Your daily summary of the Internet

-Fashion site Refinery29 tells you which restaurants have the hottest waitresses. Tyler Cowen, take note.

-'Damn neighborhood kids won't get off my lawn' is, evidently, a real complaint.

-If you leave your six-month-old puppy in a crate for six hours at a time, twice a week, this constitutes dog abuse. (My recollection, from the crate era, was that we capped it at four or five hours, but that the limit is one hour for every month old. The ability of even a puppy to spend the night in a crate suggests anything <8hrs is feasible. Dogs in crates look inherently tragic, but it's probably sadder still if your hyperactive puppy chokes on the furniture in some way that you did not anticipate was even possible, or, as came up at Prudence, risks drowning itself in the bathroom.)

Headline of the day

"Charged as Madam, and Defended as Entrepreneur and Pig Rescuer"

Emily Yoffe on Rescue Culture

A must-read. I'm amazed it applies to cat and guinea pig adoption as well. It makes me wonder if most New Yorkers are qualified to "own" the mice that invariably appear in NY apartments, and that seem perfectly capable of keeping on keeping on, even without setting out special feed bowls, providing fresh water, or taking them out for three walks daily.

Adam Gopnik Petstoregate

It is now done to mention, even in your standard here-are-cute-dog-photos Internet posting, that a dog has been rescued. As Rescue Culture goes, this doesn't strike me as a problem. All things equal, by all means, people should adopt. I think it's important to remember that all things aren't always equal, and that not every dog purchased is in fact - as is often asserted - a pound dog killed. But something like semi-gratuitously sticking a dog's rescue origins into conversation? It gets the word out that this option exists and is something to be proud of, without explicitly insulting those who, for whatever reason, purchased a dog. (It did stand out that WWPD's New Yorker Writer of the Week Adam Gopnik, in his sweeping New Yorker essay about dog ownership, mentioned his daughter picking theirs out at a pet store. He says he didn't know that this issue at the time, and if a writer who basically epitomizes Our Kind of People yuppie coastal elites didn't know, maybe the answer is to educate and not after-the-fact judge.)

But I do think it's interesting, worth pointing out, that this - "s/he's a rescue" is now something people tell you, unsolicited. It's of course an option, as it's always been, to be indifferent to the socially acceptable and unacceptable. But if you do opt to care, let it be known that if you acquired your dog in a way that didn't involve saving it from horrible circumstances, you will be asked to account for your process.

America, 2011

I decided to trade sleep for a quicker, earlier train into New York. As you might imagine, it’s more popular to spend one hour getting into the city than two, so the train was packed. But more packed than I’d ever seen it – this was rush hour plus Christmas shoppers-and-tourists. Car after car, there were either no seats or families who managed to take up so much space with their stuff and food (who’d have thought fast-food bagels could have such an odor? I guess in a closed space, most food does) that the occasional one seat available would have meant crashing a jovial early Christmas party of perfect strangers with whom one has nothing in common other than living in but wishing to spend time away from New Jersey, and asking them to move their stuff to space that simply wasn’t there. Stuff ought not to take precedence over people when it comes to seats on trains, what with people and not stuff spending $33 on tickets, but it’s one of those things where you can make a fuss, but then you end up at the bottom of the avalanche of American Girl dolls, and standing starts to look like the way to go.

So car after car, same deal. I joined the horde of preppy types looking for seats, figuring that if a horde was looking, I wouldn’t find anything. I then see one prime aisle seat, not one of those no-window spots, facing the right way. I asked the man in the window seat if the aisle was taken, he said no, I sat down.

Now let’s think for a moment. Why was this seat free? No one in the general vicinity smelled or was eating anything. No one was projectile vomiting or visibly struck with a skin-eating bacteria. Yes, the man in the aisle seat was wider than he was narrow, but this is ‘merica, so was almost everyone else on the train. Yes, some of the horde was made up of families who wanted to be seated together and were holding out for a group of empty seats, but others were just the regular businesspeople. So what on earth could it have been?

Any guesses?

I’m going to speculate that the fact that this one seat was available has something to do with the fact that the man in the window seat was, unlike the others on the train, black. Dark-skinned, with dreadlocks in a ponytail. Otherwise utterly unremarkable, maybe 30, maybe 35, and spent the trip playing with his iPhone like all the other yuppies.

