In the dog-walking business, corners are places loaded with anticipation and dread. Daisy looks up to ask if we’re turning east up Clark Street, toward what I think of as Pizza Place for the food tossed in the gutters, while Pickering and Hermia look west, to Cranberry (i.e., Squirrel Street) and Hillside Park. The concrete building corners and iron fences are redolent with scents, making any corner an adventure in history, but they are also blind spots for who or what is coming our way. I often wish I had a periscope and rearview mirror when I’m out with more than one dog so I’d know if Bangor’s Akita enemy was about to intersect us or what the jingle – keys or tags – is that’s creeping up on us.

This is also the summer that my family has had to bow to the toll of old age. I missed more than three weeks of walks because I was in Arizona trying to help my blind father cope while my mother was in the hospital and nursing home. I learned a lot in those visits to the nursing home and one thing is how important it is to have earnestly living lives around people who are losing their bodies and their minds. Two dogs live there and while they aren’t therapy dogs – they aren’t there to offer succor – they make people’s days when they stop for a pat. One of them howls whenever a newcomer arrives, a warning to everyone that someone new is on the scene. When being with my mother became too painful, I sought out Cassie and Freckles, with whom I’d immediately taken steps to make friends. Cassie and I played I-dare-you and Freckles simply dropped to her back for a belly rub. Mother was enormously cheered by them but I’m not sure I could have been as cheering to my mother as I managed without the dogs to turn to.

I came back to Brooklyn in a state of exhaustion, grief, worry and confusion about my mother’s failing health and cognition and there came a moment when I broke down in ragged tears. Daisy sat down to watch and worry, but Pickering, my shaggy pony of an English Lab, climbed up next to me on his couch, stretched out and put his head in my lap.

Pick is always ready to be loved: he squirms for it, bouncing from one vantage contact to another in relentless pleasure. But whereas Daisy wants to know I’m OK so that she’s reassured that she’s OK.

On Thursday I turn another corner: Pickering is moving to Bronxville. He’s going to join a dog-hiking club and will be closer to his family’s farm so I know he’ll thrive. There are going to be some days to come, however, that not having him for five days a week will be an out-and-out loss. He’s the only dog I’m not scared of turning corners with and the best dog I know to have around when I’m taking my own 90-degree turn into a grim unknown

Bangor likes to remain in his spot at the head of the stairs. His eyes glow green as he stares at me with fake suspicion. I narrow my eyes and bore into him and then explode, “Bangor!” He flies down the stares at that and jumps up to gently bite my chin. I take his paws and, often as not, begin singing “Shall We Dance” as I waltz him around the foyer. He’s the only one of my dogs who loves to dance. When I bend over to put the prong collar on him, he weasels between my legs so I can scratch his butt, at which he begins to stamp is back paws. The better the butt rub, the harder her stamps.

I open Hermia’s door just enough to see one eye. Her tail begins thonking the wall at that and she rushes out of the apartment with a shoe or her human sister’s Elmo in her mouth. I reach down to rub her (she and Milly are silky as otters) and she starts turning tight circles, trying to get scratched everywhere at once. After a couple of turns, she heads toward the stairs, then stops, looks back and decides she wants more. We do this three or seven times before she runs down where she walks in circles near the door. I stalk her slowly down the staircase. We both halt. She drops into a play bow and gives one woof, at which I laugh and say, “I got your goat, Goat,” and her tails starts thonking the walls again.

Pickering is my all time favorite pick up because it’s all about getting as close to me as he can. I sit down on the couch and he burrows his head into my side while flipping over for a belly rub. We can do this for hours as he tries fruitlessly to find a way to become a part of me, with breaks to sit up and gaze at me with his Bette Davis eyes in disbelief that life could be so good as I rub his ears and he leans his big head on my hand.

Farmer was a solo dancer, his butt in syncopation with his head. I had to dance, too, doing the twist while shaking my hands in the air, chanting, “We’ll do the Farmer dance, let’s do the Farmer dance,” winding him up until his tail was a yellow blur of rhythm.

When I walk in after a long separation from Daisy, she turns into Alice Roosevelt, hopping on the couch and pawing the air until I sit down with her and say terrible things about what I had to endure while I was away. She hurls herself into my lap, twisting for a belly rub then jumping up to lick my face only to fall into belly rub position again. Soon she actually climbs into my lap and barks out why I should never leave her.

It would behermia-must-retrieve1 flattering except that she pretty much does this with every visitor or visit.

The last four weeks have been a nightmare health crisis for my mother who is 2,000 miles away. As I lay awake each night in Arizona, praying the Klonopin will knock me out before it’s time to get up again, I think of Milly racing up and down her steep stairs and of Pickering nesting between my ribs. I think about the long moment that Daisy will look at me before she takes it in that I’ve come back after a week and the moment she decides to become a turban. I keep playing over those greetings until sleep comes. That happiness is the love my mother, like most mothers everywhere, promised her babies would always be.

Here’s how I deal with Daisy, Pickering, Hermia: I take three or four balls, most of them the orange and blue Chuck-it balls that get a good bounce, and one squeaky ball for emergencies. Daisy is insane about fetch. Pickering learned the second half of fetch (bring the ball back) from Daisy, but would really rather get some rough play that turns into a game of catch-me. Hermia likes to trot or lie around clutching a ball in her mouth. She’s interested in chase and battle, but will carry the ball into the fray, somehow barking around it.

This is the basic canine personality template from which I work. There are, however, a number of kinks along the way.

Daisy is the loudest and safest dog in Hillside Park. The only thing she wants is to fetch her ball and occasionally collapse and monopolize a watering spot. It doesn’t matter which ball she gets on the first toss, but after that she is exquisitely sensitive about whether it’s hers or not. She will follow a dog that takes her ball, barking, but she will never fight for it or go in too close to grab it when the dog has dropped it. Daisy comes from solid hunting stock and I’m convinced that she is transported to a Montana watershed where she would never tear the duck by competing with another retriever. Interestingly, she will pee on her way out of the park but has never taken a dump in it. The dog run is her holy, ancient ground.

Hermia is a thief if she likes some other ball better and she’s incredibly stubborn. I have a 50/50 chance of getting a ball back from her. Squeaky ball usage #1.

daisy hermia If the owner says something like, “It’s your fault for bringing balls in the park.” I go after the ball myself, firmly but soothingly. Squeaky ball usage #3.

Recently, I had a situation I couldn’t read. An owner threw out a Wubba (a sort of octopus-shaped toy made from fire hose material) for his dog, who carried it around for a minute and then dropped it. Pickering eventually got around to finding the Wubba and another dog started tug-of-war over it. They had some fun and then Pickering went back to chewing sticks or chasing his ball, and the other dog chewed the Wubba pretty much to threads. On the way out of the park, the owner made a noise that might have been in my direction and might have been a reprimand, possibly about the Wubba.

