of the car with one hand.  Hope does not want to get out of the car.  She didn’t want to get in either.  Getting her in or out of a vehicle usually necessitates lifting and carrying.  I need a third, and maybe even a fourth arm. 

Then the key falls to the ground and misses the grill covering the water drain by about a quarter inch.  Which is a good thing because the rain had fallen earlier and the water is gushing and swooshing down that drain at quite a rate.  Eventually, I manage to snag the key and muscle Aslan near enough to the door to get sufficient slack on his leash to position the seat forward.  But not near enough to reach Hope who is cowering against the far end of the seat.  Panting more than a little heavily, I decide the take a chance and, when there is a break in the runners/walkers, I release the lock on Aslan’s leash to give me the slack I need to reach Hope – and we are finally out.  It’s just a step or two away from a break in the railing around the savannah, and at last I can let their retractable leashes out to the full 10 feet.

I use retractable leashes for the two of them.  I would not do it for Rescue and Sahara because they are too strong and they’d probably burst the cord right out of the box if they saw a bird or, God forbid, another dog.  The reason I use retractable leashes is because it allows them to run while I can maintain a walk.  I am sorry.  I do not run.  Ever.

I Like Retractable Leashes!!

Walking in the savannah has its own rules, customs and regulations.  Not to mention problems and stressors.  For one thing, as the dry season progresses there are more and more athletic activities that entail us finding a very circuitous route to get around them.  There are times that we would come across two or three football games going at the same time and in the same area, and there is absolutely no way to get past them than to go through them.  The conversations at that time can become very colourful:

“Tantie, tantie – you ain see we playing a game here, or what?  You kyar jes walk thru jes so.”

“So you ain see I walking my dogs here, or what?  You kyar jes play a game in front of me jest so!  Why you want me to do – fly over?  You feel I am frigging Superwoman or what???”

And then somebody will inevitably chime in:

“So what kinda dog is that?”

And then there are the numerous holes and depressions, all of which I have at one time or another twisted my ankles in.  On a day like today, there is also the mud.  You don’t always see it in time either and the next thing you know you are squelching through a bog while the dogs are happily kicking it back up in your face. 

On the human side, other than the various athletic types, there are the weirdos.  I have seen men masturbating at least 2 or 3 times, been accosted by people who think dogs in general and Pit Bulls in particular have no business occupying the same public spaces that they do, and I was once followed for half an hour by a young woman who kept calling me “Mums”.  On the more positive side, there are lots of children, most of whom love the dogs and want to find out more about them.

You find the strangest things in the savannah.  A “normal” find is a used condom.  More exotic was the time I found a ladies’ handbag with all the contents strewn to hell and back, including a pay slip and ID card.  There are always discarded or forgotten athletic shoes, shorts and t-shirts and even cell phones.  Because of the many vagrants who live in the savannah you also find mattresses, sheets, whole suitcases of clothes and other less savoury signs of human presence that it is not necessary to think about right now.  So you need to be very alert when one or both of the dogs stop to sniff something in the grass – in Aslan’s case this happens about once every 3 seconds.  During the rest of the time he is peeing on every tree and bush that we pass (or try to pass).

Nobody's Leaving Me Anywhere!

Then there are the dogs.  The dreaded Savannah Pack.  Most of these dogs were dropped off by their owners.  When they are first left, you see them frantically running up and down looking for their owners.  Sometimes they would run up to people, thinking that they might be their owners, but this stops really quickly because those people usually shout at them and sometimes even hit them with sticks and rocks.  You next see them trying to get accepted by the existing pack.  If they are successful they have a better chance of surviving as the pack will teach them where to find food, if it is available.  I have heard some people glibly say, “Oh, they are alright – the vagrants feed them.”  These comments are described in polite circles as the person blowing smoke out of their asses.  In all the years of walking in the savannah I have seen one occasion of a vagrant with a dog. The female dogs inevitably get pregnant when they come into heat and the puppies generally die.  The momma dog tries her best, but between the lack of shelter from the elements, the various contagious diseases of the rest of the pack and her inability to generate enough nourishment for her pups, they don’t make it.  Dying of hunger is not an easy death, but it is a fate that some people sentence dogs to without a thought.  I have head stories of why dogs were left in the savannah – he dig up meh garden, I tired of the barking, is my son bring this damn dog here and I ain want no dog to harass me.  But the savannah belongs to them – at least as far as they are concerned – and they take strong exception to me and my dogs and we have been rushed on several occasions.  I used to get really annoyed as it tends to slow down your walk when you’re surrounded by 8 or 10 snarling, barking mongrels.  But I finally accepted that I was the interloper and now if I see them in time I will try to avoid them.

