DALMATIANS! YIKES!

By CALVIN TRILLIN

Amid the traditional media babble of the holiday season's opening days, dog fanciers with a lifetime devotion to the Dalmatian are lining up to tell us just what a destructive, genetically flawed, virtually unmanageable dog it can be.

These attacks are offered in the name of protecting the breed from the crushing popularity that is expected to accompany the release of Walt Disney's 101 Dalmatians. The Disney corporation is envisioned as a character in one of its own animated films--an ostensibly friendly giant galumphing around in the garden of American culture and crushing everything it picks up in its lumpy, mass-market fingers.

Did those rich people in Virginia manage to snatch the Civil War out of the giant's path by thwarting plans for a blue-and-gray theme park? Never mind, giant. Over here, in another part of the garden, is an entire breed of dog you can destroy.

Apparently, bad-mouthing the breed is considered the only way to blunt a Disney-fueled demand that could cause thousands of ill-conceived Dalmatians to be dumped on the market by puppy mills and thousands more dumped in the street by bored children who didn't really bank on that cuddly little puppy's growing up. Given the disaster-movie tone of the reports, it wouldn't surprise me to see citizens running in panic from their homes, shouting, "Help! Help! Dalmatian meltdown!"

The people who have the credentials to insult the Dalmatian for its own good are, of course, the very breeders who have spent their lives presenting it as the noblest of canines. It's as if the teenagers who have been standing in a two-mile ticket line for a Foo Fighters concert started buttonholing passing reporters to warn that grunge can lead to poor study habits and might even be a bridge addiction to the music of Lawrence Welk. In a typical radio interview I heard, one authority was going on about how demanding Dalmatians are, and how much hair they shed, and how unlikely it would be for anyone who is not a nationally ranked marathoner to provide them with enough exercise, and how difficult it is for even a skilled veterinarian to tell whether a puppy is unable to hear (one Dalmatian in four is born deaf) or is simply uninterested in hearing anything that sounds at all like a command. At the end of this prolonged put-down, the interviewer pointed out that despite everything, the authority did have a Dalmatian, or perhaps even more than one Dalmatian, herself.

Eight, actually, the authority said. That's right. She has in her own house eight of the very creatures she's been describing as something akin to coyotes with spots.

I don't suppose it's possible that Disney and the Dalmatian industry are cooperating in a piggyback promotion scheme designed to have both of their products discussed incessantly. Still, it is a little odd that people being interviewed with beautiful Dalmatians at their feet are so insistent that the average person is not up to coping with a Dalmatian.

Could this be a two-step selling strategy in which the customer is tantalized by such warnings and then smitten by the puppies in the movie? It's a strategy I must resist. I'm not in dire need of a dog right now. There seems to be no way to escape the anti-Dalmatian media blitz, but I am going to skip the movie. Just in case.