somerville dog: a weblog

Boston.com today is running three photo galleries in the Fashion section under "Your Life" featuring dog fashion. "Pooches primp and hit the runway" starts out benignly enough: the first two slides feature Juneau, an American-Eskimo dog, at Fidough on Charles Street, and Oberon, a Wire-Fox Terrier, and Redwing Indian Wolf, a Collie, from Medford. But the remaining pictures are images from Target's "Doggie Show:" deformed dogs with deformed women (and men) on the other end of the leash.

"Dog Fashion Show" includes a couple of gifts for the dog who has everything, a $500 winter coat made from bobcat fur and a $2,500 necklace by Spanish designer Antonio Menendez. While the necklace is at least something the dog's owner could borrow, a bobcat-fur dog coat does nothing to strengthen the bond between an owner and her dog. For $500, on the other hand, she could buy eighteen weeks of positive training classes at Canine University in Malden.

"Pups as accessories" is basically a photo essay on animal cruelty.

Just as expensive as a Tiffany necklace, teacup and toy dogs have become the new fashion must have.

An expensive Tiffany necklace, however, is still the better-buy: It doesn't have razor sharp teeth, it doesn't have to be house-trained, it doesn't have to be taken out first thing in the morning in the dark, rain, cold..., and it doesn't mind if you only take it out once a year.

Toy and Teacup dogs are, in the apt words or Mark Derr, "mutants maintained to feed human vanity." In Dogs Best Friend: Annals of the Dog-Human Relationship (1997), Derr observes

Like the Pekingese, some are acondroplastic drawfs with bowed and stunted legs, a punched-in face (brachycephalic head) and exaggerated coat. Others, like the Pomeranian, are midgets or ateliotic dwarfs, well-proportioned miniaturized dogs. . . . Nearly all of theses aminals—pugs, Boston terriers, Yorkies, Scotties, toy poodles, miniatureized spaniels, Maltese, Shih tzus, among them—are at the limit of their biological viability, unable to whelp naturally or exist without human intervention. Some are so distorted in temperament and appearance that it is hard to consider them dogs at all . . . . Many are unable to digest their food or relieve themselves properly. For all their problems they remain popular among people who want canine companions but consider real dogs too much bother.

To be fair, since I have become a dog-owner, I have developed an appreciation for small dogs. I was won over by Cassie, a Maltese who is known in the environs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to cavort with dogs many times her size and weight. Yesterday she was fetching a stick that was four times her length!

Derr is an avowed big-dog person, but his irritation is less with small dogs themselves than with breeding practices that produce physiologically unsound animals. Derr is, in fact, quite the fan of "feists" and some hunting terriers that "uphold the honor of small dogs."