I finished reading Merle’s Door last night; I cried like a baby through the last forty pages.

At this point, since bringing Hooper home, I have read about a dozen or more books about dogs: dog training, dog breeds, dog behavior, dog health care, dogs; the last category includes your typical dog memoir or reflection on living pets, and so far Ted Kerasote’s book totally nails it. Granted, Merle is a fantastic dog, living in fantastic conditions, but the story is still a real rags to riches story, rife with dog care and training tips—and, what I feel is one of the most important skills required of any dog owner, observational tips.

Ethologists will piss all over this book as a 400-page homage to anthropomorphism. And while I admit there is a lot of the author inserting plain-english words into his dog’s inner monologue, we all do that. Every dog owner out there knows they’re guilty of making up Fido’s inner thoughts while out for a play session in the dog park, and you know it.

So, getting past that, you have a wonderful story of a man who takes in a stray dog and together they teach EACH OTHER many important lessons of life. These are lessons I’m learning now, taught by Hooper, and having read “Merle’s Door” are lessons I’m absorbing and cherishing much more deeply, knowing Merle’s—and all dogs’—ultimate fate. And I guess that’s lesson number one that dogs teach us, is that life’s too short to sweat the small stuff.

I loved this book.

Brenda, Hooper & I all piled into the car today for a drive to Denver, to attend a birthday party for some friends of ours. Partners Greg & Ted share birthdays a day apart. Greg aged a year today, and Ted did the same yesterday. And so a joint birthday picnic/barbecue in the park near the Denver Zoo was in order, with dogs.

Greg & Ted have a pair of winning canines; Guinness the Pug, and Lucy the Mutt (I used to threaten to kidnap Lucy and take her home with us from their parties ever since we moved to Boulder; she is adorable and built just like Hooper). Many of their other friends have dogs as well, and so dogs were invited to the birthday soirée.

And so it was that we loaded a backpack with Nalgenes of water and a Tupperware container to act as a bowl, poop bags, dog treats and a couple of tennis balls, and rolled out towards Denver. We also had a secret weapon. We brought the basketball.

You see, Hooper is quite the ‘baller. He has an uncanny ability to dribble a ball around a field using his muzzle and his front paws, and this is a skill that he demonstrated the very first time I produced a bright yellow utility ball on one of our walks back in November of 2007. Hooper took to that ball like Pele, coaxing it around the field under the moonlight for over an hour, managing to steer the ball back to my feet every once in a while so I could try to kick the ball past him (which rarely happened). But suddenly, a pop and a hiss was heard, and the fun ended.

A regulation basketball is 30 inches in circumference, and comprised of a tough leather cover that can resist a dog’s attempts to bite through it, and we have one of these objects. And today, we felt that if Hooper was to be allowed to roam free on the grass of the Denver Zoo Park—with heavily trafficked roads bordering us—we wanted a reliable distraction to keep him close, hence the basketball.

When we arrived, we rolled the ball out onto the grass and Hooper immediately began working the field with the ball. People immediately inquired about how we “taught” him to do this. Shrugged shoulders and allusions to that cold November night followed. Hooper spent the next several hours rolling that basketball around, beckoning me and anyone else who was interested to kick the ball around, and to engage him in some goalie practice.

Brenda had mentioned to me that a couple of the small children present at the party were terrified of dogs, and that we needed to make sure Hooper steered clear of them, and I was paying strict attention to his movements around the guests. But at one point, a couple of kids showed up with Hooper’s basketball, and they were fighting amongst themselves over who should be the one who kicks the ball toward Hooper. I watched with great interest and joy, as Hooper adapted to the kids’ erratic movements and gestures.

This one kid was literally pushing his friend out of the way, directing the action. He was moving the ball around and gleefully watching Hooper’s attentiveness and reactions to his direction. I had a great time watching Hooper play with the kids, but when I heard on the ride home that the one kid was one of those “afraid of dogs” kids, I just beamed.

Hooper is turning into quite a gentleman, and an ambassador. A saint.

One year ago today, Brenda & I brought Hooper home from the Boulder Humane Society. What a year it’s been.

