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Carl Strock THE VIEW FROM HERE
Carl Strock can be reached at 395-3085 or by e-mail at carlstrock@dailygazette.com.

CANINE CORNER

    Regular readers know I am a student of the habit of ours of imputing human thoughts and feelings to dogs, so no one will be surprised that I perked up when I saw the two stories on our front page the other day.
    One, at the top, from Malta, declared: “Dog credited with alerting couple about house fi re.”
    The other, at the bottom, from Johnstown, declared: “Explosion sends two to hospital burn unit: Dog blamed for opening gas valve.”
    The Malta story was of course the more heartwarming. The gist of it was that an elderly couple were awakened by the barking of their dog — age, breed and name duly noted — to find that their house was on fire. They managed to get out, but the dog did not. strictly true, without necessarily implying the dog had any noble intention.
    The reader could draw that inference himself if he so chose, from the dog’s being “credited,” but basically we kept ourselves under control.
    The same could not be said for our friends over in Colonie at the Times Union.
    Do you know how a puppy will sometimes get so excited that it will actually wet itself? Well, I don’t want to reverse-anthropomorphize and impute the emotions of a puppy to humans, but that gives you an idea of what happened at the Times Union.
    “Canine gives life to save masters,” was their enthusiastic headline — though how the dog’s staying behind in the fire helped save the owners was not explained.
    Above the story they ran a photo of the dog’s face, with its tongue hanging out, next to a blown-up quote, “If not for that dog …”
    The next day they ran an editorial headlined “Good dog,” stating that the “normally docile dog roused Mr. and Mrs. Kunz from sleep,” etc., as if there were something remarkable about a normally docile dog barking when its house was on fire, and then, with regard to the dog’s staying behind in the burning house, saying, “Who knows why? Not us.”
    They don’t know why, but we can infer the dog was a saint.
    Naturally I wanted to know how they felt about the dog in Johnstown opening the gas valve and blowing its owners’ house to Kingdom Come, severely burning the owners in the process.
    I mean if barking at a fire is remarkable, how much more remarkable is opening a gas valve?
    But alas the Times Union missed that one. We had it, but they didn’t, so I’ll never know.
    I will give the Times Union credit, however, for running a photo the next day of the 11-year-old girl who got her scalp shredded by her uncle’s Rottweiler in North Greenbush last December. Newspapers frequently run feel-good photos of dogs slobbering over a popsicle on a hot day and that sort of thing but rarely let us see what happens when one of these animals rips the face off a child.
    The girl in question required 2,700 internal and 300 external stitches to close her wounds after being attacked by the dog outside her uncle’s house. The dog was ordered destroyed, but Judge Robert Jacon in Rensselaer County Court reversed that order the other day and released the dog on the grounds that it had not been demonstrated the attack was unjustified.
    And he was right, as far as I can determine. Under the state Agriculture and Markets Law it is not sufficient that a large powerful dog half rip the head off an 11-year-old girl for the dog to be declared dangerous and put to death. It must be demonstrated that the attack was unjustified.
    Maybe the dog had good reason. That’s how the law is written. Without testimony as to what the girl might possibly have been doing to offend the dog, it’s impossible to rule that the attack was unjustifi ed. So the dog is back home.
    Well, as I say, at least the newspaper gave us a picture.
Newspapers frequently run feel-good photos of dogs slobbering over a popsicle on a hot day and that sort of thing but rarely let us see what happens when one of these animals rips the face off a child.