Our routine is to walk through the Rock Gardens and come up the hill on the north side of the Savannah.  It’s a pretty walk and the only reason we won’t go that way is if there are a lot of people in the Gardens who might not take kindly to Pit Bulls.  Today it was empty so we went down.  There are two ponds in the Rock Gardens.  For years the mechanism controlling the inflow-outflow of water was broken and water used to pour out of them – thousands of gallons every day.  They have recently fixed the problem and for a few days after they were fixed they looked really pretty because they cleaned them too.  But since then people have started to again throw their garbage into the ponds – disposable diapers for some reason being the most popular, followed by empty soft drink bottles – with obvious results.

That Was Fun!

Anyway, we were walking alongside one of the ponds when all of a sudden Hope takes off like a shot out of a cannon, executes a flying leap and jumps right into the pond! I really don’t think she knew it contained water, because she immediately turned around and started frantically paddling for the edge.  Of course I had to help her out and of course that involved putting my hands down into the water.   And then I was liberally sprayed with the water when she shook herself dry. 

If your short term memory is bad, please go back and read what I said about Hope’s attitude to bathing.  Also read about the cost of the shampoo that I bathe her with.  And then try to imagine my feelings while I watch this dog, after giving one final shake which did not quite dislodge bits of water lily and algae sticking to her back, happily trot after Aslan.

I really wish I had bought shares in Pfizer – I hear they make an excellent anti-depressant.

After Her Walk/Swim, Hope is Sleepy

JEROME

I saw a little boy in the mall today.  I almost did not notice him, except that he was only about six and alone, and when he walked past me I saw that he was crying.  It didn’t take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out that he must have lost his parents.  It turned out that he had lost his granny.  His name was Jerome and he was trying not to cry, but you could see that he was just barely hanging on to his last nerve and was a hair’s breath away from blind panic. I could not get him to stop, he kept walking and looking frantically around, answering my questions (what’s wrong, are you lost, what’s your name) in such a soft voice that I could not hear everything he was saying.

The mall was so noisy – Christmas carols blasting, people rushing in every which direction, all seeming to be talking at the same time. I had to bend almost double to get on eye level with him, but I could see that as far as he was concerned I was just getting in his way of finding his granny. He wanted to keep walking until he found her, not answer my questions.  He knew she was somewhere in the vicinity and he was not supposed to talk to strangers anyway.  I tried to reassure him – don’t worry, I’ll get somebody to make a loud announcement and your granny will come and get you, I told him.  But at the same time I was trying to figure out a way to get him to go with me to the Mall office – heck, I was trying to figure out where the hell the Mall office was! As I was walking and talking to him, to my great relief he suddenly saw his granny in the distance – he must have sharp eyes because there were a lot of people in the mall – and he took off and half-ran, half-trotted, towards her.

She was with a younger woman and two little girls and I expected her to show some signs of relief when she saw him. A short, plain woman of in her late 40’s, with black rimmed glasses and a white dress, she looked like a Coco-Panyol.  Expecting a different reaction, I was so disappointed to see that when he went up to her, she immediately started to scold him.  I was too far away to hear what she was saying, but you could tell she was not happy – grabbing him by the shoulder and shoving him, gesticulating and pointing to him as she spoke to the other woman, who seemed not in the slightest bit interested.  He just stood there, a little behind her, with his head hanging, his eyes sad and his little face worried.

He looked so downcast that I had to say something.  So I walked to meet them. "Hello Jerome's granny - I'm glad he found you - he was so frightened... I guess you were frightened too, right?"  Apparently not.  She didn’t look frightened, relieved, or even marginally happy.  What she looked was pissed off. She told me that she had told Jerome not to stop to watch a demonstration of a remote control helicopter with flashing lights all over it - and he did!!!  Clearly a mortal sin, punishable by neglect, if not deliberate abandonment.