Freshly grieving over the loss of our cat Emma, we both fell in love with this little, black Labradorish-looking puppy, and brought him home with us. He was afraid of his own shadow, afraid to get into the car, hopping on all the furniture. A couple days later, he (we) learned his first command, “sit”. I went on a streak of dog book purchasing, which continues to this day. We purchased dog toys and treats like they were crack, and the high of watching our dog take to these things with varying degrees of interest was equally addictive. We discovered the baseball fields behind our house serve as an excellent local gathering place for the neighborhood dogs and their owners; we’ve made new friends, as has Hooper. I’ve learned to bake, to bake dog treats. I have considered becoming a veterinarian. I read about dogs all the time. I think about Hooper whenever we are apart. I bring him to work with me. I started a Facebook group so fellow Boulder dog lovers could share hike ideas and dog treat recipes. We’ve had Hooper’s DNA tested so we could know exactly what he was made up of—not that it mattered, but we were curious. I’d say Hooper has had quite an effect on my life.

This past weekend, Brenda & I celebrated our eighteen year anniversary as a couple, and we brought Hooper with us. He’s an inseparable member of our family, our pack.

I can’t imagine life without a dog now. He’s my buddy. I had some dogs as a kid, but they were always transients, except, unfortunately, for the stupid, barky, nippy, West Highland White Terrier that I hated (hated!) when I was little. I always wanted a big black dog that would fetch and roll over and be goofy, and now, at forty, I finally have one, and some mornings, when Hooper is running around with his tongue hanging out, a tennis ball jauntily carried in the side of his mouth, I feel like I’m ten years old again.

Hooper has a ways to go. He pulls on his lead, he still jumps up on people, he barks when he shouldn’t. But that’s just standards. That’s me being picky. Really, he’s just perfect, and I’m looking forward to many more years of friendship with this strange little creature who seems to trust me, to like me, to love me. When you have a bond like this with no words, just actions, it’s hard to, well, put into words. I’m just happy, and I think Hooper is too.

So, now we know.

Through the wonders of science and marketing, I was recently able to get the final word on Hooper’s genetic makeup. Two weeks ago, I had to take Hooper to the vet for his rabies and distemper shots, and I seized the opportunity to have them also draw blood for the Wisdom Panel DNA test. This test, a fairly new offering in the veterinary community, can identify the genetic markers of 134 AKC-recognized dog breeds from a blood sample. The price has dropped somewhat, to a still-expensive $120, but I thought it would be fun to know exactly what’s goin’ on there in Hooper’s genetic makeup. So I said what the hell.

The test consists of drawing blood from the dog in question, and sending it off to the Wisdom Panel People for analysis. They are supposed to send you a full report in the mail, but so far that has not arrived. The veterinarian did get the results however, and they called us on Friday and left a voice mail message with the results. I waited for Brenda to get home from work before playing the second half of the message, so we could find out together. As we played the message, Hooper sat beside us, head tilted to the side, as we strained to listen to the message on the speakerphone; he could sense this news was important.

And so, according to the DNA analysis, Hooper is a slightly tainted Labrador Retriever. It’s no shock to anyone who has seen him that he’s a dog built on a Lab foundation, but just what the heck are the rest of the bits, this is what I paid my $120 to find out. The Humane Society we adopted him from guessed Border Collie, which I could believe from his smaller size, fringier tail and intense herding instinct. But it turns out, there’s no Border Collie in there. Close, though…

Hooper Primo Avery Guglielmetti-King is a Labrador Retriever, with traces of Airedale Terrier, Bearded Collie, and—get this: Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

So, yeah. Now we know.

The results spawned another round of dog breed research on my part, since all three of these trace breeds are breeds I hadn’t previously had an interest in. The Bearded Collie, it turns out, is the progenitor of the Border Collie we thought Hooper was partly comprised of. So, that sorta makes sense. It’s another herding breed, like the Border Collie, which helps explain Hooper’s endless reserve of energy:

Bearded Collies are a very high energy breed, originally bred to work in the Scottish Highlands herding sheep. Beardies also excel at dog agility trials. They also prefer to be kept indoors with their families.

The Airedale Terrier threw me for a loop, as I have not really seen terrier-ish traits in Hoop (except maybe for his propensity for annoying bark fests). But the Airedale Terrier, as more of a working dog than a squirrel chaser as most terriers are, does make sense when you look at Hooper’s behavior and interests:

The Airedale can be used as a working dog and also as a hunter. Airedales exhibit some herding characteristics as well, and have a propensity to chase animals. They have no problem working with cattle and livestock.

…explains Hooper’s insistence on chasing Ellie all over the house…

The Airedale is also a stoic, able to withstand pain and injury, the Airedale’s hurts and illnesses often go unnoticed until they become severe and require veterinary attention.

…explains the negligible reaction when I cut Hooper’s nail to the quick and he bled all over the living room without so much as a yelp or a whimper…

The breed has also been called the Waterside Terrier, because it was bred originally to hunt otters in and around the valleys of the River Aire from whence it gets its name.