I honest-to-St. Rocco don’t know what the owner (who I call “Mother Superior”) or my responsibilities in this scenario were. If my dog had ignored its Wubba, I’d have packed it up. If a dog took it, I’d either ask for help or, less preferably, get it back myself. Finally, Pickering lost interest in it and it was a dog unknown to me who killed it. Mother Superior did nothing about the Wubba until that noise seemed to drift across my radar as we climbed the hill to the gate.

I’ve had run-ins over toys before, when my dogs thieve or are thieved from, and I have plans of action. Mother S. seemed to have no such thing but I remain bothered by the feeling that I should replace the Wubba.

At which point, Pickering or some other dog will pick it up and the whole thing will start again.

“Would you please leash your dog?” the boy’s father asked. “This isn’t a dog run.”

“Actually, it is. From nine to nine, the Plaza is off-leash.”

“Where does it say that?” he snapped.

“Just read the signs,” I said as I scooped up the ball and threw it down our alley of trees.  I didn’t add, “…the same signs that prohibit bike-riding on the Astro Turf,” nor did I point out the dogs flittering around at the far end of the field or the sixteen of dogless places he could have taken his kids.  He stomped off and I was left with a slow burn of righteous indignation.

The primary definition of righteous, should you care to know, is ugly in its narrowness: “without sin or guilt”.  I had no right to my anger because I’m not without guilt in handling my dogs.

Word on the street is that someone’s looking for me.  One of the dogs I walk has taken an intense dislike to a woman’s indistinguishable shepherd mix. Recently, in fact, in the midst of untangling leashes, my dog saw it crossing the road and booked on over to taunt it in her usual fashion.  Without going into further details, I’ll leave it as an incident that was terrifying for both humans but blessedly brief. The owner and I crossed paths not long after and she launched into righteous indignation. I apologized but she wanted to hammer it. Apparently it still isn’t over. She either wants my dog’s owners to fire me, get rid of the dog or, more probably, suffer a long harangue of the guiltless addressing the mortally guilty.

In two weeks, I’ll have a year of Lab Lady posts on the Brooklyn Heights Blog. I’ve been treated to some lovely responses and others that run from petty to hateful. I’m pissed off at all the righteousness directed at dogs and, therefore, at their owners and walkers.

Has that generic looking shepherd never been too rough with another dog? Has it never snarled or barked at another dog or a human? Had the owner never dropped its leash and suffered the fear of seeing the dog skip off?

Because I’m on the Most Wanted List, I’ll quote more of the word on the street, which was that the shepherd was yacking its head off at a dog sitting with a ball in its mouth as this conversation took place.

I spend my days weaving dogs in and out of traffic in order to make the Brooklyn Heights sidewalks as dog-free as possible. Sometimes I f**k up and sometimes I’m right.  It feels a whole lot better to be in the wrong because I can apologize and learn from it, while wallowing in the love of my righteousness means I don’t have room for something more honest and more entertaining in my brain.

If you want to learn about people, get a dog. If you want to know the depths of people, become a walker.

I re-collared her, tossed in one of the oatmeal cookies I’d baked and packed for a friend in the Heights, and led her back to the crate. She gyrated out of my grasp. I broke up a second cookie, fed her a bit of it and grabbed her again. This time she flew at me, grazing my knuckles with her fangs before scuttling into a corner behind a table, barking angrily.

I turned to the package clerks and said, “She’s a lot more docile when I’m not here. Would you mind if I stepped outside and you try to put her in?” They agreed, trepidatiously, and I left. Standing outside the Quonset office, I heard banging, thrashing, overturning chairs and the plastic bash of the crate being knocked around. I took a deep breath and walked in again.

“She really doesn’t want to crate,” one the men told me.

Oh.

I went back to my campaign of force and seduction, my long sleeves pulled down over my hands which were bleeding within minutes of resuming my effort to go home.

I almost had her when I upended the crate and tried to pour her in. Maybe, that first try, if one of the guys could have helped hold the crate still, she wouldn’t have figured out her paws can bend and grip as surely as human fingers. By my second attempt, she’d had her epiphany and held on to the door rim with every fiber of her soul.

We wrestled through four oatmeal cookies, a complete rearrangement of the furniture, two puncture wounds, numerous scrapes and bruises that were wonderfully livid after my shower the next morning, a stream of barking and my tears, pleading and blood for 75 minutes. I figured, by the time the clerk informed me the plane would be closing its doors in ten minutes, that I’d done ten 75-pound lifts.

I hate the word “feral”. It’s a writer’s word. Looking at the snapping, snarling, flashing fangs of my bed mate in the corner of the office, though, I had to say it. Daisy had gone native. She was feral. She made Regan’s spinning head look like a merry-go-round ride.

For the 45-minute shuttle ride back to Sun City she kept tried to climb into my lap but I was so furious I kept pushing her away as I called my father to inform him of our return and my demand of a margarita the minute I walked in. While my father’s margaritas are God in a glass, a marguerite is a daisy. God knows Daisy had drunk my blood that afternoon. Now I badly needed to drink, at least metaphorically, some of hers.

“Maybe she didn’t want to leave us,” he said as he handed me the cocktail and took his seat. Daisy swanned her neck up for a rub from her beloved grandpa. “You better start making some calls, kid. You gotta figure this out.”

When my brother stuffed Daisy into the crate at the airport, he turned to me and said, “You know, you don’t have to keep this dog.” His words sealed my pact with the little pagan, although everyone on the plane had to listen to her barking in the hold for the Twin Cities – La Guardia leg of the trip.

Daisy has hated crating ever since. When she was small, I could wrestle her in when I abandoned her for such frivolous exigencies as appearing on The Today Show. I kept the crate out for a long time in the hopes she would remember how much she liked it in her Montana infancy but at best she showed only contempt for it.

While my brothers kindly produced grandchildren for my parents, I am the child who has brought home the sole grand-Lab. I learned to walk in the midst of a litter of 15 Labrador puppies and my father relishes stories of hunting with the Pat and Sandy, Jet and Buff. Labradors are part of my family’s lore and if I showed up at Christmas without Daisy, my mother might refuse to let me in the house.

We’ve done a fair amount of flying. Daisy’s five now and shows a remarkable sensitivity for the nonagenarian pace and abilities of my parents’ life in an Arizona retirement city. She spends a lot of time getting belly rubs while sandwiched between them in bed and my father, ever one for canine discipline, feeds her at the table.

She’s still capable of tantrums for me. I have to muzzle her at her veterinarian’s, and we’ve worked out a system whereby I walk her to the scale, which she hates more than I do, and hand her off while I go straight out the back door. When I’m not there to play to, she gives up and submits. I’ve found that Western vets tend not to put her up on the table, which is enormously relieving to her, but we don’t have a veterinarian in Arizona who knows her history of hysteria.

After her first flight, her vet prescribed something wonderful. An hour after taking it, she can’t walk a straight line and her third eyelids roll around like a liver and oyster casserole. It’s against one Continental’s rules to tranquilize animals so at check-in, I lie about her drug usage, she balks enough to convince the handlers, and we’re on our separate ways to the same place.

