9780805091465

"Informative, entertaining... [A] terrific book."'”Jonathan Yardley, The Washington PostWhen Michael Schaffer and his wife drove to a rural animal shelter and adopted Murphy, a mistreated Saint Bernard, they vowed that theyrs"d never become the kind of people who, say, get their dog a facial treatment. But then they started to get weird looks from the in-laws: You hired a trainer? Murphy is on antidepressants?It turned out Murphy wasnrs"t alone: yesteryearrs"s pooch has moved from the backyard doghouse to the master bedroom, evolving from manrs"s best friend to bona fide family member. One Nation Under Dog is the beloved chronicle of this new world of American pet mania.Schaffer, guided on occasion by Murphy, provides a surprising, lively, and often hilarious portrait of our country'”how the way we treat our pets reflects evolving ideas about everything from science and consumerism, to politics and family'”through this fabulously reported and sympathetic look at both us and our animals.

TERM	PRICE	DUE
SEMESTER	$14.79	Dec 13
QUARTER	$14.05	Aug 16
SHORT TERM	$13.32	Jul 09

Michael Schaffer is a former staff writer at The Philadelphia Inquirer, US News & World Report, and Washington City Paper, and has written for The Washington Post, Slate, The Daily Beast, and The New Republic, among other publications. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Keltie Hawkins, and their daughter, Eleanor. They insist that their own pets, Murphy the Saint Bernard and Amelia the black cat, are not freakishly pampered.

Prologue. From Doghouse to Our House	p. 1
The $43-Billion Fur Baby	p. 13
Man's Best Friendster	p. 25
It's Me and the Dog	p. 40
Trading Up	p. 60
Hip Replacements and Health Plans	p. 78
Breeding the Perfect Beast	p. 99
Legal Beagles	p. 127
Toy Town	p. 146
The $100,000-a-Year Dog Walker?	p. 159
Trick or Treat	p. 180
From Alpo to Omega-3 Fatty Acids	p. 201
It Takes a Village to Raise a Puppy	p. 217
The American Way of Pet Death	p. 231
Epilogue. Our Pets, Ourselves	p. 252
Notes	p. 259
Acknowledgments	p. 283
Illustration Credits	p. 289
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

What is included with this book?

The New copy of this book will include any supplemental materials advertised. Please check the title of the book to determine if it should include any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

The Used, Rental and eBook copies of this book are not guaranteed to include any supplemental materials. Typically, only the book itself is included. This is true even if the title states it includes any access cards, study guides, lab manuals, CDs, etc.

Prologue

From Doghouse to Our House

By the time we finally saw Murphy, we’d driven the two hours of highway from our house in Philadelphia to what felt like the last rural place in all of New Jersey. We’d nosed through the town—over a pair of railroad tracks, past a warehouse, down a short road. And we’d gingerly tiptoed past the chain-link fence that held Boss, the massive Saint Bernard at the shotgun-style home opposite the town’s small-scale animal shelter. My wife spotted him first, an oddly undersized example of the same breed running around the muddy melting snow in the kennel’s yard: "It’s Murphy!" she exclaimed.

We’d spotted the pup a few days earlier on Petfinder, the Web site that lets prospective adopters eye hundreds of thousands of potential adoptees from shelters all over the United States. For a long time, we’d visited the site as a diversion, a way to kill time at work staring at snapshots of wet noses and wagging tails and drooling jowls. We’d e-mail links back and forth, each of them attached to a heartbreaking story of how this particular dog was a sweetheart who really needed a place in some family’s happy home. Eventually, we got to thinking that it was about time we became that happy family.

And then we stumbled across the page that featured Murphy, his tongue drooping, his watery eyes staring cluelessly from inside a cage that turned out to be only two hours away. When we arrived that morning, we’d been talking about him long enough to feel like he was already part of our household. The woman who ran the shelter mashed a 100-length cigarette into an old tin of dog food as she led him over. As they got close enough for us to see the matted dreadlocks on Murphy’s back, Boss began growling. "Don’t mind him," the woman said, as the guard dog’s growls turned to angry barks. "Boss don’t like other dogs."

Murphy, though, was another story. He was sweet and cuddly and goofy, exactly as we’d wanted. Of course, we tried to stay skeptical. Knowing little about dogs when we started thinking about getting one, we’d searched for wisdom in a book on how to adopt an animal. Don’t let those heartbreaking shelter stories trick you into getting an animal you can’t handle, it warned. Put them through the paces now, or suffer later. So in the ensuing half hour, we tried the book’s suggested tests as best we could. We put food in front of him and then snatched it away. No growling. A good sign. We put more food in front of him and then pushed his face away as he ate. No nipping. An even better sign. The shelter manager gazed with dismay at this spectacle of anxious yuppiehood: one of us reading reverently from the book, the other vaguely executing its tests on the befuddled dog, neither of us quite sure what to do next.

Following the book’s instructions as if they were holy writ, we asked how Murphy had wound up in the shelter—and then steeled ourselves against what we’d been warned would be a maudlin spiel designed to undercut doubts about a potentially troublesome pooch. The dog, we were told, had been brought to her kennel twice. First he was turned in by someone who the manager suspected hadn’t been able to unload this especially runty runt of his litter: Murphy was eighteen months old and 63 pounds at the time; ordinary male Saint Bernards can weigh in at 180. Next he was returned by a woman who couldn’t housebreak him.

"But she was some kind of backcountry hick," said the shelter manager. "She didn’t even know what she was doing." Ever since, Murphy had been waiting in a cage next to Boss’s yard, staring up at people like us. "Look," she said. "I don’t much care about you, but I do care about him. And if he goes and bites someone, someone like you will put him down, right? Since I don’t want that to happen, I’m telling you: He don’t bite."

The logic was pretty good.

The dog was pretty sweet.

The time was pretty right.

And so we said yes, signing some not quite official-looking paperwork—the adoption document identified the dog as "Murfy"—before forking over one hundred dollars and agreeing to take into our lives a Saint Bernard with fleas and dreadlocks and a stench somewhere between warm bunion and rotten tripe. The shelter manager whipped out a syringe, planted what was purported to be a kennel cough shot into Murfy/Murphy’s snout, and wished us well. We coaxed the dog into the backseat of our Honda, where he promptly fell fast asleep.