…explains his love for the water as much as his Lab foundation does.

Now, the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel. Shit. A fucking toy breed, god dammit. At least, that was my first reaction. But the smaller size of that breed explains Hooper’s topping out at 50lbs for a MostlyLab, instead of the more usual 85lbs for a purebred Lab. After some research, some other aspects of his personality can be traced back to this breed:

The breed is highly affectionate… Most dogs of the breed are playful, extremely patient and eager to please. A well-socialized Cavalier will not be shy about socializing with much larger dogs. (However, on occasion, this tendency can be dangerous, as many cavaliers will presume all other dogs to be equally friendly, and may attempt to greet and play with aggressive dogs.)

As I usually reply to strangers I encounter on the paths when they ask “Is your dog friendly?”, “to a fault.”. Unfortunately, Cavalier King Charles Spaniels also suffer from a long list of serious genetic defects (Royal Family, are you paying attention?), so we’ll just have to hope that the traces Hooper got are just the good traces.

So it does seem that I can find personality and behavior markers in Hooper that match up quite well with the genetic markers they found in his blood. Was it worth it? I guess so. I do find the whole thing fascinating; ever since bringing Hooper home I have read quite a lot on dogs, dog breeds and canine natural history/evolution. So this was a fun little lab(oratory) experiment for me. Really, anything that gives one an insight into the history of their stray dog is worth a lot, if you ask me. I mean, how does a dog composed of a breed from Newfoundland and bits of three other breeds all from the United Kingdom end up on the street in Vernal, Utah?

When Hooper leaps into the water at the East Boulder Dog Park, and swims out to the ball like a nuclear submarine at full power, this genetic exercise helps refine the scene that I’m watching. But at the same time, none of it matters. Hooper is Hooper. He loves me, he loves the water, he loves to eat, play, and sleep. He’s a dog, a great dog, and that’s really all that matters.

This shit makes me crazy. The local paper ran an article today about the booming pet care business, especially in dog-crazy Boulder. Here in Boulder, there is a “law” that encourages Boulder pet owners to refer to themselves as their pet’s “guardians”, not “owners”. You know how I feel about this one; I have a receipt. But it gives you an idea of the mentality Boulder residents have towards their pets, and in general I think it’s great. Here, our dogs are our kids. They hike (off-leash) with us, they frolic in the many dog parks, they are welcome in many businesses, not just the multitude of pet stores and pet bakeries (yes, pet bakeries), and they are everywhere. In an attempt to appear balanced, the author obtained some dissenting views, views on people who pour themselves into the care of their animals; views I have had to put up with from many co-workers over the years and even my own family members. The one they chose to print was a doozy:

“They either need to have children or get the Internet.”

This scholar was quoted while standing in the most overpriced petstore in Boulder with her Australian Shepherd at her side. I feel sorry for that Aussie. She has a dog, but clearly it’s “just a dog”. No massage, no cancer therapy, no quality dog food for this guy, oh no; it’s just a dog.

Where do we begin? First off, we can’t all have kids (you stupid bitch). Some of us don’t want to have kids (you myopic wench). And besides, the internet is a global computer network infrastructure that is owned by no one and utilized by many. You don’t “get” the internet, just like Al Gore didn’t “invent” it. And if you equate the responsibility of raising kids with a monthly cable internet subscription plan, I feel sorry for your kids as well as your Aussie (you sick cunt).

Emma, our dear departed cat and companion of 16 years, was my child and I loved her. When she died I struggled with my feelings of loss and attachment and was alternately devastated and frustrated—by my immense sorrow on the one hand, and the I-should-just-get-over-it-already-vibe I felt from some of my child rearing friends and family members.

Some people just don’t get it. As I type this, Hooper lies at my feet looking content and I get a warm feeling knowing that Brenda & I are responsible for this. A domestic dog living in a city is as dependent on us as any child. They can’t talk, they live much shorter lives, they have no opposable thumbs and they eat cat poo, but does that mean they don’t deserve to have someone take care of them and raise them? They didn’t ask to be born on the street, and they certainly seem to enjoy the spoils of good dog ownership: Hooper has a comfy bed and eats like a king, a diet of raw food and grain-free dry food that is supplemented with fish oil and other supplements. He is engaged in learning new “tricks” and goes to the park every single day. Is this indulgent? I don’t think so; he is canis familiaris, not canis lupus. He is descended from the wolf, but he is something else, an evolved species that owes its existence to the fact that it figured out 15,000 years ago that maybe these humans could work together with them to make a greater existence for us both, and we have. And now that we are all in a better situation than our ancestors of 15,000 years past (hey, we even have Internet!), are we supposed to simply treat these animals like some barely-alive, barely-feeling entity? What the hell is the point in that? Look, if you want to have kids, great. But bear in mind that you are engaging in the least sustainable practice possible in the world today, and an overwhelming number of you are doing a shitty job of raising your progeny, to boot. So get the fuck over yourselves. Your kids consume more than any dog, and most of them are rude, snotty and grow up with an overwhelming sense of entitlement. How does that validate what you do? I’ll tell you: it doesn’t.