We performed this routine when we flew out of Newark on December 18th. Unfortunately, while I had thought of everything I might need for myself, and more than enough to make a memorable Christmas for my parents, I forgot one thing: her travel pills.

This is her ninth airplane trip, I thought when I emptied my luggage and discovered the missing magic red bottle, she’s smart enough to know this is how we stay together. And I know Daisy’s greatest fear – beyond crates, Havaneses and other suspicious dogs and people, snowmen and abandoned inside-out umbrellas – is not being with me. We’ve been a team ever since my brother suggested I give her up.

I didn’t know what true fear could turn her into until our departure time was delayed two hours. We had sat together in the Pet Pack office and I read John LeCarré while she trembled, huddling close to me. Those shivers were the rats in the attic that preceded Regan’s spinning head. I was about to meet Captain Howdy.

BHB columnist Frances Kuffel has lived in the Heights for twenty years. Her dog walking clients include Augie, Barley, Boomer, Faith, Gus, Henry, Hero, Panda, Roger and Zeke. For more information, visit http//franceskuffel.net, http://caronthehill.blogspot.com, or http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuffelscrapbook. She is the author of Passing for Thin.

Alaskan, American, Midwest, Northwest, United, and limited non-stop flights on U.S. Airways allow dogs over twenty pounds to fly as cargo or as a “checked bag”. They fly in a different hold than baggage, which is not acclimated like the cabin to compensate for the lack of oxygen and below-freezing temperatures of high altitudes. But there are major restrictions about the ground temperature, which has to be between 32 – 80 degrees unless your dog is veterinarian-certified for timed exposure to 20-degree weather. This makes dead of winter and the dog days of summer extremely difficult to ship your dog in – Daisy once had to stay behind in Montana for two weeks while we waited for heat waves to break there, in St. Paul-Minneapolis and in New York.

If you’re going to a major city in those seasons – especially a hub city – Continental and Delta have special programs in which your animal is not exposed to ground temperature. The destinations are limited though, so that when Daisy was a year old and we went to Montana, we flew Continental to Seattle, then rented a car and drove the 500 miles east.

These temperature-protected programs are expensive because the dog’s fare is based on its weight combined with the crate. Daisy and crate are about a hundred pounds or $375.00 each way. All dogs must fly with a health certificate but Continental requires that it be no more than ten days old, which means two veterinary visits. Add in car services and it’s easily a thousand-dollar proposition.

Jet Blue, U.S. Airways, and AirTran Airways allows a combined weight of dogs and carrier of 20 pounds as carry-on luggage, with the caveat that the carrier must fit under the seat and usually only one per customer.

All of these airlines require prior reservations but Continental and Delta at least have frequent flyer miles for animals flying cargo. Owners of short-nosed dogs that include Boston and bull terriers, English and French bulldogs, Shih Tzus and pugs, need to check out the airlines’ regulations because of hereditary respiratory problems.

Last, but not in our case, least, Southwest Airlines does not accept pets at all. It should also be noted that all airlines accommodate service dogs in-cabin.

“Maybe it’s just too stressful,” the owner of a border collie we’re friends with said of taking Zooey to California for Christmas, but I countered that when I’m going to go away for two or more weeks I know Daisy would rather be with me than avoid crating.

“She’s used to it now,” I told him cockily.

“If you done it, it ain’t bragging,” Walt Whitman wrote. Surely the bard of Brooklyn was right?

BHB columnist Frances Kuffel has lived in the Heights for twenty years. Her dog walking clients include Augie, Barley, Boomer, Faith, Gus, Henry, Hero, Panda, Roger and Zeke. For more information, visit http//franceskuffel.net, http://caronthehill.blogspot.com, or http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuffelscrapbook. She is the author of Passing for Thin.

One evening this week, Daisy and I walked Pickering home after a small snowfall. We went through Cadman Plaza and the nearly pristine snow was like cocaine. Pickering went into what is known as the Mad Lab Run, a repetition of great, pointless circles of joy, while Daisy ran, nose-to-the-ground, like a shovel. They rolled, they shook, they tossed the snow in the air, they chased each other: it’s an electrifying moment to share with Labs.

Winter introduces a host of new sensations. November’s favorite sniffing places are no longer Wi-Fi peemail. Now dogs check their messages from the corpses of Christmas trees and the stubborn snow that is the equivalent of indelible ink.

Alas, this is the most dangerous time of the year for dogs and walkers. With patches of frozen pee everywhere, the dogs dart from place to place while their walker prays the dark sidewalk coming up isn’t black ice. And there is nothing more pathetic than a dog that has walked through salt. It sits, lifts its paws and looks up in excruciating pain until its walker can get a handful of pure snow and rub the paws clean. Last night, I saw a molecule of a dog in red and silver moon boots that were so nifty I wanted a pair for myself. A Lab would have none of that. In the years I walked Zach, the only time I saw him fight was when his groomer put booties on him.

Booties are for sissies, but my Labs are sissies when their paws are burning. Humans are sissies in the cold and the dark and the precipitation. These days, the Heights is not only lined with tinsel-trailing Christmas trees but ellipses of dog poop.

One of Bangor’s winter delights is frozen poop, a not terribly uncommon quirk among dogs. Poopsicles provoke yet more tugs on ice that a lot of pedestrians are simultaneously trying to avoid.

I’m a big woman. I’m tall, overweight, 52 years old, tired and achy. Every time I see a pile of poop I marvel that I can strip off my gloves, stoop while holding three big dogs with one hand and bag poop with the other, and then carry it to a trashcan. Surely those piles on the street aren’t the neglect of fat or old or handicapped people? If I can clean up, why can’t other people?

These bleak days are also the season of compassionate humanitarians out to feed the birds. I seethe at the bread and cereal strewn about that my dogs are exerting their collective 220 pounds to get to. BIRDS CAN FLY. They can dine on the mezzanine or behind a tall fence.

In the spirit of Yes We Can, I’m advocating a bargain. Invest in Safe Paw, Pet Safe, Magic Salt, a bag of sand, a snow shovel, an ice picker or straight-edged hoe. If this is a physical strain for you, remember New York’s unemployment statistics and put the word out. Safe alternatives save money by protecting concrete, cars and shoes. Put the chunks of Wonder Bread up or in. Between the birds’ meal tickets, poopcicles and chemical de-icing pellets (poisonous for dogs), the diarrhea smudges will be fewer because our dogs won’t eat so much of what they’re not supposed to.

In return, dog owners: pick it up! If you can’t – well, keep in mind those unemployment figures and hire a walker.

We love our dogs and love finding the gift that shows our intimacy and enjoyment of them.

I emailed Hermia’s owners this week to keep an eye on her. It’s hard to explain, but she doesn’t do the Bunny Hop when we leave the house, a dance that exactly matches the beat of the old song, accompanied by nips at my sleeves. They’ll take her to the vet this week.