I was trying not to say anything, or say anything in a way that would make things worse for Jerome.  But I could not just pretend that her actions were a-okay.  So I said, as lightly as possible, "Well granny, what do you expect - he's a little boy - I would want to watch that helicopter myself!!" I hope that what I said sunk in, or will eventually sink in, but at the time she was clearly not amused and she walked on with the two little girls gawking at me over their shoulders and Jerome trailing behind.

But then, I was not particularly amused either.  In fact it ruined my whole mood and I had to leave the mall.  I was very near to tears – I thought of all the Jeromes in the world who are looked after physically but neglected and abused emotionally.  No wonder we have so many young men (and women) who have no sympathy or compassion for anybody and who don’t think particularly highly of anything – including themselves.  Children truly are what they learn.  And all Jerome learned today was that his granny could be trusted only to make him unhappy.

Going into the mall at Christmas time is nothing if not an education in child rearing practices in this country.  For instance, there was a young couple with their two daughters getting a bite to eat in the food court – the man had the younger daughter (about a year old) on his lap and he was sharing his Coke with her.  I mean that literally – he did not just give her a sip or two – she had 50% of a large glass of Coca Cola. God alone know what that amount of sugar can do to an infant.

I walked behind a young mother and her little daughter for quite a while as we headed in the same direction.  The little girl, who seemed to be about 4 or 5, was dressed to the nines, from the crown of her head to the tip of her shoes, all bows and frills and glitter.  She was holding her mother’s hand and quite often had to run to keep up with her.  Her mother did not notice her daughter’s discomfort because she was talking on her cell phone the whole time.  In fact, when I got to a store I wanted to go into, and they walked on past it, she was still talking on the phone and the little girl was still trotting behind her in an effort to make her age 4 legs match her mother’s age 22 stride.

And it goes on and on – parents who create literally hundreds of “don’ts” and enforce exactly none of them - the mother who takes her 3 year old son into a store selling costume jewellery and tells the child not to touch anything, while she wanders around and leaves him to touch every thing in sight; or the father who watches on in an apparent stupor while his daughter tries her best to pull the decorations off of the trees dotted throughout the mall.  These are children who are accustomed to doing what they want, coupled with parents who don’t pay attention to them.  The result is Jerome.  The result is also children who are abducted, raped and killed in alarming numbers every year in this country.  If I wanted to, I could have abducted Jerome.  Nobody was paying attention, the mall was so noisy and busy it would have gone unnoticed.  And he is a thin, obviously docile little boy, who would not have been able to put up too much of a fight.  All I had to do was tell him that I knew where his granny was and that I would take him to her.  Abduction accomplished.  Then you would have seen one more granny on TV News, holding her head and bawling, and saying “If I did only know!!!”

Canine Racism

There is a young lady right now in Trinidad who is considering doing her MSc thesis on racism.  Not human racism, canine racism.  A few months ago I came across the term “breedism” – which is what dog people are calling canine racism, most likely because we refer to “breeds” of dogs.  People are categorized according to “races”, hence racism.  Personally, I don’t care what you call it.  Breedism or racism, the effect is the same - discriminatory actions and practices against dogs in general, and Pit Bulls specifically.

I also have to say upfront that I understand how people could be racist.  By that I mean that I consider it quite natural for someone to think that people who look like him are better than people who do not look like him.  I believe that one of the causes of racism, a mixture of fear of the unknown and comfort in the familiar, is a very human reaction.  But because I think racism is an understandable human condition does not mean that I accept that it should be condoned. On the contrary, I think it should be fought tooth and nail because its results are evil. The synonyms for racism are also its results: discrimination, prejudice, bigotry, intolerance, bias – as  I said, usually extended to somebody because they are from another ethnic background or tribe. Or breed, in the case of animals.

When I heard about what this young lady was doing, I got to thinking – not always a good thing for me to do - about the way animals are discriminated against, exploited and misunderstood.  I have never studied sociology, but I have lived with racism my whole life and have more than a nodding acquaintance with its many faces, so I felt confident that my opinions had value. And I always think best when I write, so here we are.