********

In other, less depressing, news from the world beyond the woods, my mother and I met a dog that was like a tiny Bisou - a dark gray toy, whose tininess really drove home that Bisou's on the gigantic side of miniature, the "medium" size poodles come in. As inevitably happens when dog owners connect, the question of provenance arose. No doubt because of this dog's similarity to Bisou, my mother asked if it came from a breeder. "We wanted to get a rescue dog," the owner began, and I figured, here it comes. Instead, what came was a "but." But, she and her family live in a very small apartment, and were not approved for one. Instead, they went with a "reputable pet store," and we learned what that means, and no, I'm not convinced it means anything in particular, but she seemed to have her story straight. I am convinced, however, that there are rescue promoters who take their work so seriously that they're going around telling people their apartments are too small for a toy poodle, a breed it's hard to picture existing anywhere but a small apartment.

Teacup violins

I think the NYT heard me claim that I wasn't going to read any more of its lifestyle articles beginning Jan. 1, and decided to do whatever the newspaper equivalent is of when tobacco companies increase the dose of nicotine to keep addicts from abandoning ship. They are providing these bloggable delights that I mustmustmust read and respond to. Resolutions, alas. I have until the 31st.

First, there is the couple that decided to turn its wedding into a celebration of every trendy do-gooder variant of smug. My mind, it explodes. They hate stuff! They sell t-shirts! Sample quote: "During the reception, Mr. Friedlander asked his guests to please recycle their cups, 'because we’re really in a serious situation with climate change.'" Those writing novels set in present-day yuppie NY milieus are now kicking themselves because they did not come up with this line. It's also a "Styles Style" first, in that the journalist actually lets on what she thinks of the people she's covering.

Next, the paper actually asked readers to provide their thoughts on issues at the intersection of dog breeds and Manhattan real estate. Maybe readers would have opinions on this? Maybe! Opinions such as:

-It's imprisonment to have a dog in any apartment of any size, any breed.
-Dogs experience "horror and humiliation" if forced to defecate on cement.
-It's dog abuse to have dogs without 300 acres for them to roam on.
-It's wrong to ask which breed goes best in an apartment, because rescue! (Never mind that there are breed-specific rescues.)
-It's wrong to ask which breed goes best in an apartment, because there are so many wonderful pit bulls in NY shelters.
-Dog breeds are like races, and to make distinctions among them is racist.
-If you have a preference re: dog breed, you should instead get a cat.

My own take is that, while I still don't understand the logistics of initially housebreaking a dog in a high-rise (everything we read explained that you need to scoop your puppy up and outside quickly in that initially stage, which we did, and now she's housebroken), I'm not sure how living outside the city would be better for a dog. Yes, it's a problem to leave a dog alone all day in an apartment, but are dogs left alone all day in a house or yard so much happier? The yard solves the "bathroom" question, but doesn't mean there are other dogs to play with, or that there's anything much to do, or that the owner's around.

If anything, suburban owners probably feel that because their dogs get enough "outside" time, they don't need specific exercise or socialization. Dogs in the city can go to dog runs, meet lots of dogs and people, have quick and easy access to emergency (and routine) vets, dog sitters/walkers/day care/grooming, etc. And yes, I'm aware that actually owning/leasing/something a car would make the suburbs more manageable, and if all goes according to plan, soon, but the convenience of city life seems like a good thing for dogs as well as for people. I know that the muck through which I walk Bisou is meant to be "good for dogs," but I kind of think she'd prefer things in the city, with better access to croissants and Uniqlo. Or am I projecting?

Finally, there's the requisite cue-the-tiny-violins discussion of privilege. What, in this "Occupy" age, should rich parents tell their kids? This from, of course, the parenting blog. And just as every post with the word "dog" in it leads to scolding about rescues, here it's a predictable enough response about how rich people should really be giving to charity, as if there's some reason to believe that the rich people in question are not already doing so.

The official WWPD assessment: It would seem the answer depends on the age of the kid, etc., but that what would need to be explained is that "rich" means two separate things. One is intangible, cultural, educational, etc. privilege, which is there for rich kids virtually whichever choices their parents make, simply by virtue of raising kids in wealthy surroundings. The other is the question of whether the child is wealthy, as in whether the child has much of the freedom that comes from having money to spend. For adults, one big perk of having lots of money is, it can be spent on this, that, the other. A child from a super-rich home, with a minimal allowance or (in less quaint terms) no credit card might have all the cultural privilege, but doesn't have the independence that comes from actually, personally, having access to money.