The last time I observed a change in her verve, she had Lyme disease.

When Sweet Tooth began skootching her behind on the ground, her walker ended up taking her to Animal Medical for anal cancer surgery.

Our job is to concentrate on the dog rather than hiring a new secretary. We see the dog in and against the context of a other dogs. Part of our expertise is observing changes in energy and behavior.

It’s Saturday night and I’m rushing to give an Italian greyhound his Prozac. I’m the first one notified of births, engagements, deaths, travels, redecorating and moves because I step in when labor pains start and I have the keys when an owner can’t be home for the arrival of a sofa.

This is the only job in which I have taken exactly one sick day. It’s also the only job in which I incur an ongoing roster of abrasions, bruises, scratches, pulled muscles, bites and excrement under my fingernails.

With no benefits.

Each of us got into this business from something else. We stay because of the ecstasy and trust of our dogs. We each have our own style. Some of us are cozy with our dogs and each other, while some of us maintain the silent disciplines of a New Skete monk.

It was with some trepidation, then, that I entered into the space of work styles for a completely unscientific sampling of the taboo topic of what we like getting from our clients at the end of the year. Of the eight walkers I spoke to, only one demurred that he expected nothing and was pleased by anything he got.

I guess we know who gets the re-gifted fruitcake.

From there, the answers got more uniform. Money is our favorite holiday gift. One walker added that money enclosed in a sentimental card thanking her for what she’s done for the dog is at the top of her list.

All the women melt at spa gift certificates. We’re bundled beyond gender or fashion this time of year and girly time is a rare. A massage (see pulled muscles above) or hot wax manicures for the cracked hands of winter is a blessing.

Men won’t admit to wanting the spa experience but like gift certificates for other stuff. If chosen carefully, rough weather gear is welcome. (If a store caters to hunters and ice fishermen, you’ve chosen correctly.)

One walker swoons for homemade goodies, another for booze.

The worst gaffe is no recognition of the holidays at all. We know which families are busy and/or struggling and we don’t carry grudges when there’s no fudge or an extra Andrew Jackson. But not being thanked for a year of showing up – in 38-degree rain with cookies in our pockets, hoarse with bronchitis, bloody from an encounter with an intact male golden retriever, on a humid afternoon in the 90s – is plain Scroogery.

Because that’s just the beginning of what we do.

Given the impotence their friends and family are feeling, I feel lucky to have the dog. Words don’t fail with Mr. Happy: any oogly-googley will do. He carries my heart in his Lab’s soft mouth and drops it at my feet in a continual offer to play. I can love him to distraction and he absorbs it with a smile as bright as the skyline. The tummy rubs and ear-scratchings I give him are the solace I can’t give his owners. I have the one member of the family unit who can be cosseted and loved into peace.

It’s been a hard year for loving dogs. Seven familiar faces have disappeared, among them Daisy’s first friend, Godiva, and one of her first boyfriends, Hopkins. I’ve witnessed the grief that crosses their owners’ bodies like the December wind of Montague Street, and in loving Mr. Happy over the last weeks, I’ve begun to appreciate what our dogs do – or did – for us.

We humans have enormous reserves of love and affection. Somewhere in Pack of Two, Caroline Knapp observes that the stroking, baby-talk, nicknames and other forms of doting we mete out to our dogs would oppress the most passionate of lovers and would be soon outgrown by a baby.

The concept that dogs give unconditional love is flat-out wrong. Their love is highly conditional with the single caveat that the conditions can be counted on two hands and are easy to satisfy. A cookie, a walk, a tossed ball, a belly-rub, leaving the vet’s office pretty much prove our love and earn us the privilege of doing it some more. We bend to our dogs’ wills and personalities and maybe the best way of seeing how they bend to us is how they meet their human friends.

“Miss Daisy!” Hopkins’s owner said whenever we met, sending her into a delighted frenzy. Hopkins would pull his nose away from his contemplation of the Coptic gospels and grudgingly gulp a cookie and allow me to give him a butt rub. I miss Hopkins a lot. Still more, I mourn his owners’ emptier hands, emptier time, emptier bed and emptier nonsense, and I mourn not seeing them and thereby losing one of my dog’s bright spots.

I’ve been thinking of the Pete Seeger song based on Ecclesiastes and found myself interested in what followed the “everything has its season” verses. “…[God] has set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” Along with those reserves of love, humans are cursed with memory and broken hearts and the despair of the future based on them.

The winter holidays are tinged with loss this year. But recently, Godiva’s owner boarded a larky golden doodle that made her realize it’s time to get a new dog. The golden retriever sprite that is Lila has regilded the lives of the owners who lost Maggie. The doodle didn’t know he was forcing need over memory, nor does Lila know there was a perfect Maggie who preceded her.

For the most part, there is only now for dogs. Every time I walk into Mr. Happy’s apartment, I announce, “Merry Christmas!” Life is a cabaret for this young chum. He is rarely under foot but always at hand, glad to get what he gets. Last week he, Daisy and I chatted with a friend on a stoop. He climbed behind me and rested his head on mine. Every waking movement of a dog is deliberate and reactive. The sensation of a resting paw or a head, an expression of connection, is part of the words I don’t have for Mr. Happy’s owners.

They will be back soon. I’ll leave a happy Mr. Happy to need the love they desperately need to give.

BHB columnist Frances Kuffel has lived in the Heights for twenty years. Her dog walking clients include Augie, Barley, Boomer, Faith, Gus, Henry, Hero, Panda, Roger and Zeke. For more information, visit http//franceskuffel.net, http://caronthehill.blogspot.com, or http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuffelscrapbook.

She is the author of Passing for Thin

In military parlance, a “dog fight” is two or more planes in harrowing chase through the skies. I think the term came not from the dogfights that are to the death, but from play fighting. Knowing the distinction can make visiting the Hill or meeting new dogs pleasanter as well as safer.

When I sit among or supervise my Labs in full Battle of Britain mode, there are predictable scripts they follow in what looks, to the unfamiliar, to be a lethal situation.

It can begin with tug-of-war, which escalates into snout-to-snout determination to snatch the contested object. Soon enough, the object is dropped and the dogs begin snarling and barking, teeth bared, as they nip at each other’s limbs and, most especially, each other’s necks. When Bangor or Pickering get very wound up, they will break away from the fight and run in great circles, dashing in to nip at his play-fellow and ricocheting back to his hunched all-out run. It’s a magical moment, this rocket’s octane overflowing so lavishly that it can only be expressed in what is known as the “crazy Lab run”.

When Daisy was very young, a woman in the State Street dog run shuddered and reprimanded me when my pup shook a tug-toy and I encouraged her by saying, “Kill the bunny!” To shake a toy is to snap the neck of prey, and all dog play is a spin-off from the prey drive. It’s natural that my dogs’ intramural play is focused on someone else’s neck.