As I see it, racism has two components. First, racism is the feeling that people who don’t belong to your tribe are not as good as you.  Secondly, it is the belief that your “betterness” gives you special privileges.  It is not enough to say, 'I am a more superior human being (which automatically makes you inferior) because I am African/Indian/Chinese/Whatever' – you also have to say, 'I am superior, you are inferior and that means I get to live a better quality of life than you do'.

Sometimes, it does not stop at the inferior people not having the same quality of life.  Sometimes it extends to not having any life at all. Hitler was a racist – he put the Jews and others in ghettos and then in the gas chambers.  The American settlers were racist – they put the Native Americans on reservations after doing their best to wipe them off the face of the earth.  King Leopold II of Belgium thought nothing of enslaving and brutalizing and murdering Africans from the Congo by the thousands. In these cases, it is difficult to untangle where the hunger for power left off and the racism began that led the various leaders to attempt genocide.  A question for debate at another time might be whether a leader can conquer people without trying to annihilate their race. Can a person be power-mad without being racist, or is everyone racist but not every racist is homicidal. However, what is clear is that, although racism does not necessarily always end in a holocaust, history has shown us that when racism is empowered, it easily can.

Comparing human and canine racism has one obvious disparity.  Unlike humans, dogs are not racists.  Humans discriminate against other beings just for not being like them. Dogs don't do that. So in effect, we are still talking about human racism – but only directed to animals this time. Humans have extended their animosity against people who belong to other races to animals who belong to different breeds.

In traditional racism, the “other” person is de-humanized.  He or she becomes sub-human.  It is okay to rape a young girl if she is not human; it is okay to whip the back of a man into shreds if he is not human; it is okay not to provide proper education, health care, nutrition and housing for whole families if they are not human. Because being human assures everybody of certain rights.  Not human = No rights. Therefore, it is ridiculously easy for humans to extend their racist attitudes and propensities to dogs because they are truly not human to begin with!

You hear people saying all the time, “I hate cats”.  Why? Why do you hate cats?  “Because they are sly.”  “I just don’t like them.”  “I’ve always hated them.” “Because all cats are thieves.”  “They just give me the creeps.”  “Because they kill children by stealing their breath while they sleep.” Just like all Chinese are sly; and all Indians are thieves; and all Africans are potential rapists.  So perhaps I should add one more criteria to the definition of racism.  It must have no factual basis for existing.  All that is necessary is a willingness to believe in stereotyping.

I have always said that I was very fortunate to be born of a mixed union – I am not speaking so much of my mother’s marriage, but of my grandparents’ union.  My maternal grandfather was black as the hinges of hell, and my grandmother was as white as the driven snow.  From a very early age this taught me that stereotyping was bullshit.  In the days when it was widely known and accepted that all black men were lazy and ignorant, I knew that my grandfather was a child genius, went to a British university on a scholarship he got at age 14 and became a very well known and respected jurist.  Also in the days when all white people were cruel oppressors, I could see that my grandmother was the most kind person I knew (or have ever met in my entire life), who would literally give her last cent to any person who told her a sad story.  It was from her that I learned to love and respect animals and to treat everybody as I would like them to treat me. 

So though I grew up surrounded by racism, including racism within my own family, I was perhaps fortunate that I did not buy into it as deeply as I could have because the foundation stone of accepting stereotyping was missing from my emotional makeup.  I countered every given with “how do you know that?”  I demanded proof.  Basically, I was a pain in the ass.  Which is not to say that I did not develop my own prejudices – but I like to think that I at least give everybody a chance to prove their worth before I decide that I am better than they are.  Though it might even turn out that they are more intelligent, or more caring, or more cultured, or more educated than I am, neither of us will be better than the other simply because of our race.

If it is one thing that I have learned about racism, it is that it is insidious.  It hides in laws and facts that nobody challenges. It creeps.  It slithers and slides and envelopes the atmosphere like a fog.  You don’t notice it, even though it is all around you.  And then when you finally notice it, you begin to see it in places where it does not really exist. 

When I was a child, our next door neighbours were a Dougla family.  Their three girls ranged in hue from the first daughter who brown-skinned, to the middle one who was most aptly called Darkie, to the youngest who was better known as “Reds”.  One day, the family was thrown into turmoil when the eldest girl brought home her first boyfriend because it was found that he was “too dark”. Apparently if the couple were to wed and have children, the offspring would not improve the ‘quality’ of the family. Nobody noticed that they were rejecting a young man with the same skin colour as their second daughter.  As it turned out, they did get married and had three boys, all of whom were lighter-skinned than their mother.  The family’s prejudice was groundless.

