It’s summertime, camp’s in full swing and the sound of woofing is heard in the land-along with yipping, panting and the occasional growl.
Here at Camp Gone to the Dogs, set in the lush Vermont countryside, it’s hard to escape the sound and the furry. Dogs are everywhere, more than 200 of them, every species imaginable, from national titleholders to magnificent mutts, cavorting through the first week of activities.
There are doggy swimming lessons, of course. Also agility and retrieval practice, hunting and sheepherding. To say nothing of the “fun” events like doggy square-dancing, the doggy costume party and bathing suit contest, doggy softball and-perhaps the toughest of all-the wienie-retrieval challenge, which requires the owner to throw a piece of hot dog and the dog to bring it back uneaten. Competitors drop like fly balls in that one.
This is-as improbable and perhaps downright loony as it may sound to those who don’t move in canine circles-a camp strictly for dogs and their owners. For the people, it’s a chance to spend a week with their pets, relaxing on the leafy grounds of the Putney School, which the rest of the year is an expensive private boarding school and working farm. For the critters, it’s a kind of doggy Club Med, with myriad events and activities each day they can attend, drop in and out of, or totally snooze through. At this camp they literally let sleeping dogs lie.
Camp rules are few: Pick up the poop, keep your dog under control. (Camp founder and director Honey Loring buys pooper scooper bags the way Imelda Marcos bought shoes. Last year, she went through 8,000 in two weeks, so she bought 10,000 this year, just to be sure.)
The camp’s motto is “Tails Up!” and as its literature says, “If your dog’s tail isn’t up, we’re doing something wrong. FUN is the name of the game.”
So flash over to the ol’ swimmin’ hole, where doggy swimming lessons are under way. Although most of the canines seem to take to the water with relish, there are definitely some hangers-back. Hammer, a 120-pound bull mastiff, looks particularly pained. He is being carried out to midwater, in a sitting position, by the swimming instructor and an assistant.
The instructors speak soothingly and let him go. He bobbles, reverses direction, half paddles, half lurches to the other side of the pond and takes a powder through the underbrush, his owner in hot pursuit.
Just the basics
Other notable new swimmers include Chester, a feisty gray-and-white mutt (“Could you have him do the backstroke?” his owner shouts jokingly to swimming instructor Brad Wood), and Omar, a Russian wolfhound, who arrives wearing his own life jacket, just to be safe. (Omar is still remembered in camp annals for his magnificent dinosaur outfit, complete with spine spikes, at last year’s costume party.)
Wood, in real life a physician in Boiling Springs, Pa., is attending camp for the fourth year with his wife and two dogs, a Belgian terburen and a greyhound. Over the years, he took on the role of swimming instructor and says that contrary to the common belief that all dogs can swim, “a lot panic when they first get in.” By the end of the week, he says, his chest is covered with scratches from petrified pooches, but most “learn quickly. We don’t do the butterfly here. We just teach them basics.”
Camp Gone to the Dogs is the brainchild of Loring, 44, licensed clinical psychologist and animal lover who has toured North America with two timber wolves as an environmental educator. Loring, who lives in Putney with her two standard poodles, Olympia and Athena, and greyhound, Joy, decided four years ago that she’d love to go to a camp where people could be with their dogs “and I started planning according to how I’d like a camp-meaning no sleeping bags on the ground.”
Since its first year of operation in 1990, the camp has grown to about 450 dogs and 300 campers (including a few staff members) about equally divided between two, one-week sessions in late June. Running it has become a year-round job for Loring, who also markets collars and leashes in a wholesale business.
This year, Loring says, there are dogs from 29 states, plus nine from Canada and one from Bermuda. About 84 breeds are represented, and about 15 percent are dogs found by their owners at the pound or the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals; frequently they had been abused by previous owners.
The cost is $625 per week if you book before Jan. 1, $675 after, and that includes full room and board for you, board for your dog (in your room) and all the activities Fido wants to attend. Campers can bring more than one dog at no extra charge, but Loring likes to limit it to two per person.
If you stay off campus, it’s $100 less. (At the nearby Putney Inn, where some campers who hold out for air conditioning and TV stay, the staff leaves a dog biscuit instead of a mint on your pillow.)
Turkey dinners, interpreters
Because so many dogs have different diets, owners feed their own pooches, but the last night there’s a fancy turkey dinner with all the trimmings for humans and dogs.
There are extras you can purchase, of course: the camp group photo, a photo portrait of your pet, and a half-hour with a dog “interpreter.” (You ask your dog a question like, “So, Sparky, are you happy?” and Sparky relays his answer telepathically-presumably something like, “Yeah, but I’d like more T-bone steaks and car rides”-to the interpreter.)
A new extra this year is doggy baseball cards.
All dogs are given a camp hat and assigned a little doggy dickey with a number for the doggy softball game (dogs and owners compete as one unit, and it’s actually whiffleball, so nobody gets hurt). “They’re famous numbers,” Loring explains, “like Mickey Mantle and Babe Ruth, who would probably roll over in his grave if he knew a Shih Tzu was running around with his number.” Then a professional photographer takes a picture of each dog, laminates it on a baseball card and-bingo!-the whole team is available for $15.