I’ve had some upsetting moments when people don’t understand how dogs play with each other. Pickering is very necky, but I’ve put my hand in his mouth while he’s got a chunk of Daisy and all I get for it is slobber and fur. Hermia will run after a dog but she always carries a ball and rather than biting, she kind of whams her jaw against its neck. What looks fierce can be deceiving if you don’t let the scenario play itself out a bit.

Given enough leeway, Pickering or Bangor will throw themselves on their backs so that their partner can grab their necks as well. Daisy, who is no wienie, actually prefers to loll around on her back and be chewed, although she will bare her teeth and joust from her supine position. “Jousting” is the term for the dance of the teeth, a form of playing chicken in which they go mouth-to-mouth snapping at each other’s faces. Daisy and Bangor have been jousting so long that the act is as finely tuned as an 80-year-old Cajun couple doing the two-step.

I warn other dog-owners that, on-leash, Daisy will stalk, pounce and then grab her own leash to play tug-of-war with a new acquaintance. It’s the best I can do when I see her head go level with her back and I can’t haul her out of the way. If it’s any consolation, Daisy is playing at her upland bird hunting breeding. The operative word there is “play,” because her last motion is to offer her leash as a toy for the other dog. My warnings don’t always reassure and once again I leave the scene of an un-crime wishing I could articulate better what is happening and what its outcome will be.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not always innocent. I’ve been on the verge or in the middle of fights that were meant to go to the last breath. There’s no time to talk in those moments, and the dogs’ entanglement is such that there’s no collar grabbing on the human’s parts, no coming up for air on the dogs’ parts.

The test of whether it’s violence or mutual play is in whether I can grab my dog’s collar and pull him off; whether his “victim” is crying or whether it comes back for more; whether, when a margin of time is allowed, my dogs rolls over in fair play. Puppies want to play with Pickering but sometimes owners find the roughhousing overwhelming. I usually walk on when that happens, but again I wish I could articulate how that puppy come to dead halt upon seeing Pickering, how it went down in an iron determination to meet, and rolled over as soon as they did. Puppies need to mix it up with older dogs, even if it looks like the baby’s going to be smashed. It’s how they learn to be a dog among dogs rather than a furry humanette.

His owners were humiliated and apologetic. I laughed and said, “I came on too strong. It’s my fault.” I lay down on the floor and asked them to tell me about their new dog, a Lab-terrier mix I had already deemed “Cutie-petutie.”

“We got him from the shelter,” Rachel told me. “They warned us he doesn’t like men and was probably abused but he’s so cute they thought maybe he’d be adopted. He liked me right away but was shy with Sam. When I came back from the restroom, he was lying at Sam’s feet and they were already old friends.”

As she told me this story, I tossed the occasional cookie, which got Allen’s interest. He began sniffing my feet, then my butt, gradually working up to my hair and, finally, my face. I rolled over on my back so that he towered over me. He looked me in the eye. I smiled. He sniffed my face and turned around twice before curling up against my chest.

“See,” I explained, “Allen has to choose his own friends and he needs to know his friends aren’t a threat.”

“I think he’s hired you,” Sam said.

Allen didn’t often get to go to the dog run. He was either the life of the party, taking off in great circling bursts that had all the other dogs chasing him, or Satan’s representative. I never knew which Allen would bust out.

The saving grace was that he weighs twenty-five pounds. When he was scared, and therefore vicious, I could pick him up. I’d already fallen in love with his intelligence but the first time I scooped him up so that Pickering could play with Uba and Allen went limp with trust in my arms, he became my walker and I was his. Not long after that incident, he began greeting me by rolling over for a belly rub, then hopping up to kiss me and hump my leg.

Winning the trust, and then the love, of a difficult dog is a dog walker’s badge of honor.

He respected Daisy, and was in love with Hermia. He kept an intelligent distance with Bangor, although walking them was a series of co-signing and triple-signing pees as threaded behind the other to have the last word. He bullied Pickering but I have the scratches on my thighs and left arm to prove that Pickering is not the pacifist he presents himself as. I was glad, in a way, to see Pickering fight back. Every dog should know he can protect himself.

That squabble took place the day Allen moved to the suburbs. I hauled him well away from Pickering and sat down with him. I explained that I know he’s jealous of other dogs wanting my love and that I understand. I’m jealous of lots of people and circumstances, too. I cried hard as I asked him not to forget me or forget how much I love him. He huddled close to the thigh he had just left a foot-long bruising scratch on and he listened. Allen always listened to me – to what I was worrying or thinking about, not just to commands or reassurances. Sometimes Daisy listens to me but my other dogs blithely carry on in the world I’m only there to take them to.

Rachel writes that Allen is having a good time trying to catch a particular backyard chipmunk and that suburbanite dogs don’t mingle. I know Allen is happy because he has Rachel and Sam; they’re his world.

But I miss talking to him.

Not come out again? I wondered. Was there a bomb scare? I could see activity another half block from my doorway but no steel trucks or flashing lights. I picked up my passport and the girlies and I were on our way.

By the time I got to the scene of the activity I had an idea of what had happened. Word travels fast between doormen and neighbors, even if the exact facts take another day to straighten themselves out.

The exact facts aren’t important, but that grapevine is, at least insofar as it’s a grapevine I didn’t belong to five years ago, before I brought my eleven-week old greeting card Daisy home from Montana. There is nothing cuter than a Lab puppy and we made friends fast among her playmates and admirers.

There were specific moments in which I knew the fabric of my life had new colors woven into it. A Hillside acquaintance whose puppy was one of Daisy’s constant companions made a comment about another dog-owner, and a slow tear rolled down her face. We had shifted from not much into intimacy in a sentence. On a September Sunday, I went up to the owner of a roly-poly white Lab wandering around the Hill and commented that his dog could be Daisy’s mother. One of those frissons of recognition passed in the five minutes of conversation we had before he invited me home to meet his wife and have dinner.

This street-chat is still a marvel to me. I grew up on the fringe of a big Montana town in a time when there were no leash laws. You either drove a car or rode a bike to get somewhere and there was no such thing as not having a back yard. Pedestrians are still almost as rare as seeing adult residents doing more than stepping out to pick up The Missoulian.

That evening, Hicks Street in the block between Clark and Pierrepont was crowded and ambient with the sound of murmuring. Hermia, Daisy and I ran into Mitch, who was being walked by his owner’s nephew. I introduced myself and dropped the girls’ leashes and they were a happy snarling mess in a heartbeat. “Daniel gave you my number, right?” I asked as we untangled the dogs to go our separate ways. “Call me if you have any questions.”

Daisy is always lippy with Charlie, the flat-coated retriever who is one of the family who entered mourning that evening. She speaks fluent English but not Human, and her bark is deep and scolding. Charlie’s owners are gracious about her lectures and one night I dropped the leash so she could hash out her perplexity over Charlie on her own. Her bark turned to sniffing and kissing as she and Charlie circled each other, wagging their tails. His male owner nodded to himself and said, “It’s the leash, isn’t it, Daisy?”