Of course how much money a family has available matters, but among the population not experiencing genuine need, it doesn't matter as much as one might think. There are plenty of kids with the "wrong" jeans because their well-off parents don't want to be buying $100 jeans for their kids (b/c of the values that promotes, b/c it seems like a waste, etc.), and plenty of kids in the "right" ones as a result of their parents' sacrifices with that particular goal in mind. (Growing up, the kid in my class who had the toughest time of it, clothing-wise, was from a very wealthy family, and her parents no doubt spent gobs on her clothes, but made her wear those little-girl smocked dresses when everyone else was wearing flannel in emulation of Kurt Cobain. What "privilege" that must have been for her.)

And, unless a family is so rich, and is 100% confident about passing along that wealth to the kids, it would seem that there's a danger in passing along an idea of noblesse oblige, "we" are so very very lucky, let's give thanks, blah blah, when the kid could perfectly well grow up and not have these advantages, and needing to do such radical things as clean his own bathroom and check what things cost at the supermarket. Nothing will change the fact that a kid grew up rich, but any number of things can happen later in life. I mean, when a kid from a wealthy home gets a typical teenager job, this is in part to "build character" and to make him less of an ass to food-service workers in the future, but it's also giving him life skills should he need to be at the mercy of bosses in not-glamorous situations in the future. Social mobility isn't the well-oiled machine it ought to be, but it's not entirely non-existent, and cuts both ways.

So I suppose I don't think it's being refreshingly honest to tell a child how rich "he" is, when the relevant fact is how rich his parents are. Which is still a very relevant fact in terms of his life experience, but which isn't the same as his being rich.

Dog ownership: you're doing it wrong

Bisou celebrated getting her post-spaying stitches out (and more to the point, not having to wear a cone, and being allowed to move around beyond the kitchen) with a bath, which was for the best because we had people over for Thanksgiving and, after her first long walk in two weeks, she was in her sleepy-cuddly mood with our guests. She appears to have enjoyed her long weekend - more exercise than usual, and the odd piece of croissant. Fine, so being around so many people on Saturday in NY got her in that weird mood when she prances around on her hind legs (a spectacle on crowded Nassau St., but hardly less so in Manhattan), but at least she met some other dogs. Or was nearby some other dogs. I don't know what it takes to let Bisou know that she is a dog, and meant to socialize with her kind, and had hoped this could just be done by introducing her to her fellow canines. We've trained her on our own (housebreaking and basic commands, and the gradual-ish process of phasing out the crate), so obedience school had started to seem not so pressing. I'm starting to think we will, however, have to fork over money to some entity that does for dogs whatever it is regular school is said to have over homeschooling. Given that even the closest dog run has an entry fee, this starts to seem inevitable.

Oh, and I wish I didn't know (but I now do, thanks to Gawker commenters) that the dog run we took Bisou to in NY is a place where dogs pick up parasites. I'm not too worried, given that Bisou spent most of her time at the "run" sitting under our bench, not eating or drinking anything on the ground, but this does point to the eternal doggy dilemma of the animal's mental and physical health being mutually exclusive.

********

I'd never thought about it this way, but I'd agree that "the bulldog’s aesthetic opposite [is] the poodle." I've always liked (and, if possible, gone out of my way to say hello to) basically all cats (but, severe-ish allergies) and dogs, big and small, with the exception of dogs in the pug-bulldog-pit bull-boxer-bull terrier family. So the exposés about how these dogs (or some of them) are unhealthy under the best of circumstances have made me relieved, I suppose, that my aesthetic preference matches up with what's best for dogs. (Not so with my favorite large-dog breed, the Bernese Mountain Dog, that couldn't be cuter or sweeter but apparently only lives for five to six minutes.)

The response to the article, predictably enough, brings out the my-opinion-on-matters-canine-is-the-only-correct-one-and-if-you-think-something-slightly-different-you're-evil-incarnate contingent.* As a newish dog owner and newspaper-comment aficionado, I can, unfortunately, report back. 