An elderly woman I worked with once told me about her grandmother, who would not allow anybody to enter her house with their shoes on.  This was in an effort to keep the floors clean.  Or to be more accurate it was in an effort to keep the floor clean of what she termed “Coolie spit”.  She did not want anybody tracking saliva from the mouths of the surrounding Plantation Indians onto her floors.  When I heard this story, I was aghast.  At least I was, until I visited India and realized that mostly everyone does indeed spit continually on the streets, so it is quite likely that the indentured labourers had brought this habit with them to the West Indies.  Although it would seem that my friend’s grandmother was a racist – her prejudice was based in the fact that it was highly probable that people's shoes would have spit on their soles. And the spit would have come from Indians (or Coolies, as they were called).

An important component of stereotyping, is misinformation. There are so many misconceptions and myths surrounding dogs, especially Pit Bulls, that listing them would take reams of paper. These misconceptions are fatal for dogs because they are what humans have used to create their stereotypes and resulting racist attitudes towards dogs.  For instance, dogs bite with no warning.  Wrong.  Dogs always give warning – sometimes several warnings.  It is just that humans have never taken the time to listen to dogs.  For centuries we have been so busy making dogs into our own version of what a dog should be, and training them to do what we want them to do, that nobody has stopped to ask what the dog is trying to tell us.  You may ask, “You really expect everybody to learn to speak dog?” In a word, yes.  At least make an effort.  If you were living cheek to jowl for centuries with any other species that spoke a different language, you would by now at least know a few words – and they won’t all be commands from you to that person. You'd make damn sure to learn what the person said when he reached his tolerance limit with you and was about to slap you upside the head.

Just the other day in the vet’s office, a very nice woman who said that she owned two Pit Bulls sagely informed everybody in the waiting room that people were afraid of Pit Bulls because once their jaws locked onto somebody, you could not prise them open.  This is such an urban legend!  No basis in fact whatsoever, but it is repeated like the holy grail of Pit Bull characteristics.  Nobody questions it, especially if the person repeating the “fact” has even the most tenuous connection to a Pit Bull.  It always surprises me how many dog experts exist around us - and how many of us believe every word they say just because they tell us they know what they are talking about. 

If necessary, I can lie.  But I don’t quite see the point of putting myself to all the trouble of lying for no good reason.  I have a family member who lies just because he can.  How do I know he is lying?  His lips are moving.  I have met other people like that, and always with surprise because I never expect somebody to lie to me for no good reason.   During the attempted coup d’etat in 1990, a man looked me straight in the eye and told me he had just come (to Diego Martin) from Port of Spain where he had seen with his own two eyes the bombing and total demolition of TTT House on Maraval Road.  That building is still standing to this day, 21 years later.  I have read of people swearing that they saw a Pit Bull attacking a person, when it later turned out to be a dog that looked absolutely nothing like a Pit Bull.  I don’t know if their assumption that only Pit Bulls attack humans made them see a Pit Bull, or whether they knew that if they identified the attacking dog as a Pit Bull it would create a better story.  But the fact is that stereotypes can start as a lie.

It seems that an inordinate number of dogs were bred to guard or be companions to Royalty.  In fact, almost everyone I have ever met with a purebred dog talks about the dog’s ancestral links of some kind to long-ago royalty. Take the Shar Pei for instance.  This is a dog from China whose job as a defender of the farmer’s crops from wild hogs was made redundant by industrialization.  Out of work, he then became known as a good fighting dog.  Because of this, in some areas, he is treated with the same prejudice as the Pit Bull.  But I am yet to speak with a Shar Pei owner who did not inform me that this breed was created specifically to guard Chinese royalty.  Likewise, albeit in a reverse kind of way, with the Pit Bull.  Recently, a radio announcer said that the Pit Bull was not a real dog – it had been genetically engineered.  You have to admit that term has a certain science fiction glamour about it – a kind of Mutant X dog.  Well, the truth is that all dogs in the world have had their original wolf genes interfered with by humans – the gene that made this wolf big was mated to the gene that made that wolf big to create the Mastiff; and the gene that made that wolf fast was mated to the gene that made the other wolf fast to create the Greyhound.  So what?  Does "genetic engineering " mean Pit Bulls should be ‘de-caninized’ like how the African slaves were de-humanized?