Daisy wagged herself over to get her ears rubbed and Charlie wagged himself over to his butt rubbed. They each got a cookie and that was that. Whenever Daisy barked around Charlie and Mr. Barnett after that night, we looked at each other knowingly and rolled our eyes. Charlie has my right pocket fixed in his mind and it became a joke. We discussed Charlie’s upcoming summer haircut and Daisy’s shedding.

I associated Graham Barnett with Charlie so much that I wouldn’t have known him without his dog. He didn’t know my name either. Charlie’s a great dog, however. He adores his family and is nicely aloof with dogs like Daisy.

I hope Mr. Barnett knew Daisy adores lots of people and lots of dogs, and that I really try to curb her mouthy unpredictability. I hope Charlie and his family know that the fabric of our long block, that shares Wednesday night parking and warm nights on stoops, Halloween madness and kid and dog sleep-overs, has frayed at its delicate weave of personalities.

Dogs have given me close friends and a few foes. They’ve given me citizenship and an antidote to chronic social anxiety. They’ve given me respect for people and an automatic smiling fondness for those people who understand and love dogs. Graham Barnett was one of those.

I have never made this admission without hearing similar prejudices in the other dog. We are ashamed, chagrined and frightened by our dogs’ attitudes. We didn’t teach them to fear particular demographics, and more often than not we have friends within the very groups our dogs love to hate.

In my Lab world, I have heard or encountered problems with Middle Easterners, policemen, the Aged, people using walkers, canes, crutches, wheelchairs and scooters, anyone who swings their arms too wildly (joggers, tai chi practitioners), the mentally impaired and, almost always, African Americans.

“Why do you think that is?” we ask each other. Sometimes the answers are fairly obvious. Those swinging arms and canes look too much like punishment about to happen. Dogs have strong ideas of what humans should be: two-legged, animate, inter-social. People talking to themselves don’t make sense, and cops tend to stand around too much. The person leaning against a wall and talking on her cell phone at night is highly suspicious.

But why do they take such exception to other folks?

Theories abound, some of them too obnoxious to repeat. One assumption is that dogs sense or smell fear. If a dog can smell an epileptic fit coming on, it’s not impossible that fear also has a scent. Fight or flight is a primal instinct in dogs. They differ from wolves by two-tenths in their genetic make-up. “Fight” is natural. That vulpine similarity could also account for dogs’ umbrage with the elderly, prodding them to go after the weakest members of the herd – although it doesn’t leave room for Labs’ love of children, who would also be easy prey.

I’m skeptical. Not all Africans are scared of dogs and plenty of terrified white people pass dogs without being barked or lunged at.

I’ve worked with Daisy, explaining to people I think I can trust that she is biased. I ask if I can pat them on the arm, call them by name, and stand by their side so that she understands I’m not afraid. Sometimes it works, especially if there’s no other commotion feeding her already heightened energy.

The doormen of the Heights have been invaluable partners because most of her objections are to men. Ah men! – too often afraid to show “feminine” emotions in public. That was my light bulb moment: given a dog’s ability to interpret human faces and their different color spectrum, a human without affect that she can’t see well might very well scare Daisy. And scared dogs are wolves.

The elderly, too, tend to have a set expression, their faces drawn into severity by time and gravity. To a dog that is sensitive enough to run across Hillside Park at the lift of my eyebrows, the inability to read whether the Battle of the Bulge vet is also bewildering.

But the person who talks back to Daisy often becomes one of her beloveds. My neighbor finally did this, saying loudly and jokingly, “Oh, Daisy, don’t give me that shit. I don’t believe you any more!” Calling her by name, the note of warmth in her voice and the smile on her face stopped Daisy cold and they’ve been friends ever since.

And when a welcome is offered – vibrantly, consistently and charmingly – she wags her whole body and hurtles herself into the game of love.

BHB columnist Frances Kuffel has lived in the Heights for twenty years. Her dog walking clients include Allen, Bangor, Chadow, Hope, Hermia, Lex, Malfoy, Mildred, Orson, Otto, Pepe and Pickering. Barley and Zanzibar have gone to a Better Place. If we’re very good people, we might be allowed to dance with them again. For more information, visit http//franceskuffel.net, http://caronthehill.blogspot.com, or http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuffelscrapbook.

She is the author of Passing for Thin

My favorite song starts:
When you’re a Lab,
You’re a Lab all the way,
From your first pair of shoes
To your last dyin’ day…

The “Jet Song” speaks of belonging, having your back watched, being smooth Lotharios – and being triumphant over enemies, the Sharks.

It’s a good news/bad news song for the person at the end of four leashes.

On several occasions, I have leashed my pack and let one dog go to meet a particular friend. Daisy and Tenn kiss, Tenn mounts her, and Daisy snaps up at his jaw. Then she slips away and melts into her pack. Any onlooker would have no idea she wasn’t leashed with the rest of them. The Labs are “never disconnected”.

The bad news side of this is that, as I paraphrase in our nonviolent intervals, when a dog gets in their way, that dog “don’t feel so well”. I brace myself, sometimes against a wall, and hang on as Bangor, Daisy and Hermia try to take flight. Pickering joins in but he thinks his pals are inviting the latest Shark to play. Pickering always wants in on the fun.

They aren’t having fun

At best, I can call my dogs neurotic. Certainly they’re scared and at worst they’re terrible racists.

This is a delicate subject because, when they unite into 280 pounds of outraged muscle, they’re a loud and frightening presence. I’ve walked away from confrontations in deep embarrassment, penitence, fury and/or blood. If one dog is triggered, they all are. With lust and longing, Hermia and Pickering surf for squirrel porn while Daisy and Bangor snout along for dropped Goldfish and pizza crusts. If I say the words, “tippy-toes” to Hermia, her tail shoots up and she is en pointe, tugging and looking for prey. Pickering takes her lead and lets out a sissy scream he ought to be ashamed of, standing on his hind legs at the nearest tree. I know that Hermia would tear the squirrel to bits and I’m fairly convinced that Pickering wants to adopt one as a pet, but the hat is in the ring. While Daisy and Bangor are oblivious to the idea of rodents aloft, they take this pitch of excitement as a call to battle and begin circling for sight of an enemy – anyone or anything that is land-based will do – barking and growling. Daisy’s hackles go up in a Mohawk and Bangor’s toes nails skitter as I drag him closer and get him into a down-stay. I pray no one is near us on the mother-lovin’ street to distract all that energy onto a more catchable prey.

It doesn’t take a psychology department to understand the squirrel frenzy. Even cat-lovers understand the urge to kill. Squirrels are the least of it however, a cake walk compared to what the Jets consider the real Sharks – a subject I’ll explore as delicately as possible in my next reports from the street.

BHB columnist Frances Kuffel has lived in the Heights for twenty years. Her dog walking clients include Augie, Barley, Boomer, Faith, Gus, Henry, Hero, Panda, Roger and Zeke. For more information, visit http//franceskuffel.net, http://caronthehill.blogspot.com, or http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuffelscrapbook.

