Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
The pup had something in addition to looks, strength, and remarkable sangfroid for a
newborn. He also had a fine nose, Joan wrote. “Yesterday, even within hours of coming home,
he woke up when I entered the room and his nose was working scent!” I barely registered
the irrelevant news. I knew abstractly what “working scent” meant, but it didn't interest me.
I'd taught my previous two German shepherds to keep their big noses away from visitors'
crotches. “No sniff” was a standard command in our house.
The most important news, the lead, was buried a few paragraphs into Joan's e-mail: “You
have the choice to have our little prince as we see how he develops.” She assured me that we
could discuss any concerns I might have about his being a singleton, and that she—and her
pack of adult shepherds—could help the pup overcome the issues he might have.
Concerns? Issues? David and I had just won the puppy lottery with a handsome, healthy
male. We had a pup. I had been stalking my e-mail in-box for the last week, waiting for the
birth announcement. It had been almost a year since our beloved gentle shepherd, Zev, had
died. The next chapter of our life with shepherds had finally arrived. I ran to find David,
working on his logic courses in the study. I flitted around the living room. I landed in front
of the computer to read the entire e-mail aloud to him. David patiently stood and listened as
I made the words real. I waited for my euphoria to dissipate before I e-mailed Joan back, so
my tone would be mature and balanced. All that planning and work and cost and emotional
investment for one lone pup instead of a squiggling mass of them. Others on the waiting list
would be so disappointed with the news. I knew all of that. Then I gave in to being overjoyed.
I had fallen in love with this Ohio breeder's line of shepherds, and the idea of this pup, ten
months before. Joan Andreasen-Webb bred and raised German shepherds from West Ger-
man lines, nourishing her pups with goat milk, a raw-meat diet, and lots of early exposure
to the world. Her adult dogs lay on the sidewalk under café tables; they attended children's
reading hour at the library; they herded sheep and starred in a ring sport called Schutzhund
that I knew little about, except that it involved biting on command. A couple of her pups
even became police K9s. As a reporter decades before, I had done a ride-along with a police
K9 and been both impressed and horrified by the dog's intensity and deep-throated bark. I
didn't want that in a German shepherd. This pup was destined for two jobs: to lie quietly
beneath my desk while I worked, then leap up and reign supreme in the obedience ring, a
hobby I'd abandoned when Zev became too sick to compete.
I finally stopped daydreaming and looked up “singleton” on the web. In mathematics, a
singleton is a set with exactly one element. In humans, it's the way most of us arrive, as a
single newborn. In dogs, “singleton” means exactly the same thing, only with horror stories
attached. The web is like that, though. You can look up the common cold, and the symptoms
read like it's the plague.
