Finding the perfect pet

If you choose your dog for its personality - not just its looks - you're barking up the right tree

Beauty is as beauty does.

That's the advice a savvy horse trainer gave Andrea Arden of Manhattan when she laid eyes on a deliriously beautiful thoroughbred and decided to buy him on the spot.

"I didn't understand what she meant until I took the horse on a trail and he almost slammed me against a tree," remembers Arden, who is a trainer of a smaller, furrier, more tennis-ball-loving species. "A lot of people aspire to have an animal that looks a certain way - kind of like middle-aged men who start dating young models because 'she's so pretty I want to be seen with her.'"

But looks, of course, aren't everything. Compatibility counts, whether you are talking about a trophy wife or the family dog. And when it comes to selecting a canine companion that will live in your household for years, looking beyond the exterior to the tendencies beneath is more important than a beguilingly smushed face or a wavy coat. Just like car shopping, you need to know what's under the hood.

And like those dreamy commercials where sleek convertibles zoom along painted deserts and zigzag artfully on alpine mountainsides, the media have a way of idealizing things.

"A lot of people are unrealistic because they see dogs on television shows and think they act that way," says Deborah Miller of Yaphank, director of Herding Dog Rescue. "They don't realize certain dogs need jobs."

Case in point is Murray, the shaggy border-collie mix featured on the now-defunct sitcom "Mad About You." Miller says herding-dog adoptions zoomed when people saw Murray snoozing contentedly on a Manhattan sofa alongside co-stars Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt. But in real life, a dog with such herding roots behaves more like Sahara, a year-old border-collie mix that Miller placed with Liliana Cardona of Commack.

Beyond hyper

"Deborah brought her over, and oh, my God," Cardona remembers. "Sahara went up on every single sofa, all the beds, and starting jumping from one to the other. It was crazy."

Miller's memory was, simply: "Boinga, boinga, boinga."

Most people wouldn't have been able to cope, but Cardona isn't most people. Her mother used to breed and raise German shepherds, and Cardona had lived with a revved-up border collie before. So for every problem Sahara presented - from barking at son Kenneth, 16, each time he tried to get into "her" bed to levitating her crate across the room every night - Cardona creatively found a solution.

Eventually, strong leadership and regular exercise - Kenneth does daily walking, running, ball-tossing and general pretend-I'm-a-sheep chasing with her - turned this high-drive dog into a well-behaved housemate.

Herding dogs are hardly alone in requiring a special kind of caretaker. Terriers, which were bred to go down holes and burrows to kill vermin, need a committed, firm owner who is sharp enough to outsmart them - a tall order.

Just recently, on one of her rescue swings through a city shelter, Arden had to pass up a "really pretty little Jack Russell girl.

"We know how few people could handle a 1-year-old Jack Russell," she says sadly. "If you have a dog that's been bred to go underground, there has to be something about that dog that makes it pretty tenacious."

The key to finding the right dog for your particular lifestyle is looking back at a breed's original function and understanding how its ingrained temperament translates in today's world. Vizslas were bred to be active companions to Hungarian hunters; they'll go stir-crazy without running a few miles each day. Keeshonds alerted captains of Dutch barges; if a leaf blows by in the yard, you'll be informed. Neopolitan mastiffs, sort of dogdom's living gargoyle, kept strangers out of Italian courtyards by sheer looks; if a guest comes in uninvited, they will not benignly point the way to the silverware.

But instead of logically figuring out how well a particular breed meshes with their living situations, many people follow their emotions. "Sometimes I think people get a dog that they aspire to be like in some way," Arden muses. "They think, 'I'll get a dog that requires a lot of exercise because maybe I'll start running and get in shape.' Or they get a big dog that's tough-looking and so people will be intimidated by them walking down the street."

Instead what usually happens is the doggie version of divorce - except the dog never sees it coming.

"A lot times I find that people resent their dogs for these inherent traits," says trainer Teoti Anderson of Lexington, S.C., who is president of the Association of Pet Dog Trainers and author of "Your Outta Control Puppy" (TFH, $12.95). "They get mad at their retrievers for putting everything in their mouths, or their terriers for wiping out their child's population of Barbies, or their Bassett for howling. But if you want to get mad, look in the mirror: You brought them home."

All this applies to mixed breeds as well. Arden notes that the latest fads - intentional crosses resulting in "designer dogs," such as the red-hot "puggle," a cross between a pug and beagle - are as frustrating for trainers as they are cute to owners.

The irresistibility of their flat little faces aside, "here you have two breeds of dogs with very high energy levels and you're breeding them together," Arden says. The result? "A dog who is really goofy and playful that by the time he's eight months old is spinning circles in your little apartment."

As for regular old "mutts," knowing their "ingredients" is just as important.

Doggie-wise

Sue Hassett, director of the Town of North Hempstead Animal Shelter, recommends that prospective owners "take the prominent breed in a dog's background and research it, because chances are you are going to see a lot of that in the dog." For example, "you can expect a Rottweiler mix to be more protective than a Lab mix," she says. "Rottweilers are great dogs, but they can be strong-headed, and they like their people."

Annette Jackson of Roosevelt knows that from experience. She adopted Chaos, a 6-year-old Rottweiler, from Hassett's shelter, where she also volunteers. She and husband, Chris Lyles, had owned three Dobermans before acquiring Chaos, so they knew what to expect.

"Rottweilers and Dobermans are protective of who they live with and protective of their ground," she says, adding that she has a securely gated yard from which Chaos surveys his kingdom. When Jackson greets visitors, the dog "looks and steps aside, and he'll sit in the distance and watch me and the person I'm talking to."

Hazards of the job...

As for the mailman, well, Jackson just makes sure her dog is indoors when the postman rings. "Chaos doesn't want him parking in front of the house," Jackson explains.

To satisfy her urge for a lap dog, she also owns a Shih Tzu named China.

But as dog owners like Jackson know all too well, size doesn't really matter - at least not as much as making sure your match is based more on clear, and not wishful, thinking.

## Myth-busters ##

Small dogs need less exercise.

Not always. For couch potatoes, bigger is sometimes better. The giant-sized but laid-back Irish wolfhound might make a better apartment dog than a Jack Russell terrier who's always raring to go.

The sign says it's an Albanian duck-tolling spaniel, so it must be so. In the case of many mixed breeds up for adoptions at a shelter, "the breed on the name plate is a shelter worker taking a guess," said Manhattan dog trainer Andrea Arden. Because semantics matter, some labels intentionally avoid panic-button labels like "pitbull," opting instead for the more generic "terrier mix." The more you know about breed identification, the better.

An older dog won't "bond" to me.

Sure, puppies are cute, but they also require as much attention as a newborn of the human variety. Adult dogs are equally as capable of showing you love and devotion, and the advantage to them is WYSIWYG - what you see is what you get, from temperament to final physical attributes, especially size.

Reference: www.sun-sentinel.com

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