First Church of Canine
By Patt Morrison, Times Staff Writer


I shouldn't even be telling you this, but I belong to a secret society.

We are determined, loyal, fanatical.

There are millions of us, everywhere, among you — working in your
offices, shopping at your malls, teaching in your schools, driving in
the lane next to you.

You wouldn't know us by just glancing our way, but we can all
recognize one of our own at once, by the encoded insignia we wear on
our lapels. Sometimes we wear it on our sleeves, or on the legs of
our trousers. OK, yes, or on the sofa, or the car seat.

It is dog hair — the sure mark of the true believers of the First
Church of Canine.

Yes. We the Dog People.

In the name of the First Church of Canine, I have topped out my
credit card paying vet bills for strangers' dogs. I have dashed into
freeway traffic to rescue an injured dog. I have "liberated" an
abused dog from an abusive owner. I have smashed a car window to help
a dog locked inside in 100-degree heat.

I, who haven't let a morsel of meat cross my lips since Reagan's
first term, have bought 10 59-cent burgers at the drive-through at 2
a.m., and fed them to the dog I just rescued from the street. I have
irritated scores of Muscovites by standing in line to buy ice cream,
and then feeding it to starving Moscow strays. I have packed my
luggage with Milkbones and tossed them from taxi windows to hungry
street hounds in Mexico City.

And I take doggie bags home to actual doggies.

Among our church's other acolytes:

• Actors Betty White and Earl Holliman and Doris Day, whose inn
in
Carmel, Calif., encourages you to bring your dog, and former actress
and home designer Kelly Harmon, who told me one reason she drives a
pickup is to rescue stray and injured creatures.

• The Long Beach lady who monitors the "found dog" ads in The
Times
every day, and calls up to warn that unscrupulous people sometimes
claim to own the found dogs — and then sell them to laboratories.

• Mike Antonovich, the county supervisor with whom I have almost
nothing in common politically, who has begun each board meeting by
holding up a homeless pet — often a dog — to the TV camera
and asking
someone to adopt.

• Nicole the makeup artist, and Antonio Villaraigosa the
councilman-
elect, both new converts to the First Church of Canine.

Not Caninian candidates: LBJ, who lifted his beagles by the ears and
insisted they liked it; the man who tied a dog to a rope and dragged
him along the back of his pickup; anyone who freaks out when a dog
licks his face.

See what happens when you get me started?

It's easy to laugh at my more fanatical brethren, with their topiary-
cut poodles, ringside seats at the Westminster Dog Show, dog
masseuses, dietitians and psychoanalysts. Rudy Giuliani is paying
$1,140 a month in dog support for Goalie, a retired seeing-eye golden
retriever who needs eye surgery.

It's even easier to cry about them. For every dozen Shih-Tzus getting
shiatsu, the city of L.A. alone kills nearly a thousand dogs a week,
all for want of good homes and spaying and neutering. Don't even
calculate the unspeakably casual cruelties of dogfights, mutilation
of tails and ears in the name of "looks."

In this church, some of us move from the pews to the pulpit, from dog
lovers to dog rescuers, saving them from the shelters and the streets.

But please, don't call them mutts. They are multicultural canines,
dogs so singular-looking they deserve their own breeds, and so I
sometimes make them up. Osgood is my Highland collie, because if
there ever were such a dog, my Osgood — long of coat, plumy of
tail —
is what it should look like.

I keep in a hatbox, along with the Mother's Day cards my dogs have
given me, the photos of the dozens of dogs I've saved; it is a four-
legged family album, and each picture recalls the lost-and-found
tale, the ending almost always happier than the beginning.

Charlotte, the elegant border collie mix who loved to herd guests at
parties, rescued in the rain one night in Larchmont.

Frances and Bradley, the Disney-victim Dalmatians. Kids who saw the
movie wanted the dog, and the puppy mills went into overdrive. Dals
are temperamental and high-strung, and too many Dals got dumped onto
the street when they didn't act the way they did in the movie.
Bradley, running in terror in Glassell Park, now lives in the Valley,
and gets to sleep on the bed. And Frances, who is deaf, finally got
matched up with an Idaho woman whose deaf Dalmatian had just died.

Bumper, hit by a car on the Glendale Freeway, hence his name. I hid
behind my car, stopped on the shoulder, and struggled out of my
stockings to wrap around his muzzle so he wouldn't bite me in his
fear and pain.

Penelope Ann, tossed onto the Pasadena Freeway. I was on my way to
interview the president of Nicaragua when I scooped her up, dropped
her at the vet's with orders to give her "the works," and dashed off
to my interview.

Woodrow, found half-dead in the gutter by a woman who called me
sobbing. Without having seen him, I phoned an outfit called Pet Taxi
and had him collected and delivered to my vet's office. He hadn't
been hit by a car, but he was starved and exhausted and chewed up.
One ear was tattered. One back foot was splayed, the bones long ago
broken and badly healed.

I named him Woodrow because his long bony face reminded me of Woodrow
Wilson's, even without a pince-nez (which I tried to balance on his
nose once, just to check the resemblance). He'd been a street dog all
his life, and was so dumbstruck at his luck that he used to sit by
the tub and stare at me when I took a bath, to make sure I didn't try
to sneak out the drain and leave him behind. He died last November,
full of years and love and Science Diet; the cleaning lady, who
always spoke baby-talk Spanish to him as he followed her around the
house, cried when I told her he had died. "My little boy," she
wept, "my good little boy."

Some rescues leap into your car; my friends are convinced that stray
dogs know my route home, and hang out there waiting for me to save
them. Some take a lot of coaxing. I carry dog food and treats and
water in the car, and I used it all one evening to get to Penny, an
American Staffordshire terrier (vulgarly known as a pit bull, and a
very sweet breed they can be too — for most of us Caninians
believe
that bad dogs are not born, bad dogs are made that way, by bad
owners). Penny was only a puppy, but already mange-bald and terrified
of people. I spent two hours crouched on a sidewalk before Penny
would eat my food and let me leash her. My legs were so cramped I
could hardly unfold them to press the accelerator.

And some dogs, no amount of food and murmured words can reach.
Approach, and they run off, spooked, and you can only watch them flee
and hope they can dodge traffic.

A dog isn't as expensive as a child, or as long-lived, but the
commitment is lifelong. Maybe longer. The ashes from all my dogs are
sealed in cedar boxes, and when it's my turn, we'll all get mixed in
together. You got a problem with that? There's an English aristocrat
who wants his carcass fed to his dogs when he goes.

I don't know much about the Corinthians, apart from the fact that
they invented very ornate architectural columns, but I can imagine
that when St. Paul admonished them to love, he could have used the
dog as his example. A dog "is patient, [it] is kind. It does not
envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not
self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs
[It] always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always preserves."

And always sheds. But then, dog hair is my favorite fabric.