Jon Katz: Good thing his dogs love him, right?
By Gina Spadafori
March 22, 2008
Life’s never been easy for anyone trying to make a living as a writer, but in the old days you were either dealing with the starvation that comes with being unknown (unless you married well and or lived off an inheritance) or weeping privately into your pillow after reading the work of professional critics in journals that were often pretty darn obscure.
Oh, for the simple days of yesteryear!
Now, of course, every word you write or say is examined, your facts checked, your subconscious or potentially hidden agendas speculated upon. And everyone with an Internet connection is a critic, like the person who trashed my “Dogs For Dummies” on a book-sellers Web site because it wasn’t much about Boxers. Well, it wasn’t much about Dachshunds or Irish Wolfhounds or Finnish Spitz, either. It’s a general reference, duh. Or the person who trashed the same book because it recommends the use of a crate for house-training — she thought that cruel in the extreme, even though it’s been common, accepted practice by trainers and behaviorists for a couple decades now.
This is all by way of saying if you’re going to put it out there, you’d better have a pretty tough hide because you’re going to need it.
Which brings me to Jon Katz.
Katz is a very talented writer who knocked around for a long time writing on all kinds of topics. And then, I’m guessing by accident as much as anything else, he latched onto the subject of dogs. Success breeds success, and soon, too soon perhaps, Katz was writing about pretty much nothing else except dogs, border collies to be precise. And soon, without the years of work, apprenticeship and study that characterize the true “dog man/woman,” he went from an expert writer on the subject of dogs to an expert on dogs who writes about them.
If there’s one breed in which that’s truly not advisable, it’s the border collie.
The loathing each faction of serious border collie people has for the people within another faction is truly quite remarkable in the dog world. (The heated show-field split in some sporting breeds is a mere preschool food fight by comparison.) The agility border collie people hate the show border collie people who hate the obedience border collie people who hate the stockdog border collie people and they all hate hate hate people who get a border collie for an under-stimulated suburban family pet. It’s not by chance that regular Pet Connection reader Christopher has called his blog Border Wars. It’s ugly out there.
But whether because ignorance is truly bliss or because he knows controversy sells books or because after knocking about for years as a writer he actually doesn’t give a damn what people think — or all of these combined — Katz bravely/foolishly finally writes a book about a border collie with a behavior problem: The dog bites people. After page after page of angst and some previous work from other places, most notably his Slate.com column, Katz decides that the dog needs to be killed, so that happens.
At that point things go nuclear. (more…)




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