So let me and my people raise our dogs and cats, naming them and petting them and feeding them and massaging them and playing with them and training them and loving them, worrying about them, caring about them, putting up with them when they are being assholes and just connecting with them. You do what you feel you need to do, I won’t implore you to get an internet of your own, but if your kid comes up to me and tries to talk to me in a restaurant while you bury your head in a burger, I’m telling it it’s an asshole, and I don’t care how young it is, capiche?

And this leads me to my latest announcement: I’m thinking about my third of fourth career change (depending on how you quantify a career): I have been thinking of becoming a veterinarian for a little while now (fleeting thoughts go back decades, but serious thought has occupied the last months or so), and I’m really starting to look into it. It’s past the “idea stage” of many of my hare-brained schemes and more into the active planning stage. More on this later.

Hooper is a licker.

In recent days, the temperatures have soared to the point where I wore shorts to work today. Never mind that it is supposed to snow here tomorrow, in April you take advantage of the warm sunny days. So I wore shorts today, and that means Hooper was licking my legs (and up my shorts) whenever I was in the vicinity. With our dear friends Dierdre and Evan coming this weekend with their three kids in tow, I started thinking it might might be a good time to teach Hooper that the vigorous licking, while appreciated, is not always appropriate.

And so we have embarked on our latest “trick”, the training of “stop licking”. Brenda & I decided it would be cool to teach Hooper some Italian while we were at it, so we selected the term “basta” as the “leave me alone” term, which is Italian for “enough”. He’s getting it.

How cool is it to have a bilingual Lab?

This is cool. What we got here is the last remnants of the 8” of snow that dumped on Boulder yesterday. The Colorado sun came out in force today, melting most of the white stuff; the final traces are hanging tough here in the shadow cast by the ballfield fence, all nice and neat in a line, while Hooper and Lulu watch in despair as Jeannie and the other woman walk away with their dogs Joplin and Kyla:

Just goes to show you what a little shading can do in terms of reducing the amount of direct beam solar radiation that affects a given area.

P.S.
The bits of snow missing in the foreground were eaten by Hooper. No shading device could have prevented that.

Sitting here reading Bark Magazine (which I realize outs me as an insane dog lover more than any of my previous admissions), I came across a quote:

“A mutt is a dog. He is the stuff of dogginess, a creature allied to species, not breed, and untrammeled by human hand or preference. A mutt knows that you have chosen him for himself, and not because he is of the type you set out to get.”

Well put. Yesterday, Brenda & I (and Hooper) watched the Eukanuba dog show and couldn’t help but feel a bit of a slight, knowing that as great a dog as Hooper is, we could never show him in such an event because he’s not a purebred. But I would argue that while there is almost certainly a breed for every purpose, thousands of years of evolution led to a single mating of what is most likely a Border Collie and a Black Labrador Retriever and produced a perfect specimen for Brenda & I.

Hooper is almost exactly fifty pounds, the weight limit our condo association has arbitrarily imposed on dogs in the complex; his coat is low maintenance; he is friendly, almost to a fault; he is handsome; he loves to go hiking; he loves fetch; he loves soccer; he loves learning new tricks; he is smart, and yet he is also stupid, at all the right times.

The AKC doesn’t recognize Hooper because we can’t show papers that trace his lineage along some lines of doggie purity, but I would argue that Hooper represents something even greater. Hooper is our dog. He was sitting there in the kennel, the day I picked up Emma’s ashes, and he held the promise of being everything I ever wanted in a dog, complete with all the high expectations and idealization that comes with twenty plus years of longing for the chance to raise a puppy.

And when Hooper trots up to me in the ballfield, looking into my eyes with a ball in his mouth, timing his drop and velocity such that the ball rolls right to my feet stopping an inch from my toes, and he looks to me to make that blessed ball fly through the air once again, I know, I know, that this animal is the perfect amalgam of DNA; the end result of thousands of years of evolution, strict breeding, and errant screws in untold alleys that led to this precise genetic glop that is Hooper. He is perfect. The AKC says otherwise, but they are wrong.

