The Cruel Truth The Movie Makes Them Look Cute But Dalmations Can Be Quite A Handful
Forget for a moment the adorable Disneyfied image of 101 Dalmatians and try instead to get inside the mind of Cruella De Vil. Maybe the old bat had a good reason for being so unkind to the little critters.
Anyone who’s ever had a puppy can attest to moments of impatience. And Dalmatians are tougher to live with than many canines.
But most people don’t know that. And Disney’s new movie opening today, a live-action version of its 1961 animated hit, threatens to do for Dalmatians what John Travolta did for disco, what Michael Jordan did for sneakers. You can almost hear it now. Thousands of children in the back of thousands of minivans yammering that all they want for Christmas is a little spotted pup.
As Cruella would say: Heh, heh, heh.
Those parents will wish they had talked to Kathi Travers of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, who’s working with the Walt Disney Co. to educate prospective Dalmatian owners about reality: “They shed like crazy. They bite. You’ve got to have a big back yard for them, and they require a lot of energy. They’re susceptible to hearing problems as well as urinary problems.”
Here’s the message from the Dalmatian Club of America: Don’t - no matter how wide-eyed the child on your arm as you leave the theater - don’t rush out and get a Dalmatian. Dog trainer Brian Kilcommons, host of Fox’s “Pet News,” looks into the future and describes your desperate conversation with a dog trainer six months later.
“People are going to be standing on their coffee tables with their cordless going, ‘Um, I need you right now,”’ he said.
It’s not that Dalmatians are stupid, trainers say - a popular misconception, although they rank square in the middle of the list in “The Intelligence of Dogs,” just behind Irish setters and just ahead of Siberian huskies. It’s just that they’re obstinate.
The speckled canines were bred to run beside coaches as guard dogs. If someone strange approached the coach, the dog let it be known that he was unwelcome. In Kilcommons’ words, the resulting breed is “extremely athletic” and “highly suspicious” with a “certain level of aloofness.”
Not the best combination for a family dog.
The perfect owner of a Dalmatian would look something like this: works at home, wants the dog as a companion for daily seven-mile runs, has no children and is willing to part with much of his wardrobe.
“One of the big myths about Dalmatians is that because they are short-haired they don’t shed,” said Linda Hazen Lewin, a Falls Church, Va., breeder and member of the Greater Washington Dalmatian Club. “Dalmatians are massive year-round shedders. … I tell people the first thing you do is … go into your closet and get rid of everything that is black, navy and green.”
But even if this isn’t the perfect family dog, say trainers and members of the Dalmatian Club of America, back-yard breeders and puppy mills have carefully timed those 63-day gestation periods to meet the demand of the little tykes who will leave the cinema misty-eyed.