She is the author of Passing for Thin

As do the bites from the chiggery flies in Hillside Park. They have no respect for repellent and seem especially fond of the skin just above my anklets.

The heat has broken, sort of, so I’m writing this after a shower. I have a quarter-sized bruise on my arm, a sign of Hermia’s affection. This really is how she shows true love: she jumps and bites. Or maybe she jumped and bit when I held a squeaky ball aloft.

Not long ago, two golden retrievers crossed Columbia Heights for a walk on the Promenade at exactly the broad entrance from which Bangor, Allen and I were leaving. Bangor and Allen have some weird aversion to golden retrievers (the gentlest of dogs until they sometimes cross a line deep in their nature while playing) and they went berserkers. I wrapped both leashes around my right hand and leaned back like a water skier. One hundred pounds of outrage and bloodlust fractured the cartilage in the knuckle of my right index finger.

Forget about opposable thumbs. It’s Mr. Pointer that differentiates us from gold fish.

Then there was my graceful trip on some uneven sidewalk on Willow, which brought me down on top of Bangor, who growled, whipped around and then got slurpy with concern. My baseball cap fell off in the melee and Pickering was already eating the brim by the time a fellow-dog walker rushed over to help. “Just hold the dogs,” I asked.

“Sit,” he told Bangor and Pickering, and told them again. Pickering and Bangor looked up at him with curiosity. Sit? Was there maybe a cookie in it?

I had a bloody knee and when I told dog walker friends that I’d fallen, their reaction was an avid, “Let me see, let me see – ooh: good one!”
“What are those scratches?” Sylvie asked of the long red marks up my calf.

“Allen humped me. I was wearing shorts.”

In the middle of the sidewalk, four people pulled up their pants or their sleeves and pointed at bruises, scrapes, scratches and braces that Bowser or Fido caused in a jump or a lunge, the stairs, the trips, the ankle-turning surface of the dog run, bending and walking that tax our bodies.

“My knees are killing me,” Marjorie said.

“It’s my shoulders and lower back,” I nodded. “The leashes at a forty-five degree angle are killers.”

“What do you do for the pain?”

“Three Naprosin in the morning,” I told her. “Stretching out my lower back by doing lunges on a stoop really helps. And thank God for my cheap massage place on Grand Street.”

“How much, how much?” everyone clamored.

Sometimes dog walkers talk about the best looking dogs. Sometimes dog walkers talk about the worst behaved dogs. We always talk about the weather and about not being paid on time. And we always talk about what hurts today.

Today it’s my forehead (Hermia raised her head as I was bending over to leash her) and my cheek (Hope, an Italian greyhound, wanted my attention and used her raptor nails to get it). And my back, shoulders and hands, of course.

BHB columnist Frances Kuffel has lived in the Heights for twenty years. Her dog walking clients include Augie, Barley, Boomer, Faith, Gus, Henry, Hero, Panda, Roger and Zeke. For more information, visit http//franceskuffel.net, http://caronthehill.blogspot.com, or http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuffelscrapbook.

She is the author of Passing for Thin

It’s 8: 15 on a crisp blue May morning and I’m already furious.

It’s quite the picnic that Brooklyn Heights is providing for the dogs, rats, pigeons and street cleaners. I can almost understand being drunk or tired and dropping the bag of your leftover eats because there’s no trash basket nearby, but I am livid at what I’ve had to steer dogs past in the last twenty-four hours.

It started with a bag of hero bread leaning against a trash barrel in front of the Subway store on Montague Street on Sunday morning. I realize it’s probably technically illegal for a store to use the public waste baskets, and it’s probably against company policy to keep the unused bread in the shop overnight, but the irony – and Zanzibar’s magnetic pull to it – is beyond comprehension.

I’m typing this with barbecue sauce under my fingernails because at 7:05 this morning Daisy ducked and came up looking like Pan with half a rack of pork ribs sticking out of her mouth. I’ve renamed Clark Street between Hicks and Henry Take-Out Turnpike for its wealth of noodles and muffin wrappers and, now, ribs. Henry Street north of Clark has become Pizza Place in my canine lexicon, and Montague is Bagel Boulevard. The area is rife with trash receptacles.

As is Montague Streets, where they’re at every corner and at each half-block. The three-quarters of a six or seven-layer yellow cake with chocolate frosting on top of a trash bag leaning against a tree on Montague, vaguely between Banana Republic and Heights Cleaners looked something I would have loved to chow down on this morning. The difference is that it might have given me a bellyache but the chocolate would have poisoned Zanzibar.

I am ashamed when I see poop on the street – it reflects badly on every dog owner and walker, and if I can pick up a trail of a dog’s doo when I’ve got 280 pounds of willful muscle straining to get to the tree a squirrel just ran up, anyone can do it. At best, dog poop is an inconvenience and at worst it’s a hazard when you’re walking a poop-eating dog. It’s a discreet menace, affecting shoes and misguided dogs, whereas ribs, cake, muffin wrappers, bread, French fries and potato chips attract vermin, are a trip to the vet for dogs, and to the chiropractor or orthopedist for the walkers who are lurched backwards, sideways and upside down by the dogs’ eagerness to retrieve them. My shoulders are a mess, I’ve been bloodied over turkey legs, and my fingernails harbor dinner for four.

In the interests of fairness, I counted the dog piles between Zanzibar’s house and mine this morning, the stretch of Hicks between Pierrpont and Clark. Seven dried up messes that were hard to tell apart from the graying blossoms and miscellaneous tree branches the storms have dropped on us. The dogs aren’t at fault for our streets’ disgusting amount of shit, their tenders are. And between piles of human indifference, there was also one nice group of chicken bones waiting to pierce a Corgi’s gut.

You tell me who the primitives are.

“If he’s moving, not really.”

The kid looked confused. I consider it a civic service to share dog love, but Zanzibar is different. Zanny turned seventeen in April, which, depending on the chart one consults, is either 99 or 119 years old in human years. He has acute arthritis in his back hips and legs, his eyes are milky blue with cataracts, his hearing is shot. He likes people, when he notices them, and he loves other dogs, but once he’s in motion, I have to stay with him.

I wake Zan up with a sketch of a belly rub. He can’t roll over but the light scratching of his ribs elicits a smile of his good old days. What comes next is a train wreck as he pulls himself up by his forelegs, buckling and panting as his paws seek purchase on the floor.

I don’t pet Zanzibar because it hurts him. He loves me, his female human tells me, because he pushes his head into my leg, in effect petting himself.

His male human tells people who ask (everyone asks) what breed Zan is, that he’s a Himalayan shepherd or a Moravian wolfhound. I once fed someone a story of him being part Sheffieldpinscher, part Dinmont mastiff. My questioner nodded his head gravely and said, “I thought it had to be something like that.”

None of these breeds exist, even in the fashionable oodle universe where every breed is being crossed with a poodle. Zan is a mix of Lab, Great Dane and, maybe, some shepherd. He’s the height and hairiness of a Shetland pony with paws the size of my hands.

