My dog America, a full-on poodle, loves to stare into pines and oaks that quill out of a hillside down to the marsh. She’ll do this sitting on a comfy bed by a window, standing outside on a deck, or curled atop pine needles.
She can stare for a long time, quite the attention span. Sometimes she’ll whimper in recognition, rumble a growl of concern, or jump up with a bark and if we’re inside bolt for the door.
I’ll go out with her, see if I might catch a glimpse of what’s so intriguing. She’s never on a leash so she’ll vanish for a few minutes, then return with a bounce in her step and self-satisfied air.
Late at night, when howls waft up from the marsh, once upon a time she’d bolt alert, bark, press against a window. Nowadays she mimics me, staying stretched out, tilting her head, listening with interest but no concern.
I assume her daytime focus mostly is the same as at night:
The presence of Canis Latrans, Eastern coyotes.
People say they arrived here in the 1980s; my favorite fairy tale is that they stowed away on trucks carrying firewood from northern New England, tempted aboard by tasty mice hiding among cords.
People say many more things about them, apocryphal and scientific. According to scat analysis, they eat voles but manage to hunt small or weak deer as well as turkeys, rabbits, and squirrels. Their diet also includes chicken, meat and pork scavenged from our garbage.
Cats, dogs, and shorebirds don’t fall prey much. OK, I admit the possibility, but coyote dens full of cat collars are in the apocryphal realm. A dog America’s size has little to fear; I’ve seen her herd a coyote or two off our hill more than once.
People also say a lot about poodles, named from the German pudel, which means to splash (maybe in a puddle), shortened from Pudelhund, a dog that splashes. Bred as water fowl retrievers, some wound up in circus troupes and royal courts because they could be trained to do tricks and errands.
People call them the most intelligent of dogs; I’ve joked it’s a good thing America doesn’t have an opposable thumb because she’d be out the door, driving my car. But I’ve come to realize something different:
The reason we think poodles are so smart is that they care about humans, they try to please us. So we think they’re smart.
A bloodhound is just as “smart,” with a different focus. And if you were to plunk a poodle and mutt into wilderness, no way of knowing which of them would be “smarter” and survive.
Poodles being human-centric, there have been attempts to breed their attentiveness into other species; labradoodles, goldendoodles, cockapoos, St. Berdoodles — I could go on 50 creepy times. So perhaps I can be forgiven for a eugenics wish:
If America had puppies, I would be intrigued if the father was a Canis Latrans.
What would this new breed be called? Coyoodles? Pooyotes?
Whatever, the puppies might become the greatest canine partners ever to walk the face of the earth. Then again they might be too wild yet smart enough to become Satanic, canine AI.
This is not abstract musing:
America has not been fixed.
