The facts have been hushed up for over thirty years due to a provision in Walt Disney's will. However, you are about to learn the real reason Dorothy McGuire made Tommy Kirk shoot Old Yeller. And rabies had nothing to do with it.
But first, let me present a shocking educational printumentary, "Selecting a Child's First Dog: One Parent's Nightmare."
As far as all-American pairings go, A Boy and His Dog is right up there with Love and Marriage, Soup and Sandwich, and Death and Taxes. So naturally, when my three-year-old son began to appreciate the difference between pets and Legos, it seemed time to procure his very first canine companion.
Being a dad of action, I immediately bought him some goldfish.
You see, I've had dogs. I'm too old to go through puppy-training hell again; too old to step barefooted into warm surprises; too old to see my favorite belongings chewed to soggy smithereens.
Alas, my son failed to establish an emotional bond with his goldfish until they started floating to the top of the aquarium. So the Great Doggie Hunt was on, necessitating a list of the absolute, unbendable standards any dog would have to meet to become a part of my happy family unit.
1. He'd have to be at least a year old. In addition to the reservations I've already expressed, all puppies are adorable. It takes about a year for their true personality to develop. Then, one day, you run out of Jerky Treats and there you are, cornered in your own kitchen by Cujo. 2. Lap-sized. Our home is so small, cluttered and yardless that the only free space we have is in our laps. If we ever have another kid, he'll have to be lap-sized, too. 3. Mellow. Better yet, narcoleptic. Actually, what I really had in mind was all the symptoms of death except rigor mortis and decay.
My standards set, I promptly made my first mistake. My wife said, "Say! Let's see what we can find at the animal shelter." And I said (I still can't believe it), "Okay, dear." Important rule: A visit to the animal shelter should never be turned into a family outing, unless your family is riddled with sadists and masochists. The place is as uplifting as an orphan's funeral and not at all conducive to sane, unemotional decision-making. As a rule, the cellblocks are populated by four types of dogs: runaways, the abandoned, the psychotic and the quarantined. None are ideal adoption material. Take home a runaway, and he'll run away. Take home an abandoned dog, and you're sure to find he was abandoned for good reason. Psychotic dogs are fine until you do something foolish, like make eye contact. Then they become quarantined dogs.
A further problem is that any dog with only a few hours to live automatically takes on the most adorable characteristics of a puppy. It's amazing. I'm sure John Wayne Gacy is no more adorable now than when he was digging up his yard. But a pit bull who's set to die for eating a family of six? He's adorable.
So was the mutt we finally chose to rescue from the Big Sleep. The one my son named Buddy.
It wasn't until we got Buddy out to the car that I realized he was much bigger and younger than he'd seemed inside. And it wasn't until I read the paperwork that I realized we'd adopted a seven-month-old border collie--a breed with no use for a human lap. If you have sixty acres and a few hundred head of sheep in need of herding, you get yourself a border collie. But what the hell. My son was ecstatic. He had a dog who looked just like Benji. If you stood back a few hundred yards and squinted REEEEAL hard.
Once home, I opened the door, removed Buddy's leash and said something gracious like, "Welcome to your new home!" Within twelve minutes the dog soaked the couch; took a dump on my slippers; mistook a video cassette for a rawhide chew toy; howled whenever we left the room; and knocked my son down with an overly affectionate greeting whenever we returned.
It was around the thirteenth minute that my boy decided he didn't want a dog after all. So he took it very well when Buddy--apparently a former runaway--ran away.
Honest. I did not aid his escape. I simply opened the door to admit a visitor, and at a speed exceeding any ever attained by Chuck Yeager, Buddy was gone. Out of the house, neighborhood and perhaps the state. After a long, fruitless search, I took my son aside and broke the horrible news. "Oh," he said, remarkably dry-eyed. Then panic struck. "Are we gonna get another dog?"
Five days later, I was certain Buddy had become one with a Buick. Imagine my surprise when I came home and found him chained to the kitchen table--which he'd upended and dragged into the living room, upending the stereo along the way.
Seems some well-meaning folks halfway across town had found him and run a lost-and-found ad ("Black/white border collie, un-housebroken and energetic") that my wife happened to see. Ooooh, what luck.
I thought of borrowing Dorothy McGuire's rabies story and figured my son would be willing to play the Tommy Kirk part. But that would have involved the purchase of a shotgun, and frankly, I didn't want to invest any more money into our pitiable excuse for a boy's best friend. Also, if incredibly stupid people like me have a right to live, then incredibly stupid animals have the same right, provided they exercise it at somebody else's house. Like my in-laws. My wife's parents possess many fine qualities, but the finest, perhaps, is that they always make grand offers without seeming to worry you may accept. And when Buddy returned, they made the grandest offer of all time: "We have a big yard. He can live with us."
If Dorothy McGuire had such big-hearted relatives, she wouldn't have had to invent her rabies cover-up story or fork out for a shotgun. And Old Yeller would have ended on the upbeat, like this story: Buddy's happy, my wife is happy, I'm happy, even my in-laws are happy.
Oh, yes. My son is happy, too. Except when we're at grandma's house and someone tells him to go out back and play with his dog.