I hear people saying that they don’t like Rottweilers (too unpredictable), or PomPeks (too snappy), or Pit Bulls (too vicious), and I have a problem.  Rottweilers can be snappy and Pom Peks can be vicious and Pit Bulls can be unpredictable too – they are dogs, not predictably packaged Pringles.  People buy dogs and either do not teach them how to behave, or use such harsh methods that the dogs become emotionally damaged, and then they are amazed at the resulting undesirable behaviours.  They say, “See what I told you?  Those dogs are vicious!”  It is like ill treating a slave until he runs away and then saying, “See what I told you?  These people always try to run away!”

Now they are instituting laws that are targeting specific dogs.  They are called Breed Specific Laws (BSLs).  If laws that targeted specific human races were instituted, the world would rise up in protest.  But using the same methodology of racism, they do it to dogs.  All dogs can bite and all human can abuse; all dogs are capable of killing – a small dog can kill a baby or a child, a larger dog can kill a human or other dog – and all humans are capable of killing everything in sight.  Humans kill more humans in one day than dogs do in one year.  But all humans are given the benefit of the doubt until proven guilty, and even if they might have committed murder, in some cases they never have to pay with their own lives. Dogs are never given a trial, but are killed instantly, no questions asked, sometimes just for seeming to show aggression.  The other day, in the USA, police shot an elderly, chained Golden Retriever for growling at them when they came into its owner's yard.

But this brings us to the point of whether the same rules that we apply to ourselves should be applied to animals.  I have made this point before, and I will make it again.  You are either just or you are not just.  You are either humane or you are not humane.  You can not decide who you want to be humane to and still consider yourself a humane person.  You can not decide to show justice to only one type of person and expect to be considered a just person.  Compassion, concern, care – they all have more in common that just the same first letter.  They are attributes of a civilized person (strangely, also starting with the letter “C”).  I think it is a good thing to strive to be civilized, don’t you?

Mercy, Mercy, Mercy

Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got.

Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot.

Wouldn't you like to get away?

Sometimes you want to go

Where everybody knows your name,

And they're always glad you came.

You wanna be where you can see,

Our troubles are all the same

You wanna be where everybody knows your name.

“Cheers” Theme Song

Sometimes I wish I could live in a place containing only people who think like I do, especially about the things that I hold important.  ‘People who try to kind’ would be number one on that list.  I am not asking for much, because I know that there are not many people in this world who are as weird as I am, so we would only need a very small area. 

Yes, I know that diversity brings interest to your life and stretches and expands your horizons.  But most of the diversity I meet on a daily basis just makes me sad.  I am tired of rubbing shoulders with people who are unkind – to children, to older people, to poorer people, to people with handicaps, and most especially to animals.  I don’t want to be with them.  As the Desiderata says, they are injurious to my spirit.  They fill the air I breathe with toxicity. I just want to be with people who reflect who I am.  People who I don’t have to explain myself to, to justify my thoughts to, to argue with or force myself to ignore. I want a meeting of minds.  I want to be around soul mates.

Imagine somebody cheerfully announcing that he killed two puppies from his female’s litter because they did not meet the breed’s standard.  Not because they had an incurable disease.  Not because they were so badly deformed that living would have been agony for them.  Simply because they were not perfect, according to what some book told him perfection should be.  He felt he was being heroic and self sacrificing in not selling or giving away those puppies because his ethical code would not allow him to risk these sub-perfect specimens reproducing with another owner. 

"Anyone who has accustomed himself to regard the life of any living creature as worthless is in danger of arriving also at the idea of worthless human lives."

- Albert Schweitzer, (Alsatian Theologian, Musician, and Medical Missionary)

How can I begin to express how deeply depressing I found this to be?  I wanted to scream at him “You’re not ethical, you’re maniacal!” but I knew that would end badly and nothing would change. I thought about calmly stating my dissent in a civilized and measured manner because I felt disgusted that my silence would seem to be condoning what he was doing. But ultimately I just wanted to slowly, carefully, back away from him, like you would back away from a cobra with venom dripping from his fangs. I felt sick.

