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Off LeashAugust 15, 2008 Conventional wisdom among Alaskan malamute and Siberian husky people is that these "northern breeds" should never be allowed off-leash. So I've learned in the last few months from contributors to a malamute-devoted e-list called Malamute-L. I could see the point: malamutes and huskies have minds of their own, slavish obedience isn't in their nature, and it isn't going too far to say that they have a sense of humor. Rhodry Malamutt gave me plenty of nerve-racking moments off-leash, and not just in his younger days either. Trav already has a pretty well developed ability to vanish into another dimension as soon as my back is turned. But Travvy, like Rhodry before him, is going to be a trail-riding dog, and for dogs who accompany horses at faster than a walk, leashes are not practical. Besides, one of the joys of having a dog (or a horse, for that matter) is watching them tear along at speeds I could never match, and bound easily through undergrowth that would trip me up in a second. So I already knew that my malamute was going to spend considerable time off-leash, and that no matter how trustworthy he was most of the time and no matter how careful I was about choosing our routes, he was probably going to scare me to death on a regular basis. Tuesday while I was cashing a check in the Vineyard Haven branch of my bank, my Fellow Traveller helped strike up a conversation with a fellow bankee, who had (not with him) a 12-week-old Irish wolfhound puppy, as well as several grown dogs and a two-year-old child. The puppy, he said, could never be allowed off-leash, because she was a "sight hound" -- meaning she'd give chase to anything she spotted. Wednesday I was in the heart of Edgartown at about quarter till one (yeah, I know this is a nutty thing to do in the middle of August, but I needed some back issues of the Vineyard Gazette), again accompanied by Trav. On a streetcorner near the Federated Church stood a tall young woman wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat and attached by leash to a portly Basset hound. The dogs eyed each other, Trav eagerly and the Basset stolidly, and the woman asked across the intersection if it was OK for the dogs to meet. I crossed the street and Trav and the Basset introduced themselves; the Basset's name was Norton, and he was two years old. In the course of our pleasant conversation about dogs and puppies and the source of Norton's name (he's not one of the island Nortons, and he wasn't named after Norton Point Beach either), Norton's owner said that of course he could never be let off-leash because he would follow any scent that intrigued him. By now I was on a scent of my own, not least because I suspected that even my 57-year-old non-sprinter self could probably outrun Norton. I'd assumed that the conventional wisdom about dogs and leashes was a northern breed thing, but my new hunch is that it's applied to all dogs with breed-specific variations: malamutes can't be allowed off-leash because they're bred to run, Irish wolfhounds can't be allowed off-leash because they're bred to chase moving animal-like objects, Basset hounds can't be allowed off-leash because they're bred to follow a scent . . . Presumably Labs can't be allowed off-leash because if a duck falls in the forest, they'll surely want to retrieve it, and who knows what trouble a dog of unknown parentage could get into. Earlier this year I read Ray and Lorna Coppinger's fascinating book Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution, which among (many) other things explains how important nurture and training are in the development of a dog's physical potential. A dog can be the offspring of two stellar lifestock-guarding dogs, for instance, but if he's not raised among the livestock he's supposed to guard, his abilities won't develop fully, or maybe much at all. So the various warnings against ever allowing a dog of X breed off-leash because of its penchant for going AWOL for whatever genetically determined reason are starting to sound as if they're rooted in doctrine more than in the voice of experience, and that the point is to instill in dog owners the conviction that they must never, ever risk letting their dogs out of their immediate control. Nagging at the back of my mind is an article I read in a dog rescue group's newsletter a few weeks ago. The writer's malamute had been reliable off-leash for many years, then one day he took off after another dog and was hit by a car and killed. Bad luck, I thought. Shit happens. But that wasn't the author's take on the sad story. The author's take was obvious from the first paragraph: "There is a deadly disease stalking your dog, a hideous, stealthy thing just waiting its chance to steal your beloved friend. It is not a new disease, or one for which there are inoculations. The disease is called trust." The gist of the article is that the author did everything right and shit still happened. The accompanying cartoon depicts a thief running away with a dog in his satchel. The caption: "Bad things can happen if you let your dog run free, out of sight." I've filed the conventional wisdom about dogs off-leash in the same bulging folder where I've stored all my other insights about "risk, the unexpected, and the war on terrorism." The short version is that shit is going to happen no matter how many precautions we take, and that a life that's all precaution and no risk isn't worth living. Shit can happen even when you do everything right. That's the nature of shit. Or maybe I'm talking about Coyote. I forget. Whatever, if you back yourself into a corner where trust looks like a disease, I think it's time to start looking for a way out.
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