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Few animal stories fit between adoration, contempt

Denise Flaim | Animal House

April 3, 2008

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My inbox is stuffed with animal-related news stories from around the world, urgent "permission to cross-post granted" diatribes, action alerts about legislation from Los Angeles to Laos.

Their sheer volume aside, what fascinates me about these missives chronicling our animals and how we relate to them is that they fall into two categories, with very little middle ground.

On the one hand, there are countless stories that anthropomorphize our animals to such an extent that they make Wilbur and Mr. Ed look like perfect strangers.

Last week, for example, a 1 1/2 -year-old black-and-white Chihuahua named Conan was photographed "praying" alongside priest Joei Yoshikuni in a Zen Buddhist temple in southern Japan. Conan sits on his hind legs and puts his paws together, something Yoshikuni says the pooch learned by imitation.

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Tourists have now congregated, and Yoshikuni has embarked on teaching the little Chi to mediate - or at the very least, sit still. "It's not like we can make him cross his legs," he told The Associated Press.

This idea of dogs as little people in fur suits has just as much traction on this side of the world. The ne plus ultra had to be the late Leona Helmsley's $12 million bequest to her Maltese, the aptly named Trouble, who had a penchant for chomping housekeepers.

Conversely, there are the stories that are troubling for their utter lack of appreciation for animals as sentient beings.

Left Coasters are in an uproar over a San Francisco Art Institute Exhibition by Paris-based Adel Abdessemed entitled "Don't Trust Me," which includes videos of a pig, goat, doe, ox, horse and sheep being bludgeoned to death with a sledgehammer. The San Francisco SPCA condemned the exhibit, noting that "there is no artistic merit in cruelty to, and suffering of, living creatures."

Starting with Michael Vick, if I had a dime for every animal torture or abuse story that crossed my electronic threshold, I could keep my pack of four dogs in rawhides for a year.

Is there no in between? Is it possible to love and respect animals without according them human status? Is there a staging post somewhere between adoration and contempt? If so, it is becoming increasingly hard to find.

I think this dichotomy explains a lot about pop-culture phenomenon Cesar Millan, who keeps a pack of dogs in a grittily industrial L.A. neighborhood. The star of the National Geographic Channel's "Dog Whisperer" is an unlikely candidate for the nation's most influential dog trainer.

But he nonetheless is, and I think that's because - his sometimes too negative training techniques aside - he has successfully deconstructed our relationship with dogs.

In Millan's native rural Mexico, dogs and people exist in the kinds of arrangements that forged our interspecies bond. Tending and herding livestock, protecting homesteads, killing vermin - these are the traditional roles that canines took on in exchange for human-procured food and shelter.

Today, most of us don't subsist off the land; our connection to it has been broken, supplanted with wireless service and TiVo. Still, we struggle to draw animals into our lives and create meaning, however awkwardly. I think that was the motive of Joy Douglas, a hair-salon owner in Boulder, Colo., who got slapped with a $1,000 fine from the local humane society for dyeing her miniature poodle. Douglas says she used beet juice to turn Cici's coat pink as a statement of breast-cancer awareness.

Still-another e-mail arrived last week that told a story of this elusive middle ground, this time pertaining to feral cats, those hot potatoes of the rescue world. Most will never learn to accept human companionship, and so are unadoptable. A rescue group in Modesto, Calif., has found an innovative solution: Put them to work by placing them with ranchers who use them for gopher control. A win-win, except, of course, for the gophers.

So how can we move our relationships with our animals closer to center? By finding ways to reconnect them - and, by extension, ourselves - to the earth. For dogs, it's long hikes and swims, or sports that replicate their original purpose, like agility, or indulging their desire for human interaction with therapy-dog work. For cats, it's controlled access to the outdoors, such as screened enclosures. And for birds, it's providing ample opportunities for foraging and puzzle solving, skills that would be vital for their survival in the wild.

And you can accomplish all that with nary one beet.