“Dogs are not humans.  We are not obligated to treat them the same way we treat humans. In fact, it is bad if we do.”  Over and over again, I’ve heard so many variations of this theme that I’ve lost track.  No, dogs are not humans – but they are thinking, feeling beings with emotions that include trust, loyalty and unconditional forgiveness towards their human masters.  And I stress the word “masters” because it is the part of dog ownership that a lot of people like the best – to be in total control of something with a pumping heart, and millions of cells and nerves and chromosomes and synapses that we could never in a million years hope to recreate. We can’t make it, but we can destroy it – the power of destruction with impunity, with no repercussions, is in the hands of any idiot who can walk into the TTSPCA or visit a breeder and plunk down some money, or beg, borrow or steal a dog.

And I would argue that we do treat dogs the same way we treat humans.  Historically, mankind has raped, murdered, enslaved, tortured and oppressed his fellow humans, and still continues to do so. Hopefully putting aside the rape, we do the same to dogs. Many years ago I read a book called The Chrysalids by John Wyndham – I still have it, battered and falling apart.  It was about a world after the final holocaust, where because of the radiation from the nuclear warheads used in the war, the chances of breeding true to the standards (which its inhabitants found in a book called The Bible) were less than 50%.  Deviations to the breed standard were considered abominations and rooted out and destroyed – animals, crops and humans.  Fiction based in fact. People who would kill a child for having an extra thumb, as was done in the book, are based on the same people who would burn a young woman at the stake for having a mole under her arm, or put a dog in a bag and throw it in the sea to drown because it dug up a flower bed – or did not have a correctly curved tail.

As Shakespeare said, “the quality of mercy is not strained.”  Mercy is mercy is mercy.  You can’t say you are a merciful person, or a kind person, or a loving person and then decide who you are going to be merciful and kind and loving towards. You can’t filter your mercy. Hitler was kind to children and dogs – German children and German Sheppard Dogs.  Did that make him eligible for the Noble Peace Prize? 

There was a woman once who wrote a critically acclaimed book on dog training.  It was a masterpiece of prose and beautiful poetical allusions.  And it related how she dug holes, day after day, and filled them with water and held her dog’s head under the water, day after day, in punishment for the dog digging up her garden.  Did authoring a beautifully written book make her a merciful person? Because she was a well respected dog trainer, were her actions kind? No, on both counts. But thousands of people read what she had written and calmly accepted her cruelty to that dog - and even applied it to their own dogs.

When I first went to live in Canada, I never saw anybody living on the street. It would have caused an uproar if Torontonians discovered that people were eating out of their garbage cans.  I went back to visit years after returning to Trinidad and was shocked to see Yonge Street filled with homeless people.  And nobody saw them.  I still remember the first time I saw a woman driving a taxi in Trinidad – I was so surprised, (and delighted) that I couldn’t stop talking about it for hours afterwards.  Now, I don’t even notice the hundreds of female drivers we have on the roads. What has this got to do with cruelty?  I am making the point that if we are immersed in a certain way of doing things for long enough we don’t see what we are doing.  We can act cruelly without even thinking about it being cruel. We just accept it as the way things are and it becomes okay for things to be that way.  We stop questioning the status quo, especially if no one else around us is doing it.  We become cruel because we stop seeing. We stop seeing the dog.  We see only the breed.  The species.

Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man."

- Arthur Schopenhauer, (German Philosopher)

Yes, we are the masters.  But it is the dogs who are merciful and forgiving.  Perhaps, instead of humans training dogs, dogs should teach humans how to be humane.

C is for Confrontation

Today I took Rescue for a walk in the savannah.  This might appear to be a simple sentence, but it is loaded with nuance. I have never walked Rescue anywhere that somebody has not told me to (a) “hole dat dog hole dat dog”; (b) “he shud haf on a muzzle”; (c) “woman, you kyar hole dat dog, nuh”; or (d) “steups”.  Walking a pit bull in Trinidad is highly recommended as a sovereign remedy for low blood pressure.  I can only hope that Rescue has no idea the amount of negativity that is directed his way, because if looks could kill he would be lying senseless at my feet before we rounded the first bend by Queen's Royal College.