-There's the usual Rescue Culture intervention. If you purchase any dog - bulldog or not, breeder or pet store - you are a dog murderer. This makes reading comments to anything about dogs like reading those to anything about the Middle East - the set who pick up on key words, present their template rant, then (if ambitious) quickly attempt to connect their rant to the specific issue at hand. So sure, one could read as the broader message of the article that purebred dogs are part of a corrupt system, and that's just one more reason to go with a mutt (or save an abandoned fancy dog). I'm not sure that was the point, but hey, the article did not make the "responsible breeder" sound so fabulous.

-Many think it's wrong to care what a dog looks like. Lookist, or something. While I agree that it's sinister that bulldogs are being bred to look a way that is inherently bad for the dogs, I'm not sure what the crime is in choosing a dog you think looks cute. And the anti-lookism comes from all sides - those who think if you won't take the saddest dog at the pound, you don't deserve a pet, as well as those who think you need to have extensively researched breed temperament before making the decision of a lifetime. When it's like, when it comes down to it, dogs are dogs. They by and large need to be taken out for bathroom-time and exercise, they like to chew on your slippers, and (god willing) when they're older than puppies they calm down a bit. Having a dog is, especially at first, a lot of work, so you might as well start out with one of a sort that, if you weren't constantly monitoring its bowel movement schedule, you'd be squealing with delight every time you looked at it. 

-Many think this "breed" thing is unnatural. Fair enough, if we're defining anything that comes from human intervention as unnatural, as is the usual definition, but is a mutt "natural"? Human interference brought you your scraggily unclassifiable fluffballs, too. Note that they do not resemble wolves. Consider how this may have come to be. Do you think some wolves up and decided to get perms, bleach their fur, and become Bichon-mixes?

-Many think preferring one "breed" to another is akin to being a racist eugenicist. Now, given that anyone who cares about dogs advocates sterilizing most of them, and anyone with a dog is feeding it meat products, and that dogs get "put to sleep" in a way that people, ideally, don't, it shouldn't but does require noting that non-human animals aren't people. (Except for Bisou, who walks around on her hind legs to drive the point home.) As far as I'm concerned, if humanity can channel its interest in purity and the color and texture of hair onto non-human animals and keep it there, that's for the best. So, while I find it creepy that in this day and age, there's a profession called "model" in which humans are judged entirely on the basis of their looks (although I'm sure Tyra would say there's more to it), I don't find it at all unsettling that there's such a thing as the Westminster Dog Show. I'd rather people make a fuss about perpetuating Golden Retrievers than going on all Norwegian-murderer-like about how the world would end if blondness in humans disappeared as a trait.

-One commenter (and I hope just the one) thinks he or she "rescued" her dog from a pet store... by purchasing it from a pet store. And then, to make things worse, notes that this does fund the problem, but the dog looked so pathetic. This is upsetting in part because it's so idiotic if the person really believes this, and bad for dogs if this view is generally shared, but also because it suggests "rescue" perhaps is now considered the reason to own a dog, however the dog was acquired. Speaking of...

-Many of the commenters rail against those who own a dog for the wrong reasons, and no this isn't an unfortunate call to Dan Savage. The wrong reasons are wanting a dog that's like a teddy bear, or that flatters one's vanity, or something, I don't quite get this gripe. My only guess is that it hints at the idea that the only correct reason to own a dog is to preserve an already-existing life, to do one's small part to keep dogs from suffering. And as noble as it is to help already-existing dogs, it seems wrong, or at least unnecessary, to make that the point of dog ownership. The point of dog ownership is that it's fun to spend more time with a dog than you get just seeing them pass by on the street, and to have a dog with whom you and your family in particular have bonded. It's selfish, yes, but in principle at least, the much-beloved creature is well-treated and gets something out of it as well. Of course owning a dog is about responsibility, about not deciding a year or ten in that you're bored with having a dog, about (in the more immediate moment) getting up to walk the dog at all hours and in all weather. But these are things you do in order to have a dog, not for their own sake.

*This is true at Gawker as well. Somewhere in that thread, there's a heated debate about whether Great Danes (Whitney, this one's for you) are apartment dogs. One commenter holds forth smugly about how it's basically dog abuse to only give your dog one or two long walks a day, because this breed needs to run free daily for hours. Then someone who actually owns this kind of dog explains that they take their dog to a place to run around and the dog just sits there and isn't interested in that, and is thus a perfectly fine dog to have in an apartment. Others chime in to point out that people have a tendency to overexercise these dogs. In other words, you can rest assured that if you own a dog, whatever your approach, you're doing it wrong.