Zan picks up those paws with great deliberation and articulation: one; then another; then another. For six or ten blocks, depending on the weather and his bowels, we paw-plop along. He pauses to sniff ivy or meet the yapping Havanese that could take Zan down, and he halts at corners as if trying to remember what he’s there for. I used to be embarrassed by Zan’s favorite pee spots but one nice thing about such an old dog is that he can’t lift his leg to aim.

And there’s the rub. Strong winds knock Zan over. Taking a dump leaves him weaker because of the strain on his back legs. I let him decide which side of the pavement he’s going to walk on because I have visions of tumbling him to the ground by pulling on the leash. He smells dogs but doesn’t differentiate among humans. Is it any wonder that when an elderly woman, walking straight at us, asked me if I could move my dog, I said no?

And is it any wonder that I hate Liberation Hour when kids, fresh from school, are traveling in mothers’ prides for play dates and racquetball lessons? Recently, Zan and I were making our way, single file, down Hicks when a wave of six year-olds ran screaming across Montague Street and one of them smashed into Zanzibar. Luckily, it was the kid who fell. I snapped.

“Could you control your children!?” I hurled at the Mom in Charge.

She made a well-I-never face at me and said, “Brooklyn is for everyone, you know.”

“Exactly,” I said with a tureen of sarcasm. “Including the dogs.”

“Do you know all their names?” my friend yelled back.

“How do you keep their leashes straight?”

“What are all those keys for?”

It was a cool, gray, late spring afternoon and I was in the mood to laugh as I led Farmer, a ten-year-old yellow Lab, across the street to meet my friend.

“How’s that blog going?” she asked as one of her dogs nosed toward Farmer. He backed away and behind me. “Good boy,” she coaxed her dog. “Farmy, this is your auntie,” I piped in. It’s a dog-walkers’ version of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” a round of compliments and reassurance.

“I think I’ll write about mistakes I’ve made.”

“Don’t do it,” she warned. She wasn’t the only one who said this, but if I don’t admit the times I’ve been stupid and/or inattentive, I’m not telling you how I’ve learned to do my job or how it stays interesting. On the other hand, walkers and owners don’t want to be reminded that we’ve all been stupid and/or inattentive and that our dogs aren’t Cesar Milan poster kids.

Farmer was not having a good time. He’s not shy but he’s relatively new to city living, a trade-off he hasn’t made up his mind about. The smells are dizzyingly fascinating but then there’s the business of elevators and leashes and other dogs wanting to claim that lovely fresh pee on the wall of St. Charles. His Farmer Dance, an ecstatic butt- and tail-wiggling combo with paw stamping and nosing my jacket, had turned to an inside-out cha-cha to get back to the other side of the street.

By the time Farmer took his dump, he was wheezing. He sounded like he was hacking and foaming through layers of wool. Luckily, his owner had asked what I thought about their vet’s advice to give him Benadryl when he had such an episode.

Dog walkers don’t snoop. We don’t have time. But there I was, surveying the contents of cabinets until I found a pack of antihistamines on the microwave. I’m the last person in Brooklyn to have bought a cell phone and I was carrying it that day as a timepiece for a packed schedule. I called my father, an M.D. but close enough, and read him the ingredients and dosage to make sure it really was Benadryl and wouldn’t kill my old man, fingered out a gob of peanut butter and offered it up. Farmer looked up at me, wagged his tail but kept his chin on the floor. I slid the pill to the back of his tongue and massaged his throat, then laid down next to him to rub his ears.

Five minutes later he vomited but the pill stayed down. I cleaned up and waited until the situation felt stable – no more foam, no trying to throw up, his breathing labored but not getting worse.

A half hour later, Farmer met me at the door, butt and tail wiggling, his breathing almost normal but gearing up in excitement. I rubbed his and backed out before he got worked up again.

Farmer has happily met me with my pack several times, but then again, he knows me and, probably, the scents that are imprinted on my clothes. I had failed to be sensitive to his anxiety; I should have re-crossed the street as soon as he backed away.

Mistakes with dogs never take long. That one took less than three minutes, a lifetime in comparison to the attack or the lunge. They need personal space, a fluid construct that we humans can’t always anticipate. That’s when it pays, literally, to stay in the dog’s moment rather than our own.

BHB columnist Frances Kuffel has lived in the Heights for twenty years. Her dog walking clients include Augie, Barley, Boomer, Faith, Gus, Henry, Hero, Panda, Roger and Zeke. For more information, visit http//franceskuffel.net, http://caronthehill.blogspot.com, or http://www.flickr.com/photos/kuffelscrapbook.

She is the author of Passing for Thin

Hermia’s M.O. is to slyly nip another dog’s ball and run along side whatever scrumble occurs, barking with the ball in her mouth. Pickering is the happiest dog alive. He’s happy to chase balls, happy to chase and wrestle, happy to play tug-of-war, happy to eat sticks.

This, then, is my set-up: throw-the-ball-throw-the-ball for Daisy, keep Picks out of the wood chips, police Hermia.

“Can’t you just take it from her mouth?” a woman wanting Hermia to give up her golden’s Cuz asked.
I stood up and shrugged. “Go ahead,” I said. “Take it.”
The Cuz squealed loudly.
I shrugged and went off in search of a ball Hermia would trade the Cuz for.

Today a very young pit bull made her debut at the Hill, wired, jumping on everyone and every dog, running after Daisy running after her ball, only to stop half-way and run after a Springer. Her humans kept intervening in her explorations of crotches and backpacks, her scuffle with a fellow youngster, and her approach to a mature pit that seemed interested in imparting some pit wisdom to the neophyte.
“Put your knee up when she jumps,” they.

“Anyone who expects to be clean when they leave here deserves what they get,” I told them. “It’s the dog run. She’s allowed to jump.”

What I should have said is that she was too excited with her freedom and newness of scents, humans games and, above all, dogs, to re-inforce training. She was barely a foot tall. She could leap a mile, but she’d meet my foot, not my knee, and that’s a much more threatening piece of anatomy.
Mostly, she needed to test herself against the younger dogs, get bossed by the older dogs, follow the ball chasers. That’s how puppies learn.

One couple left the Hill in clean clothes, the owners of two huskies. The huskies joined my gang with the unfortunate result that they stole our balls and we had to wait until we could swipe them back. They were depriving Hermia, Daisy and Pickering of their play.

What was pitiful was that their humans were sitting under the pear blossoms, watching. Those huskies were hungry – literally hungry – to chase and catch, and they were old enough that their owners must know this. Why didn’t they bring balls and a Chuck-it so that they could bond with their dogs by providing the ecstasy of the chase? Why risk my dogs taking umbrage at robbery?

I felt sorry for the pit that needed an unfettered field of exploration. I felt sorrier for the huskies. They needed their humans’ involvement so that they, too, would leave hot, tired, grateful and smiling from the hour of freedom to be themselves.