I encourage you to read the full article that the above quote came from; it’s very entertaining, especially if you love dogs and hate purebreed dogma.

Today is Hooper’s birthday, making Hooper one year old! In truth, we brought him home at six months of age, and he was picked up as a stray in Utah sometime before that, so unfortunately we really don’t know the exact circumstances or conditions of his conception, birth and early development. The vet guessed he was six months old, based on his teeth, when we took him in or his first checkup in early August. So we counted back from there and picked Groundhog Day as his “birthday”. In truth we’ll never know, and we don’t care. Just as we’ll never really know his genetic makeup. He’s Hooper the Dog, he’s ours, he’s one today, and we love him. So we took him out for a hike.

Up past Jamestown there’s a trail that meanders through the tall trees and it seemed as good as any for a winter hike. Hooper seems to love the hiking, the snow, the altitude, the adventure, as much as all of us. Once out of the car, he starts whimpering if we don’t get on with the business of plodding through the snow in a timely fashion. He’s generally uninterested in drinking water because that would involve stopping. Instead, he snags chunks of snow and ice on the fly, and keeps on marching.

Today’s hike led to a vague trail hidden by snow, and Brenda eventually became more interested in scaling a boulder for the view at the top than continuing to the summit. Hooper & I ventured onward, but he kept looking back at Brenda and I lost all sight of anything recognizable as a trail, so we headed back to join her. We snapped a few pics, headed back to town and picked up new treats and toys for the birthday boy. He’s cached out on his bed now, amidst the debris of yet another destroyed stuffed toy. Life is good.

Hooper is a soccer wunderkind. Like all of his other traits/habits/skills, we discovered this over time.

It started with a yellow “utility ball” we found in the snow in November, a forgotten castaway from an Aurora 7 Elementary School recess. Upon discovering the lost ball languishing on top of the fresh snow at the schoolyard after one of the first snowfalls of the season here in Boulder, I kicked it toward the ballfield and Hooper immediately recognized the potential. We ran toward the ballfield gate, kicking the ball along, and once we got inside, a game of keep-away/get-the-ball-past-the-dog ensued, for far longer than it should have.

Since that time, a number of balls (soccer balls, utility balls, baseballs… balls!) have turned up in the ballfields where we take our dogs—in various states of disrepair and deflation—and recently a particular soccer ball has become the apple in Hooper’s eye.

I left work early today to make a doctor’s appointment, so Hooper & I ended up at the ballfield earlier than usual. With no other dog action going on, we resorted to a good old fashioned game of one-on-one fetch. But returning from the second throw of the day, Hooper discovered a pathetic, half-deflated, chewed-up soccer ball to his left and dropped the baseball he was bringing back to me and darted off towards the soccer ball. He jumped on it, bit it, and bounced back a foot or so and nosed at the ball, then looked at me, tail wagging.

Game on.

Soccer with Hooper is simple; make the ball go. But there are evolutionary, hard-wired layers to the game that I find interesting. Hooper’s Border Collie DNA makes this a game of Get in Front of the Ball, Herd the Ball, more than anything else. All it takes to put Hooper in motion is to simply put your body between ball and dog; he circles around and positions himself in front of the ball and you with precision. You can keep moving around the ball and he will follow suit, making sure that ball has no “out”.

The main game is to put the ball in motion though, and this clearly makes Hooper’s day. cutting left and right, Hooper eyes the ball, my feet, my hips and my eyes, as if the end result of my getting past him with the ball decides the World Cup Championship Match. And so I oblige, until I am out of breath. We cut left and right, kick-dribbling and running, Hooper’s tongue hanging out, his big brown eyes tracking my every move. The best part is when we get a certain momentum going in one direction and I open up enough distance between ourselves that I can give the ball a good whack, sending the ball arcing just over Hooper’s head in a dead run; Hooper springs up into the air, all four paws off the ground, and he throws a single snap of the teeth towards the ball, missing, and then scampers off to tackle the errant ball. He pounces, shakes it a few times like it owes him money, drops it, backs up a few steps, and looks at me and wags his tail. How does one resist this plea?

We played this game for a full hour in the ballpark tonight, with no other dogs joining us. I even gave up early and sat on the dugout bench, holding the leash. Hooper came up to me and dropped the ball at my feet, which I rewarded with another ten minutes of World Cup Doggie Soccer. Afterward, we walked home and I made him another batch of homemade dog treats; I think I love this animal.