GOOD DOG, LASSIE OLD BOY

Lurch is such a good dog.

We got him at the Roicy Duhon Animal Control facility in Lafayette, LA, on a trip to help with Katrina pet rescue. He was a shell-shocked puppy, so catatonic that my daughter named him Lurch.

Lurch is a nondescript black mix—possibly some lab in there. He looks about as no-breed as a dog can get. He's just a dog.

The name doesn’t fit him any more. My husband has suggested that we call him "Go Like The Wind" instead. My husband, who claims to not be able to remember most of our animals’ names, likes to come in from the deck and tell me that Go Like The Wind has gone over the fence again.

Lurch started climbing our four-foot chain-link fence at the age of four months. At almost a year old, he can now hop right over it, but he doesn’t go far. I keep an eye on him in the back yard so I can run to the front yard and retrieve him when he goes over. I try to put him out when the neighbors aren’t home, because sometimes he prefers to jump over the side fence into their yard, and that way they don’t know about the times he's in their yard licking their barbecue grill.

Anyway. The other day, I came home and noticed barking from the back yard. My husband—let's call him Fred, as in in Flintstone—was sitting out on the deck with his personal DVD player. He likes to sit out there and watch movies.

It took me about two seconds to realize that the dogs had found something unusual in the yard. They were standing around a certain spot, barking, and occasionally making startled little jumps backward—the way dogs act when they find a turtle, if they aren’t used to turtles. They stand and bark at it, and if it moves a bit, they jump. I suppose they would act that way about other animals too, but most animals move fast and aren’t going to hang around and get barked at.

Not wanting to deal with a possibly injured turtle, I stuck my head out the door and asked my husband to go see what the dogs had in the yard. He said, "Oh, they don’t have anything, they’re just barking. They’ve been barking for half an hour. I finally got them to quit running up here and barking."

Apparently Lurch, in particular, had been running to the deck, barking at my husband, and then running back out to the spot in the yard. For quite some time.

My husband, assuming Lurch was just a dumb barky dog, saw no need to investigate any of this further until I got home and told him to go out there and look. He found an injured, almost-dead squirrel lying the in the weeds that I euphemistically refer to as "ground cover." The dogs hadn’t injured the squirrel. It appeared to have an old injury that had become infected, according to my husband (I didn’t look). Possibly it finally got so weak that it fell out of the tree.

So, Lurch was doing the Lassie thing. You know, the "Timmy fell in the well" routine? Lurch would run up to the deck and bark at Fred—"Dad, Dad! There’s a critter in the yard, come and look! Hurry, Dad!" Fred would shoo Lurch away, and Lurch would run out to check on the squirrel again before starting all over. He’s a pretty good ol’ dog, if a person would just notice it.

For Mother’s Day, Fred got me a copy of a book called Cesar’s Way, by a dog trainer who came here from Mexico and has apparently become pretty famous as a TV dog trainer (I’d never heard of him). It’s an interesting book because his approach is so very different from other American dog trainers. For one thing, he believes that no one should own a dog unless they are willing to commit an hour and a half a day, minimum, to walking the dog, even if they have a fenced yard.

Cesar thinks that a lot of American dogs, although much cleaner and better maintained than Mexican dogs, have problems that you don’t see in Mexico; that Americans in general don’t understand what dogs are really like.

He gives Lassie as an example, saying that many Americans believe that dogs can understand and communicate much more than they actually can. I see his point, but some dogs DO do the "Timmy fell down the well" routine. If they come and bark at us, they aren’t suggesting a complicated scheme involving getting a rope from the old barn and tying it to the well supports. Nothing like that. They’re just letting us know that something weird is going on.

We used to have goats. We had one sad incident where a baby goat drowned in a stock tank. We were gone at the time, and when we got home, all the other goats ran over to the fence, baa-ing, and then ran over to the stock tank, and then back to the fence again.

They knew something was wrong and they knew we were the ones who took care of stuff like that. You get hungry, you baa at the people, they produce food. Your baby goat drowns in the stock tank, you baa at the people, they do something about it.

Well, we couldn’t, in that case. But if goats can do the Lassie thing, surely dogs can. When was the last time someone trained a goat to hand signals and took it out hunting? Dogs have been bred for a long time to interact with people.

It’s a God thing, really. To a normal, healthy dog, people are gods. Dying squirrel in the yard—"Hey, you up there on the deck, something’s wrong here! Come on, I know you can do anything. You could do something about this if you wanted to, right?"

People do the same thing. Sick great-aunt: "Hey, you up there! Something’s wrong here. Come on, I know you can do anything. You could do something about this if you wanted to, right?"

Anyway, Lurch is a pretty good old dog, for having a lousy start in life and very little special attention since then—no puppy socialization classes, no obedience classes, no much of anything. I just haven’t had the time or money.

Unfortunately, it just goes to show how many perfectly sound animals are being put to sleep in shelters for no reason other than lack of homes. Lurch has never shown any aggression toward another dog, a cat, or a person. And apparently not squirrels, either.