Despite descriptions of events as “contests,” there is little competition, by design, with everyone cheering on everyone else’s dog. The bathing suit contest, for example, was more like a parade, with Hammer, the bull mastiff (perhaps he learned more at the pond than he thought), bringing down the house as a beach bum with low-slung, iridescent blue trunks, a towel around his neck and sunglasses.
Doggy square-dancing involves the owner and dog dancing as a couple in squares of four to live music. It includes several steps not usually seen outside of camp, such as “pat your partner” and “face your dog and shake his paw” and “now give him a kiss on top of his head.”
Others just don’t get it
There is a kind of incredulity on the part of outsiders, of course.
“My friends were speechless,” says Denise Muro of Farmingdale, N.Y., who was at camp with her husband, Bob, and 4-year-old Welsh terrier, Bonnie. “At first they think you’re going to a camp that allows dogs, and then you say, `No, actually it’s a dog camp that allows people.’ “
Most campers are so enthusiastic that they immediately sign up for next year. Loring says she has about a 70 percent planned return rate, though often, at the last minute, “life hits,” forcing a cancellation and allowing someone from the waiting list to jump in. Loring has dutifully kept a list of the reasons people gave this year for canceling, and they include everything from “surgery” and “no money” to “mean husband.”
A first-year camper this summer is Paulette Weir, 43, who arrived last week with her Jack Russell terrier, Teddy, 7, from Kansas City, Mo., where Weir is director of public relations at St. Luke’s Hospital.
“It’s (Teddy’s) birthday trip, her birthday’s in June,” Weir explains, “(and) I haven’t been to a camp since I was a girl.”
She says that while “everyone (at home) thinks I’m crazy,” her staff did throw her a big going-away party with dog presents, and Teddy was arriving with “a whole suitcase of costumes” for various occasions. These include a “Chihuahua disguise,” complete with Mexican hat, for the costume party, a rugby shirt for the wienie retrieval and a logging hat (with earflaps) and backpack for the parade of camper dogs.
The costume party is a big subject of conversation. Tasha Ann, a 19-month-old miniature black poodle with shocking pink nails, hat and collar, is going to wear a white blouse and pink felt skirt with a poodle on it for a ” ’50s look,” explains owner Cindy Lou Carmona, 30, of Greenbelt, Md. Hammer is going to trade his bathing trunks for a tuxedo, and Ceilidh, 6, and her son Porridge, 3, soft-coated Wheaton terriers from Winnipeg, will be Grandma and the Wolf, respectively, from Little Red Riding Hood (as the wolf, Porridge will wear a red cape with a hood and carry a basket in his mouth). Bonnie the Welsh terrier will be a bride (wearing her owner’s cut-up wedding dress), and Buster, a shepherd mix, is going to appear in a United Parcel Service uniform, complete with hat.
Not everyone goes for the dressed-up look. Says Lee Wear Gerhardt of Madison, Wis., a retired teacher and nurse who attended with Sunshine, her 4-year-old Cavalier King Charles spaniel: “I’m one of those people who doesn’t like to dress up her dog. I value my dog because she’s a dog. I don’t need to humanize her.”
Then there’s Harley, a 5-year-old basset hound from Indianapolis, spending his fourth year at camp with owner Judy Johnson, an industrial mechanic. Johnson, who uses a rope instead of a leash (“my sister calls him `dope on a rope’ “), says Harley will be decked out in his “Rude Dog” T-shirt “because it’s kind of apropos.”
She reports that Harley has proven to be a whiz at tracking and adds: “I’m so thrilled there’s something he’s good at. He’s kind of a dud at agility and flyball.” Harley sits nearby, looking appropriately morose.
Like most other campers, Johnson says her friends “think I’m an idiot (for coming to dog camp). But I did have one guy say he wished he’d die and come back as my dog.”
Only one feels left out
The only animal at camp this year who doesn’t seem happy is a cat, which materialized out of nowhere on Day 1 and then apparently realized it was living out the worst kind of feline nightmare.
By Day 2, the cat, probably in a state of shock, has disappeared, much to the disappointment of Chester. Says owner Charles Banfield of Orinda, Calif., who found Chester living on the streets, “Chester was extremely good at agility, jumping and also chasing that cat.”
Most owners agree that animals are a great equalizer and that things that may count in real life-like titles and incomes-just don’t matter here. Nobody talks about what they do for a living, but a few questions turn up everything from Wall Street banker to a mail carrier to a computer analyst to a real estate saleswoman.
“Nobody cares how you look or what you wear,” says banker Kathryn Schuler, 37, of New York, who is back for the third year with her collie, Jackson.
“Everyone just cares about their animal and having fun. Makeup is very rare, people don’t bring jewelry, you don’t have to impress anybody. . . . This is just heaven.”
Of course, there’s always the question of how to justify spending money on taking your dog to camp when there are homeless and starving people in the world. It’s a question Loring has given some thought to.
“I never feel OK about how good a life I have and other people don’t,” she says. “We all should try to get some happiness out of life. This is a happy environment, and these are not people who are real selfish. A lot spend their time with their dogs at nursing homes or with kids with cancer.
“It’s an awful world . . . but I don’t feel we’re real frivolous. A lot of (campers) have had major losses in their lives, and this is what keeps them going.”
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Camp Gone to the Dogs and Honey Loring can be reached at R.R. 1, Box 958, Putney, Vt. 05346; phone 802-387-5673.