Today we actually managed to get as far as opposite to where Casuals Club used to be without attracting more than a few dozen glares.  Now, it must be clearly understood that we do not walk on the paved perimeter of the savannah.  I gave that up after the first two or three afternoons when I came to the conclusion that seeing almost everybody walking towards me scatter, scream, gasp and cuss was just not worth the while of using the concrete as an emory board for Rescue’s toe nails.  So we walk inside the savannah – far inside the savannah.  This means that if rain had fallen that day (as it did today), both Rescue and I return to the car with mud up to our ankles.  If anyone should ever have to know where every depression, hole, drain or marshy area in the savannah is to be found, then I am the person to ask.  I am also on intimate terms with the various packs of feral dogs who live in the savannah, and having to watch their misery also does nothing to lower my blood pressure or raise my depression.  But, as I said, we had reached the second stretch in our walk when our paths were crossed by two men, one considerably older than the other, who were toting a goal post.  We slowed down politely to let them pass, and the older one looked at Rescue, looked at me, and then said the inevitable “that dog should have on a muzzle.”

 
I did what I always do.  I ignored the fool and walked on.  But then something clicked in my brain and I thought, no.  No.  I am not going to take it this afternoon.  I am going to defend my dog.  So I made an abrupt turn around and with Rescue seemingly just as happy about the directional change of plan, started to walk rapidly after the two men.  I am not the type of person to gracefully walk rapidly, especially not over soggy, muddy ground.  Nevertheless, I slowly closed the distance between us and caught up to them.  If I am to be totally honest I suppose I have to admit that it also helped that they stopped, having reached their destination.  I have no idea why they could not play football nearer to the edge of the savannah, but at the time I felt it was all part and parcel of their inexplicable determination to irritate me.

“Excuse me, sir” (I am nothing if not polite) I called out to the elder gentleman who looked around enquiringly at me.

“Hi – I was wondering – when you passed me just now you said something about my dog needing a muzzle?  I was wondering, what made you say that?”

The man looked a little taken aback. “Well, he is a pit bull…..”

“Yes?” I said in what I hoped to be a neutrally encouraging voice that conveyed kindness but common sense, maturity but not abrasiveness, friendliness and stunning intelligence, all at the same time.  The poor man just looked harassed.

“Well, they have a reputation you know.  They have attacked people….  So I was just suggesting….”

“Sir, I think you would agree that in the United States of America there are many more dogs and people than in Trinidad, right?”  He nodded agreement.  “But in the United States of American more children are killed by their own parents than by all the breeds of dogs combined.  And I have never heard anybody suggest that parents should be muzzled!”

“That’s true, that’s true.  But you have to be careful..”

“Tell me something” I asked.  “Have you ever seen or heard about a dog attacking someone while on a leash?”  You could actually see the computer in his brain checking all of his back files.  After a little while he admitted that he had never heard of a bite, but he had seen dogs on leashes attacking people.

 "Attacking?” I asked disbelievingly.  “While on a leash that was held by its owner?”

 “Yes, I am telling you!  Lunging at people!  And the owners, like they want the dog to do it!  They find it’s a joke.” Oh Lord.  The infamous bad owners strike again.

“Lunging can mean anything.  Lunging is not attacking.  But what made you think I was an owner like that?  I really want to know because you are not the first person to tell me about muzzling my dog, and I want to know what it is about him or about me that makes people feel threatened.”

“No, no – I was really only joking, you know.  Ask this young man here – when we passed you I told him that the dog looked like he was well trained and if he wasn’t so well trained you could never hold him back if he decided to attack somebody.  He’s a real nice dog.  A real big dog – especially the head and mouth.  Real solid body. Plenty teeth, boy.” (Rescue had chosen just that moment to indicate his boredom with sitting in one place by yawning widely.)

Well.  Who could stay vexed at somebody who was clearly a discerning connoisseur of canine excellence?  After that the conversation quickly progressed to a catalogue of Rescue’s finer points,  the conditions under which I came to be owned by him, the near saint-like attributes of pit bulls in general, and all the difficulties we both have to overcome just to live a half-normal life.  At the end of it all we parted the best of good friends, with Rescue grinning companionably at both of them before trotting off with what he thought was a wave of his tail-stub, but was actually only a twitch.