The New York Times
April 8, 2007
New Tricks
By CHARLES SIEBERT
"Let me know when you're ready," Diane Mollaghan called out as I
rummaged one recent winter afternoon through the costumes and props
she had stored in the back room of a run-down house trailer on the
grounds of the Town Lake Animal Center in Austin.
Mollaghan, a 34-year-old animal-behavior researcher and graduate
student in the University of Texas's psychology department, was
waiting in the trailer's main room beside a tan-and-brown mutt that
had recently been left in the shelter's night drop-off box with no ID
tags or background-information form.
Estimated by the shelter's staff members to be a "Manchester terrier
mix," it looked like a pointy-faced Chihuahua on stilts, a creature of
indeterminate origin and yet-to-be-determined disposition. That,
literally, was where I was to come in.
All afternoon, in that continuous din of kennel-dog barking - high-
pitched, autocatalytic, corrosive - I had been helping Mollaghan
conduct various trait-assessment tests on some of the shelter's recent
arrivals, trying to get a fix on each animal's temperament, measuring
characteristics like sociability, playfulness, aggressiveness and
fearfulness.
The house trailer - situated midway between Town Lake's western row of
kennels, which hold already approved, adoptable dogs, and the
compound's eastern end, where the veterinary clinic and euthanasia
rooms are - was serving as a kind of purgatorial courtroom.
The dogs we gave high marks to would advance westward with a
certificate of adoptability; those we didn't rate so well would be
dispatched the other way, eastward to the euthanasia room.
(more)
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